Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Grindhouse

(2007)

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, like a lot of movie buffs, love bad movies. The difference, I think, is that they don’t think they’re bad. They like them for themselves, not for the campy pleasure of seeing how awful they are. They like Hong Kong chop-socky, Japanese let’s-stomp-Tokyo, and those awful sexploitation grinders from the early ’60s. But when they set out to make this double-feature homage, they did so with 21st Century technology that none of the producers of this sort of dreck could have afforded even if it had been available.
But the reviews were pretty good, and Tarantino is always fascinating, even when I don’t like the movie, and it Grindhouse is the quintessential drive-in movie, and we were at the drive-in … so … bad idea. Very bad idea.