MasterChugs Theater Extra: 'Death Proof'

Though it probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Quentin Tarantino has, with Death Proof, once again outdone his Weinstein-indentured buddy, what should shock people is that, in conflating the slasher and car chase genres, Tarantino has slapped together his most formally audacious work since Pulp Fiction. After coloring outside the lines to impetuously enjoyable effect with the Kill Bill saga, Tarantino has, to a startling extent, focused himself and written what can most confusingly be described as Eugene O'Neill's The Car by way of Susan Faludi. If Godard had any interest in shooting a car chase, he might've headed in this direction following Week End. That right, I said it--Death Proof is the better of the two movies in Grindhouse.

The first act is my favorite: it follows a couple of girls out for a night on the town in Austin, Texas. One of the watering holes where they end up happens to be where a strange character named Stuntman Mike hangs out. Stuntman Mike, as his name suggests, works as a movie stunt man, and his car is a movie stunt car--it’s been rigged so that no matter how badly he crashes, the driver will remain safe from mortal injury. Tarantino builds subtle dread throughout act one, having Stuntman Mike creepily interact with the girls he’s going to kill. And not only is Tarantino at his best here, giving his characters real conversations that, as always, are laced with pop culture minutiae, the actresses in this segment can carry the weight. What’s great is that the talky Tarantino style fits perfectly with low budget exploitation movies--most of these films contain arduous stretches of dialog and filler because there was no room in the budget for much action. Anyone who has spent a lot of time sitting through real grindhouse movies will be familiar with slogging through interminable scenes that are poorly written and terribly acted; thankfully Tarantino isn’t aping his influences too much here and while by no means the best stuff he’s ever written, a lot of the dialog and bar hopping business in the first act is pretty great.

Death Proof is more faithful to its grindhouse roots than Planet Terror, yet Tarantino's sensibility is such a perfect fit for the slasher genre that it ends up seeming both more personal and more original than Rodriguez's film. Death Proof really feels as though it could have been released in 1977, and it's a natural extension of Tarantino's obsessions--right from the opening shot of a woman's feet that extends the fetishism of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. The movie is an unholy marriage of Vanishing Point and John Carpenter's Halloween, in which Kurt Russell's "Stuntman Mike" stalks gorgeous young women the same way Michael Meyers did in Carpenter's classic--only he does it with a muscle car instead of a knife. Although Tarantino reinvents the slasher genre, he's also respectful of its pleasures and plays by its rules. The slasher conventions are remarkably compatible with Tarantino's predisposition toward feisty women and idiosyncratic dialog, since Halloween and most of its imitators devote long stretches of time to teenage conversation before kicking off the carnage. Like the babysitters in Halloween or the seniors in Prom Night, the girls who Stuntman Mike targets spend the first half of the film just hanging out and talking--but since the screenwriter in Death Proof is the inventive Q.T., that talk is hilarious and eccentric in a way that it rarely was in the Friday the 13th films. It also gives Death Proof a subtle poignancy, since real lives are at stake in a way that they aren't in Planet Terror; Rodriguez makes violence giddy and exhilarating, but Tarantino makes it scary and disturbing as well.

As in his best films, however, Tarantino doesn't stick to one tone for long, and Death Proof alternates moments of harrowing terror with goofy action, and then alternates those moments with hilariously true slices of life such as a conversation between two guys trying to get the heroines into bed. While the pace of all this seems positively contemplative compared to the frenetic Planet Terror, it's never boring thanks to Tarantino's genuine fascination with human behavior. Like John Carpenter, whose influence permeates every frame of both Planet Terror and Death Proof, Tarantino is capable of anchoring the most absurd physical action in an emotional reality that gives it depth. While Death Proof lacks the psychological complexity of Jackie Brown and Kill Bill 2, on its own terms it's a nearly perfect summing up of the components that make Tarantino the smartest mass entertainer in American cinema since Hitchcock. It's manipulative in the best sense of the word, in that it's a film by an artist who knows exactly how to scare and amuse his audience, yet it never feels overly controlled. To the contrary, the movie gives the illusion of recklessness in its kinetic chase sequences, and it has a natural observational style in the scenes devoted to character. Tarantino juggles all of these styles and elements with the precision of a master filmmaker, and the effect is something similar to what Orson Welles did when he both elevated and respected sleazy genre conventions in Touch of Evil. By itself Death Proof is pure cinematic ecstasy; taken together with the films by Rodriguez, Zombie, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie, and Eli Roth that it accompanies, it makes Grindhouse an instant cult classic.