What's a RETROACTIVE REVIEW?
A "Retroactive Review" is basically a dusty movie review from the vaults. The reviews and movies are old, but they represent the type of writing for which I have the most passion. Some of my favorite retro-reviews and perhaps the occasional new review will appear here regularly.
But first some history:
Sure, writing is my bread n' butter. It's what I do, what I've always done, and what I'll keep on doing forever and ever, amen. (Hire me!) But first love? Nope. That would be movies. I absorb movies, movie trivia, and other miscellaneous pop culture the way most guys absorb sports. (Which I just don't get. Sorry.) As a child, long before I developed the attention span to write, I'd get out my big ol' coffee can full of crayons and draw scenes from my favorite movies. (The Ghostbusters, Superman and Indiana Jones were common themes in my "early work.")
In third grade I started scribbling out my own little one-panel comic strip that, essentially, was my way of creating my own "Mad" magazine-style movie parodies. I even took my humble comic to the editor of our hometown newspaper ("The Brookville Star") in hopes of getting some pre-pre-pre-internet public exposure. That venture -sadly- never took off, but by the time I made it to high school I decided I was going to elbow my way onto the school paper staff (not so tough in Brookville, Ohio) so that I could jockey for the (not yet created) "movie critic" position (which I proceeded to create). By my senior year I was the editor of the Brookville High School "Blue Blazer," giving me free reign to write the longest, most self-indulgent movie reviews I could dream up, and I loved every line inch of it all.
Even though my career aspirations never involved becoming a filmmaker I was still able to squeeze some unnecessary film classes into my packed Ohio University journalism curriculum. They say "those who don't, teach" (which is total bull, by the way), and likewise one might say those who don't make movies, point and laugh at movies made by others. That's not really bull. That's probably pretty true actually. [Read more and the Grindhouse review after the jump.]
The dawn of the Internet age officially began the very moment I was handed my degree, so in college if I really wanted to get my wiseacre movie commentary to the masses, it would have meant joining Ohio University's "The Post" (where it was less easy to jockey for the exact position one wants) or starting a "'zine" (--which: retro-slang for self-published newsletters about...I dunno'...edgy hipster things.) at the very moment 'zines became irrelevant (ie. the very moment every twenty-something ran to the interwebs to become a movie critic).
Undeterred by the flood of Internet competition, I started two blogs, got my friends to contribute and kept on keepin' on with (what I desperately want to believe is) my own unique brand of movie-lovin' snark. I definitely have an area of specialization, which include the less-respected "fanboy" genres: horror, sci-fi, cult, and b-movies of any era. That's where my heart lives.
That's the history, whether you care or not, but also an explanation for what you'll be seeing here. From time to time I'll dip back into the archives of my blogs and post some old favorites (aka, suitably written for this kind of self-pitching site) as a kind of bloggy portfolio to share with anyone interested in hiring me to write for them. (I'm capable of much more than movie reviews, but just between you and I, I consider film criticism my specialty.) I can do technical writing, textbook writing, ghost writing and copy writing. But for the best example of my personal writing "voice" I humbly offer some out-of-date reviews that, if nothing else, might inspire you to add something to your Netflix queue.
For today's post I pulled a review for 2007's under-appreciated Grindhouse. Though it's become a cult fave to many movie geeks like myself, it tanked at the box-office; a fact that surprised me at the time.
~WN
Meant to duplicate the experience of soaking up an afternoon at a 42nd Street grindhouse (that's the standard term for the type of theater described above), directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have created a self-contained double bill with novella-like features meant to tap the anything-goes spirit of sixties and seventies exploitation. Does it succeed? Mostly, yes.
The first half of Grindhouse belongs to Rodriguez's psuedo-zombie splatterfest, Planet Terror. In a convoluted series of events indicative of seventies horror, a biological weapon has been released somewhere in the armpit of Texas, turning oblivious locals into boil-covered, flesh-eating zombies. Freddy Rodriguez (Rico from HBO's Six Feet Under) and his estranged go-go dancing girlfriend, the outrageously, paranormally, sexy Rose McGowan (giving the performance of her career I might add), team up when their paths cross at a roadside chili stand/gas station(!) run by a grizzled but game straight-to-video character actor, Jeff Fahey(!!). The action moves from strip clubs to suburbia to dreary, starkly-lit hospitals to military bases. Heads explode, pustules pop, Tarantino "acts" and inexplicable "pop sensation," Fergie (credited as Stacey Fergusen) gets ripped apart by blood-thirsty ghouls. Marley Shelton also makes an impression as a nurse married to a devious doc played with obvious relish by an almost unrecognizable Josh Brolin.
What makes PT such a winner is that the action is almost unstoppable, only letting us stop to catch our breath for scenes of hilariously over-the-top exposition. Like Shaun of the Dead and Slither, it succeeds at bringing both visceral thrills and the funny. While wandering close to full-on parody, it keeps a solid balance between tongue-in-cheek and finger-in-gash. McGowan and Shelton both take roles that might sound flat on paper and inject them with searing melodramatics that function as the heart of the movie's first half.
Where I've always found the action in Rodriguez's earlier efforts like Once Upon a Time in Mexico and From Dusk til Dawn more static than exciting, here he shows a newly developed sense of pacing that doesn't undermine the fan-boy passion or over-the-top violence. It's a perfectly plotted, paced and executed little trash epic that moves fast and furious with solid perfs and plenty of "oh shit!" moments that will earn it an enduring cult status. It's no stretch to say that PT would fit beautifully between titles like Last House on the Left and Scream Blacula Scream on any 42nd Street marquee in 1977. Maybe that's why QT's fetishy slasher/crash-up/revenge segment, Death Proof, pales in comparison.
It might have been wise to kick off our butt-numbing 3 hour double bill with DP, to set a tone that would've partially prepped us for PT's onslaught of mayhem. It would have allowed Grindhouse to build to a frantic crescendo that has you leaving the theater feeling that they really knocked the high-concept, double-bill experiment out of the park. This is not to say that DP is bad--it's not--but its first half is thick with the same talky pop-referencing crap that QT has always employed. We used to like it, but it's beginning to feel like shtick; as if Tarantino was parodying himself. This element of QT's "style" is having the same effect on me that Kevin Smith's dialogue does now. Self-referencing meta-theatrics seem sorta' "nineties" now and while it worked in the mouths of reservoir dogs like Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi, it sounds showy and stilted when spewed by the young female primaries of DP (particularly in one of those signature "around-and-around-the-table shots" Tarantino seems to love so much). Do we really buy a group of girls waxing nerdy over movies like Vanishing Point and Gone in 60 Seconds? (Yes, Quentin. We KNOW you mean the ORIGINAL Gi60S. *sigh*)
DP is positioned as a slasher movie with a muscle car as the killer's choice weapon. Kurt Russell is outstanding as Stuntman Mike; a washed-up silver satin racing-jacketed stunt driver who hunts down young lovelies with his reinforced "indestructible" stunt car (It's "death-proof," y'see.), sending unknowingly doomed victims through the seatbelt-free passenger-side windshield when he's not staging impromptu head-on collisions at top speed.
The just-off pacing reminded me a little of QT's contribution to the terrible multi-directed Four Rooms (a faaaar less successful experiment). The story looks great on paper, but comes across as one-note and half-baked. Things don't really pick up until DP's second half flies off the rails with throw-it-ALL-at-the-wall abandon. Rosario Dawson, as a Hollywood make-up artist road-tripping with her fellow low-rung entertainment industry gal pals, fares the best of her femme fatale costars with QT's dialogue and gives McGowan a run for her money as Hottest Genre Mama of All Time.
DP's best surprise, however, is Zoe Bell, a sweet but tough-looking real-life stunt woman (Uma Thurman's in the Kill Bill movies as a matter of fact. She bears a striking resemblance to Thurman and is, in some ways, surprisingly more charismatic!). Because she's essentially playing "...as Herself," the nicely lensed crash-em-up stunt-heavy finale gives Grindhouse's last reel the nitro kick it sorely needs. And as crash-em-ups go, it's a doozy.
There's lots to like about DP but the whole grindhouse vibe kind of loses its way somewhere inside. You'll still have fun, but not nearly as much as you'll have laughing, howling, screaming and groaning with PT.
Adding to the fun are classic movie theater intermission reels and a handful of phony movie previews, directed by modern horror bad boys Rob (Devil's Rejects) Zombie, Eli (Hostel) Roth, and my favorite: Edgar Wright. Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead, creates a pitch-perfect horror movie trailer for the mysteriously titled faux-flick, Don't.
Genre fans will love Grindhouse and most moviegoers that give it a go should be highly entertained too. It certainly rates as my favorite major feature so far this year. You'll be wanting a small soda with your popcorn and don't forget to hit the bathroom before the movie starts!
~WN
GRINDHOUSE (2007)
Grindhouse is an homage to the bad ol' days when Times Square and 42nd Street were still the heart and soul of all that is seedy, dirty, violent and wrong; where several old busted-down bijoux palaces had gone second or third-run with double and triple-bills featuring exploitation flicks that ran the gamut between chop-socky kung-fu flicks, cheesy European sex comedies, women-in-prison epics and sleazy, violent, hard-edged horror flicks. It was a time when one ticket could score you a whole afternoon's entertainment in a dirty, smelly (and probably dangerous) theater with busted speakers, perverts in trench coats, pushers and prostitutes; some (but not all) there to take in the type of low-budget train wrecks that the home-video age helped bury in the eighties.
If you're like me and wish you'd have been around for all of that, before Rudy Giuliani came in to spit-polish NYC and sweep the homeless and ugly under the rug to make Times Square a safe haven for Virgin Megastores, MTV studios and Sbarro Pizza joints, then boy oh boy, is Grindhouse for you. Will others enjoy it? Those with delicate sensibilities and no taste for hard-core violence (Let's call them the March-of-the-Penguins set.) should steer clear, but those who can stomach carnage mixed with comedy, and enjoy a washed-out, low-budget seventies' sensibility...I think it's safe to say you just might fall in love.
Grindhouse is an homage to the bad ol' days when Times Square and 42nd Street were still the heart and soul of all that is seedy, dirty, violent and wrong; where several old busted-down bijoux palaces had gone second or third-run with double and triple-bills featuring exploitation flicks that ran the gamut between chop-socky kung-fu flicks, cheesy European sex comedies, women-in-prison epics and sleazy, violent, hard-edged horror flicks. It was a time when one ticket could score you a whole afternoon's entertainment in a dirty, smelly (and probably dangerous) theater with busted speakers, perverts in trench coats, pushers and prostitutes; some (but not all) there to take in the type of low-budget train wrecks that the home-video age helped bury in the eighties.
If you're like me and wish you'd have been around for all of that, before Rudy Giuliani came in to spit-polish NYC and sweep the homeless and ugly under the rug to make Times Square a safe haven for Virgin Megastores, MTV studios and Sbarro Pizza joints, then boy oh boy, is Grindhouse for you. Will others enjoy it? Those with delicate sensibilities and no taste for hard-core violence (Let's call them the March-of-the-Penguins set.) should steer clear, but those who can stomach carnage mixed with comedy, and enjoy a washed-out, low-budget seventies' sensibility...I think it's safe to say you just might fall in love.
Meant to duplicate the experience of soaking up an afternoon at a 42nd Street grindhouse (that's the standard term for the type of theater described above), directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have created a self-contained double bill with novella-like features meant to tap the anything-goes spirit of sixties and seventies exploitation. Does it succeed? Mostly, yes.
The first half of Grindhouse belongs to Rodriguez's psuedo-zombie splatterfest, Planet Terror. In a convoluted series of events indicative of seventies horror, a biological weapon has been released somewhere in the armpit of Texas, turning oblivious locals into boil-covered, flesh-eating zombies. Freddy Rodriguez (Rico from HBO's Six Feet Under) and his estranged go-go dancing girlfriend, the outrageously, paranormally, sexy Rose McGowan (giving the performance of her career I might add), team up when their paths cross at a roadside chili stand/gas station(!) run by a grizzled but game straight-to-video character actor, Jeff Fahey(!!). The action moves from strip clubs to suburbia to dreary, starkly-lit hospitals to military bases. Heads explode, pustules pop, Tarantino "acts" and inexplicable "pop sensation," Fergie (credited as Stacey Fergusen) gets ripped apart by blood-thirsty ghouls. Marley Shelton also makes an impression as a nurse married to a devious doc played with obvious relish by an almost unrecognizable Josh Brolin.
What makes PT such a winner is that the action is almost unstoppable, only letting us stop to catch our breath for scenes of hilariously over-the-top exposition. Like Shaun of the Dead and Slither, it succeeds at bringing both visceral thrills and the funny. While wandering close to full-on parody, it keeps a solid balance between tongue-in-cheek and finger-in-gash. McGowan and Shelton both take roles that might sound flat on paper and inject them with searing melodramatics that function as the heart of the movie's first half.
Where I've always found the action in Rodriguez's earlier efforts like Once Upon a Time in Mexico and From Dusk til Dawn more static than exciting, here he shows a newly developed sense of pacing that doesn't undermine the fan-boy passion or over-the-top violence. It's a perfectly plotted, paced and executed little trash epic that moves fast and furious with solid perfs and plenty of "oh shit!" moments that will earn it an enduring cult status. It's no stretch to say that PT would fit beautifully between titles like Last House on the Left and Scream Blacula Scream on any 42nd Street marquee in 1977. Maybe that's why QT's fetishy slasher/crash-up/revenge segment, Death Proof, pales in comparison.
It might have been wise to kick off our butt-numbing 3 hour double bill with DP, to set a tone that would've partially prepped us for PT's onslaught of mayhem. It would have allowed Grindhouse to build to a frantic crescendo that has you leaving the theater feeling that they really knocked the high-concept, double-bill experiment out of the park. This is not to say that DP is bad--it's not--but its first half is thick with the same talky pop-referencing crap that QT has always employed. We used to like it, but it's beginning to feel like shtick; as if Tarantino was parodying himself. This element of QT's "style" is having the same effect on me that Kevin Smith's dialogue does now. Self-referencing meta-theatrics seem sorta' "nineties" now and while it worked in the mouths of reservoir dogs like Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi, it sounds showy and stilted when spewed by the young female primaries of DP (particularly in one of those signature "around-and-around-the-table shots" Tarantino seems to love so much). Do we really buy a group of girls waxing nerdy over movies like Vanishing Point and Gone in 60 Seconds? (Yes, Quentin. We KNOW you mean the ORIGINAL Gi60S. *sigh*)
DP is positioned as a slasher movie with a muscle car as the killer's choice weapon. Kurt Russell is outstanding as Stuntman Mike; a washed-up silver satin racing-jacketed stunt driver who hunts down young lovelies with his reinforced "indestructible" stunt car (It's "death-proof," y'see.), sending unknowingly doomed victims through the seatbelt-free passenger-side windshield when he's not staging impromptu head-on collisions at top speed.
The just-off pacing reminded me a little of QT's contribution to the terrible multi-directed Four Rooms (a faaaar less successful experiment). The story looks great on paper, but comes across as one-note and half-baked. Things don't really pick up until DP's second half flies off the rails with throw-it-ALL-at-the-wall abandon. Rosario Dawson, as a Hollywood make-up artist road-tripping with her fellow low-rung entertainment industry gal pals, fares the best of her femme fatale costars with QT's dialogue and gives McGowan a run for her money as Hottest Genre Mama of All Time.
DP's best surprise, however, is Zoe Bell, a sweet but tough-looking real-life stunt woman (Uma Thurman's in the Kill Bill movies as a matter of fact. She bears a striking resemblance to Thurman and is, in some ways, surprisingly more charismatic!). Because she's essentially playing "...as Herself," the nicely lensed crash-em-up stunt-heavy finale gives Grindhouse's last reel the nitro kick it sorely needs. And as crash-em-ups go, it's a doozy.
There's lots to like about DP but the whole grindhouse vibe kind of loses its way somewhere inside. You'll still have fun, but not nearly as much as you'll have laughing, howling, screaming and groaning with PT.
Adding to the fun are classic movie theater intermission reels and a handful of phony movie previews, directed by modern horror bad boys Rob (Devil's Rejects) Zombie, Eli (Hostel) Roth, and my favorite: Edgar Wright. Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead, creates a pitch-perfect horror movie trailer for the mysteriously titled faux-flick, Don't.
Genre fans will love Grindhouse and most moviegoers that give it a go should be highly entertained too. It certainly rates as my favorite major feature so far this year. You'll be wanting a small soda with your popcorn and don't forget to hit the bathroom before the movie starts!
Planet Terror - ***
Death Proof - ** 1/2
Overall - ***
Confused, curious or inspired by the "grindhouse" concept? I recommend the following:
Death Proof - ** 1/2
Overall - ***
Confused, curious or inspired by the "grindhouse" concept? I recommend the following:
- 42 Street Forever - A great collection of rare exploitation trailers from the 70s and 80s. EXACTLY the kind of movies that inspired Grindhouse. Probably the best movie trailer collection of its kind.
- Sleazoid Express- A Mind-twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford - In addition to being a great reference book, it's a highly entertaining read that walks you through the major 42nd Street movie houses and the signature genres they offered.
I've seen a couple of pretty uninspired "best grindhouse movies" lists over the past few weeks. Here's a list of titles I recommend to help get the uninitiated up to his or her elbows in sleaze.
Ms. 45 (1981)
The Crippled Masters (1979)
Lady Snowblood (1973)
Mondo Freudo (1966)
The Defilers (1965)
Teenage Gang Debs (1966)
Illsa: The Wicked Warden (1977)
Mudhoney (1965)
Invasion of the Bee Girls aka Graveyard Tramps (1973)
Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory aka Lycanthropus (1966)
Suspiria (1977)
The Crippled Masters (1979)
Lady Snowblood (1973)
Mondo Freudo (1966)
The Defilers (1965)
Teenage Gang Debs (1966)
Illsa: The Wicked Warden (1977)
Mudhoney (1965)
Invasion of the Bee Girls aka Graveyard Tramps (1973)
Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory aka Lycanthropus (1966)
Suspiria (1977)
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