MasterChugs Theater Extra: 'Planet Terror'
Take one part go-go dancer, her ex-boyfriend, two parts Josh Brolin, five parts the rest of their small town community who get swept up in your typical chemically man-made zombie super-soldier military conspiracy, one part Robert Rodriguez, and a bucket-load of gore, and what do you get? A go-go dancer that has an M-16 with a grenade launcher attachment, zombies, and part of one of the most insane movies of year. We on Earth like to call it Planet Terror ... probably because that's its name.
Planet Terror is a hilarious and audacious apocalyptic horror film that recalls the Evil Dead series in its sly blend of broad comedy and excessive gore-though "excessive" isn't really a word that applies in this kind of film making. The movie tells the story of a military experiment that spawns zombies who lay siege to a small town populated by a gallery of beautifully conceived characters. There's Rose McGowan's stripper ... excuse me, go-go dancer, who wants to be a stand-up comedian, Freddy Rodriguez's mechanic with a mysterious past, and Jeff Fahey as a poverty-stricken cook who won't reveal his barbecue recipe to anyone, no matter what. Along the way they pick up some local cops like Michael Biehn and Tom Savini, Marley Shelton as a doctor with an unusual handicap, and Lost’s Naveen Andrews as a shadowy biochemist/black marketeer/ testicle collector who may be partially to blame for all the zombification, and more. All of these wonderfully original characters have stories that are kept in perfect balance by Robert Rodriguez's elegant story construction. The performances are even better here than they were in the director's all-star Sin City, and the gory zombie sequences are deliriously inventive-Rodriguez invites comparison with the gross-out classics of Lucio Fulci and early Peter Jackson, and he surpasses his cinematic ancestors by giving a more effective dramatic context to the blood and guts.
One of the things I like most about real grindhouse cinema is how scrappy these movies were; filmmakers didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and there’s something endearing about the cheapness of their production values. Rodriguez has always been a cheap director, but there’s nothing endearing about it. He’s like the kid at the science fair who made a working particle accelerator out of papier mache and the guts of an Atari 2600--it’s impressive but ugly, and you’re really at the science fair to see the kid who made a volcano using baking soda and vinegar and who glued his army men to the sides of the mountain to be consumed by kitchen sink lava. Planet Terror is the pinnacle of this for Rodriguez--he uses his home brew CGI to do impressive stunts and wreak lots of destruction that feels out of place in the milieu in which he’s playing. Rodriguez wasn’t schooled on exploitation like Tarantino was, and he’s really using the language of action films of the 80s here--the kinds of films that took over after the exploitation circuit was slowly killed off and as home video began to dominate the market. Chuck Norris could have very easily been in the Freddy Rodriguez role, albeit with the addition of some more martial arts to the film’s many, many fight scenes ... a sheer moment of awesome, too, if possible.
In some ways his movie is probably too physically elaborate to qualify as a true grindhouse film, as digital technology enables him to create pyrotechnic effects that would have been far out of reach for the B-movie auteurs of the 1970s. But who cares? Stylish and energetic, this is Rodriguez's best film to date. And yes, I say that, having seen El Mariachi, Desperado, and all of his other stuff ... even Spy Kids.
Planet Terror is a hilarious and audacious apocalyptic horror film that recalls the Evil Dead series in its sly blend of broad comedy and excessive gore-though "excessive" isn't really a word that applies in this kind of film making. The movie tells the story of a military experiment that spawns zombies who lay siege to a small town populated by a gallery of beautifully conceived characters. There's Rose McGowan's stripper ... excuse me, go-go dancer, who wants to be a stand-up comedian, Freddy Rodriguez's mechanic with a mysterious past, and Jeff Fahey as a poverty-stricken cook who won't reveal his barbecue recipe to anyone, no matter what. Along the way they pick up some local cops like Michael Biehn and Tom Savini, Marley Shelton as a doctor with an unusual handicap, and Lost’s Naveen Andrews as a shadowy biochemist/black marketeer/ testicle collector who may be partially to blame for all the zombification, and more. All of these wonderfully original characters have stories that are kept in perfect balance by Robert Rodriguez's elegant story construction. The performances are even better here than they were in the director's all-star Sin City, and the gory zombie sequences are deliriously inventive-Rodriguez invites comparison with the gross-out classics of Lucio Fulci and early Peter Jackson, and he surpasses his cinematic ancestors by giving a more effective dramatic context to the blood and guts.
One of the things I like most about real grindhouse cinema is how scrappy these movies were; filmmakers didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and there’s something endearing about the cheapness of their production values. Rodriguez has always been a cheap director, but there’s nothing endearing about it. He’s like the kid at the science fair who made a working particle accelerator out of papier mache and the guts of an Atari 2600--it’s impressive but ugly, and you’re really at the science fair to see the kid who made a volcano using baking soda and vinegar and who glued his army men to the sides of the mountain to be consumed by kitchen sink lava. Planet Terror is the pinnacle of this for Rodriguez--he uses his home brew CGI to do impressive stunts and wreak lots of destruction that feels out of place in the milieu in which he’s playing. Rodriguez wasn’t schooled on exploitation like Tarantino was, and he’s really using the language of action films of the 80s here--the kinds of films that took over after the exploitation circuit was slowly killed off and as home video began to dominate the market. Chuck Norris could have very easily been in the Freddy Rodriguez role, albeit with the addition of some more martial arts to the film’s many, many fight scenes ... a sheer moment of awesome, too, if possible.
In some ways his movie is probably too physically elaborate to qualify as a true grindhouse film, as digital technology enables him to create pyrotechnic effects that would have been far out of reach for the B-movie auteurs of the 1970s. But who cares? Stylish and energetic, this is Rodriguez's best film to date. And yes, I say that, having seen El Mariachi, Desperado, and all of his other stuff ... even Spy Kids.
Labels: MasterChugs Theater, Zombies
posted by Chris 'Chugs' Taylor at
12:15 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home