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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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The Reaping
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by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
If any two people should pay homage to B-movies it’s Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. After all, they both owe plenty to the B-movie bonanza of the late ‘50s-through the late ‘70s.
Tarantino has used many of the shock value techniques and gimmicks of the B-movie exploitation flick in all of his films, as in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. He has also acknowledged that Jackie Brown, with its funk heavy soundtrack, is modeled after the blaxploitation films of the 1970s (ie. Shaft). In the Grindhouse double feature, Tarantino will be directing Death Proof, a film that owes its lineage to the shock exploitation and slash sub-genres. Like many of his other films, Death Proof cashes in on the exploitation of violence, first and foremost.
Rodriguez has made an art out of making movies cheaply and quickly, serving as most of the crew, particularly on his early movies. He’s most famous for Desperado and co-directing with Tarantino on From Dusk Till Dawn. His book, Rebel Without a Crew, details his style of filmmaking in which creativity, instead of money, is used to solve problems. Rodriguez will be directing Planet Terror, the other half of Grindhouse. Not surprisingly, it’s a flick that deals with supernatural/horror in the mold of all those 1970s zombie movies.
Besides an extensive use of gore, sex and shock, Tarantino and Rodriguez worked to make their double feature as close to a classic B-movie as possible, even editing in intentional mistakes and film “hiccups.” Rodriguez, a big proponent of digital film, simply edited in all the scratches you might find on outdated film stock, to get the look he wanted. Mid-movie, there will be an “intermission” between the two movies, in which there will be faux trailers for non-existent B movies.
B-movie actors and actresses often made several movies in the course of a year, since they were shot cheaply and quickly. Rose McGowan plays two characters in the double feature: a zombie victim with a machine gun for a leg in Planet Terror and a hippie in Death Proof.
If you’ve ever been a fan of exploitation flicks, you’re definitely going to go all misty –eyed and sentimental over the Rodriguez /Tarantino double feature marriage of blood, sex and gore.
Any movie that sacrifices traditional artistic mores on the altar of sensationalistic shock value can be considered in the exploitation genre. That definition can be applied to current big budget movies, which rely on sensational advertising rather than artistic merit to get audiences in the door. Mostly though, the term is applied to low-budget B-movies.
The weird, the shocking and the violent all have their place in a good exploitation flick. Throw in a dash of sex, a lumbering zombie, a-less-than cohesive plot, overblown acting and bad editing cuts for the perfect B grade exploitation movie.
Of course, the best exploitation flicks mix the sub-categories so luridly that you can barely believe you’re watching a sexy lesbian prison movie in which a zombie killer stalks the halls, killing the women in new and exciting ways.
Zombie movies like Planet Terror, with over-the-top blood, gore and sex weren’t the norm until the 1970s. Prior to that, zombie movies were just run-of-the-mill supernatural horror flicks. In the 70s, Italian exploitation filmmakers naturally gravitated to zombie sub-genre as a great excuse for the violence and possibly sex that they wanted to put on the screen anyway. Filmmakers could also get more creative with their violence, since zombies aren’t really people anymore and because a zombie is happily capable of shambling around with a pipe through its head.
A Grindhouse is a term for a movie theater that showed mostly B-grade exploitation films. Grindhouses often showed double-features, in which patrons paid for one ticket and got to see two movies, back to back. The term may have come from the fact that many of these theaters used to feature bump and grind burlesque shows, many of them were entirely pornographic or because most people took their dates not to watch the movie, but for the advantage of a dark theater.
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