7 Quentin Tarantino Movie Plots That Really Happened

3. Stuntman Mike, Meet Malcolm Webster

Robert Rodriguez and Tarantino's attempt to resurrect the beloved exploitation cinema of their youth in the form of Grindhouse may not have been the roaring success they were expecting, but Quentin at least succeeded in creating a great, nasty bad guy in his half of the double bill. Death Proof as a whole may not quite have lived up to the standards of his other films - a little too heavy on the dialogue, a little too light on everything else - but Kurt Russell was inspired casting as Stuntman Mike, the misogynistic serial killer who picks women up, takes them for a ride in his "death proof" car, crashes it, and escapes unscathed. It's a novel way of killing, and a neat little conceit that would be perfectly at home in the sort of grimy B-movies Grindhouse and Death Proof were supposed to evoke. It's not a particularly clean or necessarily effective way of murdering someone, and there's a decent risk the killer himself might also expire in the auto wrecks Mike uses to dispatch his victims. It's the sort of larger-than-life MO that's good for Grindhouse and firmly plants the film in the realm of "movie movies" as opposed to the ever-so-slightly more grounded "realer than real" Tarantino flicks.

Except, unique as it sounds, Stuntman Mike isn't alone in his chosen method of murder. In fact a good decade before Death Proof hit the cinemas there were news reports about Malcolm Webster, an Englishman convicted of the murder of his first wife and attempted murder of his second wife in Scotland in 1994. Webster's motive was more financial (wishing to pick up his spouses' life insurance) than purely bloodthirsty, but he went about killing off these women just like Kurt Russell's character: by deliberately crashing the car whilst they were both in it, then setting it alight so it looked like an accident.