DEATH PROOF

By Matt Holmes / July 1, 2011

I loved my trip to the U.S. last April. I loved watching GRINDHOUSE in a small theatre with only a handful of yanks, ready to clap, cheer and groan (but not at what they were seeing, but with it) and just spending 3 hours hanging out with the type of characters you don't see in the modern day cinema. You may remember my original review of GRINDHOUSE all those months ago. I absolutely adored Rodriguez's cut of PLANET TERROR but I was extremely harsh on DEATH PROOF and kinda ripped into it a little bit. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it because I did. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the genre that Tarantino is playing with because I do. Ya know, even though it's very different I love DEATH RACE 2000 and VANISHING POINT. Hell, you could probably lump Spielberg's DUEL and the original GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS in there too, I love car movies from the by-gone era of cinema and 'not the Angelina Jolie crap' that we are lumped with these days as one character memorably says. It's just I found it hard work to watch it after PLANET TERROR. Here are some of my original thoughts taken from my review...

Death Proof is an awfully slow and boring movie, the worst of Quentin Tarantino€™s career and the likes of which is so hard to comprehend after the fun and electric Planet Terror from Robert Rodriguez which never seems to stop with it€™s fast paced gore, sex and zombie violence. I could hardly contain my excitement for seeing Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike in Death Proof but when it finally came, I was let down. It was like finding out that Santa Claus doesn€™t really bring the christmas presents down the chimney on Christmas Eve, or that the Tooth Fairy is really your mum late at night when your in the land of nod. The movie is just girls sitting around talking, bitching, talking, bitching, talking and then more bitching. Sound familiar? The first 30 minutes at least of Death Proof is fucking Sex and the City!!

I didn't hate it, I just thought and I still do that it's placement in the GRINDHOUSE experience was a bad one. They should have put DEATH PROOF first and PLANET TERROR second. The feeling you get at the GRINDHOUSE after watching Rodriguez's electric sci-fi movie is the same sugar-rush you get whilst your eating fast food. It never truly fills you up, you just want more of it. Then DEATH PROOF comes and you expect Tarantino to give you more of the same frantic cinema. The kind that he scripted in TRUE ROMANCE and FROM DUSK TILL DAWN but then here is a real movie. It's every bit a proper film as anything else you have seen in the theatre this year. Yes, it still has a GRINDHOUSE feel but it's a full on movie. It's like being given another full course meal after your fast food and you just don't know where to start with it. You feel bloated, you feel full, you don't want to eat something this deliciously good and exquisite after fast food. They should have been the other way around and then I probably wouldn't have got so irritated with DEATH PROOF as I did in the U.S.

So hit's the slightly longer cut of DEATH PROOF here in the U.K. without the missing reels and without PLANET TERROR and the fake trailers. I saw the movie on Wednesday night and ya know what, I dug it a whole lot more on my second viewing. This film was clearly meant to be a stand alone movie (which is bizarre really when you think about it), because in itself it's almost a mini-double feature. The first half showcases Tarantino's amazing ability to transform a modern day setting into a 70's look and feel. For at least thirty minutes, it's just a couple of girls drinking excessively, bitching about things and each other and just getting wasted in a bar whilst feeling a little remorseful about things that have gone on in their lives. They are just trying to have a good time, utilising Tarantino's awesome ear for killer music and wardrobe. Yeah the dialogue and the things they talk about here aren't as interesting as they were in past Tarantino movies and the characters aren't as well defined as those in his other works and yeah it really goes way too long and slow but there's some really good stuff in the first half of this movie. The characters Tarantino has crafted aren't the usual slasher victims. They actually seem to have some life in them. They talk about the future but it's all with a sense of sadness from us because we know they are to be left lined up as lambs to the slaughter when Kurt Russell gets in his DEATH PROOF car.

Now, Kurt Russell to me is God. During my childhood, he always played the characters I wanted to be. The Snake Plissken's of this world, the MacReady's, the Jack Burton's (from BIG TROUBLE LITTLE CHINA, and if you didn't know that you should be ashamed) and the real Wyatt Earp. In my household, Kurt Russell was the fucking man and he has always stayed like that to me. I loved him in VANILLA SKY as the surrogate father to Tom Cruise. I mean if you were creating an alternative reality for yourself of course Kurt Russell would be the guy you would project as your father? And I really think your suppose to feel sorry for Russell in those opening sequences of DEATH PROOF. He looks like he's from the 50's, the guys in the bar give him no respect and don't have a fucking clue what movies he has stunt doubled in. We feel for him because we want him to succeed at hooking up with a girl, we feel that he was a ladies man back in his day and we like the idea that this lonely guy can still score. When Rose McGowan's character (who doesn't quite work as well as when it does after you have seen her lead PLANET TERROR) says "I'm not going to fuck him or anything" when she is about to leave in her car, you kinda think as if your Mike - "Why the hell not, after I was so nice to you!". I think Tarantino was almost doing a mini-PSYCHO movie with the first half of GRINDHOUSE here. He was making you see the girls from the projection of a sympathetic Stuntman Mike and then ala Norman Bates, you are horrified that he turns psycho. Or at least, you would be if you hadn't seen the trailers to DEATH PROOF or that it was hinted at by his photographs of the girls he has stalked. Maybe it would have worked better if Tarantino didn't spoil his own movie! Even the Earl McGraw added scene that is actually a little extended in this cut that takes place half way through the movie is exactly like the examination psychoanalysis scene at the end of Hitchcock's movie, where they hypothesise why what happened... happened... and the motives behind the act. Then it changes direction once again and we flash forward to the future, not only in narrative terms (14 months later) but in cinematic style. We are now in the present day look and feel, which is bridged by a nice black and white sequence which carries us from the old into the new (many KILL BILL references which I'm sure Stevie Wonder could see, but the scene is nice and Tarantino's experiment with colours and characters breaking the fourth wall is fun) and then a boring reenactment of the opening scene of RESERVOIR DOGS (which doesn't work in these terms as I've mentioned before, because it's slap down in the middle of the movie) and because it's ordinary people talking about ordinary things... and not gangsters talking about ordinary thinks as they were in his first movie. That's why DOGS worked so well and this scene doesn't.

From there we get an absolutely thrilling car sequence where Tarantino frames Zoe Bell as if she were a real life superhero, and I guess she kinda is. She straps herself to the front of the Dodge Challenger car and is part of a twenty minute scene where she does all her own stunts and it's at that moment you realise Tarantino is a genius. He's used his Uma Thurman stunt double from KILL BILL and clearly seen that she has some talent and given her some time in the sun to show what she can do, and ya know what, she can act. Or at least, she can act playing herself. She brings a great warmth to the movie and may just be Tarantino's most likeable protagnist he has ever created. Tarantino is just having great fun with us here. Scratchy prints, off-skew camera angles, repeated dialgoue... a love letter to the type of movies he and Rodriguez will have seen in shitty Grindhouse cinema's at midnight during their youth. We never see these movies anymore and a nice dip into this forgotten cinema, is one you shouldn't miss. If anything it's a cool and interesting little history lesson. This is the type of movie that influenced a young Tarantino into making stuff B-Movies like KILL BILL and FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.

rating: 3.5

It's not for everyone and it takes it's time to get to the good stuff but there's some great stuff in DEATH PROOF. Tarantino has created a love letter to a forgotten cinema and his genius as a film-maker in creating some elaborate set pieces with absolutely killer dialogue and cool characters makes this one you shouldn't miss. DEATH PROOF is definitely better for the longer, though I do miss PLANET TERROR.