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My movie year (so far)

Grindhouse (2007), starring Kurt Russell and Rose McGowan. $100 million was spent so two precious auteurs could make an indulgent homage to the cheapest genre of them all-- the directors they try to emulate could have made 300 movies with that kind of dough, and most would have been more enjoyable. The viewers who understand that it's a parody still won't be impressed by the accurate trailers and film glitches because they're just not funny, and Miramax found out the hard way that most people didn't get it at all-- audiences bitched about the way the movie looked (they believe the added flaws were real), and didn't grasp the double-feature concept and left after the first of the movie's two parts. When the company previewed it as two separate films, however, audiences hated it even more. (I understand-- they saw the whole thing.)

The best of the real grindhouse schlock often had a strong emotional content, mostly negative but undeniably genuine, and it gave the stuff its spark and perverse charm. Grindhouse is all slickness with no emotional content at all-- it's just a couple of out-of-gas wonder boys slumming with the help of state-of-the-art everything, including money. The directors of those old pictures would laugh in the faces of Tarantino and Rodriguez for wanting to make shit when they could make something good, a chance most of those guys never got even once.

Terror in the Midnight Sun aka Invasion of the Animal People (1959 - USA-Sweden). You want real grindhouse fare?-- here it is, in all its spliced-up glory. It's also known as Space Invasion of Lapland. Imagine a movie where every indoor scene begins and ends with elegant people struggling with enormous fur coats and every exterior is set in a blizzard. And when the monster finally goes on a Kong-like rampage, the citizens mount up their reindeer and get the hell out!

Posted by Steve Monaco at April 24, 2007 11:38 PM

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