The second half of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s failed grindhouse experiment limps sheepishly into cinemas. And if you’ve already seen the all-round car crash that is Death Proof, you’ll know just what to expect when we tell you that Planet Terror is the runt of the litter.
So it’s about zombies. Wow. How edgy. A mutant virus seeps out of a broken container, infects the innocent and causes pustule-sprouting freaks to break through walls. You run, they chase, they bite, you die.
Unless you’re the vitamin D-deprived Rose McGowan, in which case you’ll fix a machine gun to the stump of your leg and blast the fuckers away. Through the battle with the undead, you’ll lose some of your motley crew, and perhaps a few limbs, but eventually you’ll make it to where the grass is greener and the air is pure.
Very little of the film is designed to make sense. In fact, risk a two-minute toilet trip and you may well wonder if you’ve come back into the wrong cinema. In keeping with the traditions of grindhouse cinema it may be, but the skank and squalor and painfully laughable violence override of this pastiche don’t cut the mustard.
To highlight the idiocy that is Planet Terror, there’s a character called ‘The Rapist’, played by none other than QT, who gets his cock out just long enough to wank over himself. Sly self-awareness or painfully literal explanation of why this project exists? You decide. Actually, no, we will: it’s the latter.
