Planet Terror

A month or two ago I posted my Death Proof review, which I liked, but bemoaned the Weinstein Brothers’ idiotic decision to cut the Grindhouse experience in two for us beret-wearing, war-mongering Europeans. Now, after a prolonged gap, I have finally got to see the second half of the experience. That is not to say I have seen the theatrical release as it was meant to be viewed. Nor have I seen all of the accompanying fake trailers which were meant to be half the fun (have only seen Eli Roth's Thanksgiving online, and the Machete trailer included before the feature on this DVD). Oh well. What can one do but rant about it in a blog?

Anyway, let us not get distracted from the subject. Planet Terror is the order of the day here. This is Robert Rodríguez’s contribution to the Grindhouse experiment. Quentin went for old school road movie. Robert goes with one of the most traditionally cheap and gory of all genres: the zombie movie. This is genre fodder: backyard American town gets infected by evil gas. The military show up for some reason, the bastards! Much ammunition is spent. Scores of zombiefied beings explode in chunks of red. Plot, my friends, is really not a concern here. It is merely an excuse for visceral bloodshed.

Let us get one thing straight here: Planet Terror is an exploitative, sexist and gory piece of trash. The women here wear practically nothing most of the time, and nothing at all the rest of the time. The men are all bad-asses, and the girls all kick ass. The violence is hyper-stylised: zombies don’t just get dispatched, they get dispatched in increasingly absurd ways. Realism takes a holiday as the living dead explode at the slightest flesh wound. This is exploitation cinema, first and foremost, and it would do Russ Meyer proud.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? I would argue no, that it is in fact rather refreshing. The whole point of Grindhouse was to create a homage to the un-PC days of old, where anything flew (especially limbs). The idea was for a cheap looking, hyper-gory throwback. Planet Terror is just that.

The only adjective that can be used to accurately sum up the 100 minutes of Planet Terror is ‘excessive’. Such an over the top stick of brain bubblegum is a rarity these days (although Rambo was refreshingly R, and damn proud of it). This is a film that tries to push the MPAA to their limits. Here we get brains chewed upon, folk literally ripped into segments, and every limb ripped from its respective joint (and yes, I mean every limb – especially that one, fellows). This is hardcore. The violence is vile, but consistently blackly comic. As the zombies burst their foul pimples for our unsuspecting entertainment, you will both be physically repulsed and oddly amused. The gore here is movie gore. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

And yeah, don’t expect characterisation here either. Rose McGowan plays a stripper, who opens the film in the midst of a hugely superfluous and exploitative pole dance, and by the end of the narrative has a machine gun for a leg. That is the kind of internal consistency at play here. Freddy Rodríguez and Marley Shelton inhabit the two other major roles, as a bad-ass gun expert and a needle-gun bearing nurse respectively. The characters have all the depth of a partially filled and slowly leaking paddling pool: expect the usual small-town stereotypes and a bunch of amusing cameos from a wide variety of recognisable faces too.

I can’t honestly say I found any of these to be negative factors (‘cept maybe the often overly exaggerated sexism). For the most part, this is absurdly entertaining nonsense. It is on a whole other level of ridiculousness than your average zombie film – the gore, kitsch and humour are all turned up to twelve, eleven not being high enough for Rodriguez’s beautifully demented ambitions. He just wants something that rocks socks, and rock this does.

Like all superior trash, I could waste paragraphs writing about the negatives – like the occasionally overdone vintage effects, the shitty acting and all other kinds of cinematic misdoings. But I am working on the assumption that if you have any interest in seeing this film, you don’t care about that shit. You want some hilarious, OTT idiocy. And that, good sir/madam, is exactly what you will get from Planet Terror. The cover art features a lady with machine gun leg. That. says it all, really.