USA
3.5*
Director:
Robert Rodriguez
Screenwriter:
Robert Rodriguez
Director of Photography:
Robert Rodriguez
Running time: 105 minutes
It’s a bad night in Texas: The zombies are out. Planet Terror‘s take on the zombie film is much grittier (read: more steamy, more violent, more bloody and less funny) than commercial ventures such as Shaun of the Dead, and what it sets out to do it does very well. The film is made as an homage to zombie movies and the kinds of violent films shown at “grindhouse theatres” in the 1970s. In combination with Quentin Tarantino’s Deathproof, these two films constitute Grindhouse.
The film starts with a fake trailer (which would later be done for real and released under the same name) for Machete, in which one of Mexico’s Federales hacks off limbs with a machete. The trailer sets the tone for the movie we are about to see, although very quickly the main feature reveals itself to be even more blood-soaked, and while there are some moments of comedy by actors who deliver rather witty lines deadpan, the film’s dialogue overall is quite serious.
We meet a number of characters who will soon come together to defeat the zombie uprising, including gogo dancer Cherry Darling. On the night she decides to call it quits at the strip club, she runs into El Wray, a former boyfriend, at a steakhouse with the best meat in Texas. Cherry Darling is played by Rose McGowan, while Freddie Rodriguez is El Wray, who is much more talented in the art of mass murder than he lets on, especially when the victims are undead.
Bruce Willis also makes two brief appearances as a general who wants to immunise himself against the green vapour that turns everybody to zombies; he is presented in a way that evokes a kind of alienation (as far as I can remember, he never interacts with another character in the same frame).
The story, which takes place during one night, is very simple: Zombies arrive; some fight the zombies while others turn into zombies; lots of explosions and bloodletting, led mostly by the unlikely hero El Wray; survivors escape to Mexico. There is also some domestic drama with a doctor (Josh Brolin), his unfaithful wife who is also a nurse (Marley Shelton) and their young boy.
The film was made for its visual effects, and the zombies’ bubbling epidermis is consistently revolting. So too are the instances of cannibalism (although zombies don’t seem to eat other zombies, they do like the taste of human flesh) and the drops of blood on the lens of the camera. The scenes of violence are disproportionately bloody compared with the bodies being decimated, and often the bodies seem to disintegrate on impact with a slow-moving motor vehicle, releasing an amazing amount of blood that gushes in every direction.
Planet Terror contains numerous jump cuts, often timed with specific actions in the film itself, and in this way, the film diverges from the films it pretends to emulate since Rodriguez makes visible his evident manipulation of the film itself, instead of the latter being a work that is affected by random factors such as time, heat, friction, etc. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, the viewer will have to decide for himself or herself.
This world is clearly a part of the Grindhouse world that is otherwise defined by Deathproof, and a number of characters appear in both. Also, the show hosted by Jungle Julia, a character in Tarantino’s film, is mentioned here on the radio. But while Tarantino’s universe was conceivably a slightly manipulated version of a world close to our reality, Planet Terror makes a mistake when it mentions Chris Rock by name, thereby pretending both that the world is close to ours and (in being made with the conventions of a zombie film, including the presence of zombies) that it is not. Whatever the viewer’s reading of these finer points, it remains a very entertaining film, though if one took away the fire and the blood, there wouldn’t be much left standing.