Planet Terror

I was interested for about the first half hour. It felt like a spoof, which worked pretty well. Solemn, nonsensical dialogue, shambling zombies, buckets of blood. Then … it just went on too long, and though it never lost its over-the-top stupidity, after a while it was just … over the top. They must have bought fake blood by the supertanker load. After a while, exploding bodies and a one-legged girl with a machine gun instead of a pegleg just didn’t hack it anymore. No one except the queasiest could possible take the oceans of blood and gore seriously, and I sure didn’t, but after a while it’s just a yawn. After a while it’s just not funny. If you want to see a funny “shambling zombie” movie, go see Shaun of the Dead.

Both Planet Terror and Death Proof have “missing reels” (We apologize for the inconvenience!), and a lot of surface scratching and film burn-throughs and other stuff to make them look old, which doesn’t quite work since they are both set in the present day. I wondered it if might have worked better if some reels were shown out of order, you could play little Pulp Fiction games with that … but I don’t think anything could really have saved them.