Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Hot Fuzz + Grindhouse

I saw two fun movies in April that I never got around to writing about - Hot Fuzz and Grindhouse. Now that I think about it, I still haven't written a meaningful review of Pan's Labyrinth either. Yikes, that's getting to be a while ago now. Damn, I'm behind. And not in a good way.

Anyway, my April movie outings rocked! Hot Fuzz is the perfect spoof of a cop buddy movie. There were a few bits that dragged, but on the whole the filmmakers nailed the genre. This film works both as a comic send-up of every cliche you can think of, but also as a genuine action flick. Yarp!

Grindhouse was a total gas. Go with a friend, grab a box of popcorn, and prepare to get bloody! The first installment, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, was the better of the two features. First off, va-va-voooom! Rose McGowan was smokin in that movie. What was I saying..? Oh ya. The movie delights in goofy, gross-out situations made famous by those classic 1970s splatter exploitation films. And are there any filmmakers alive who care more about what happened culturally during the seventies than Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino? I don't think so. Why aren't they featured on I Love the 70s?

Tarantino's offering, Death Proof, had hot cars, more hot babes, and the incomparable Kurt Russell. But somehow it fell a little flat. Whenever Russell wasn't on screen, the movie sagged. That said, it was still fun, and Russell's presence was menacing and comical and crackling with energy. It might have been better if Death Proof had been the warm-up to Planet Terror, rather than vice-versa, because anything after the mayhem in that movie is bound to seem like a letdown. I wonder why they ordered the films the way they did?

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