Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
In Grindhouse's lurid double feature, pole dancer Cherry Darling loses a limb yet keeps on kicking with a machine gun for a leg. Now the Texas-based sleaze epic is being cut apart, but that could be a kick, too.
Its three-hour running time and disparate styles hurt Grindhouse in theaters last spring, when the double dose of exploitation earned just $25 million. But on DVD the films within the film are going solo, with Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof due Sept. 18 and Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror coming Oct. 16.
Each will get a two-disc, unrated, expanded edition with substantial footage not shown in theaters. Each also should play better separately, rather than in a three-hour grind. In fact, the Weinstein Co. split the films for theaters internationally.
Some fans resent getting Grindhouse as separate movies on DVD. One amazon.com customer says he wants "the whole movie, not half of it," while another insists the split won't serve "the creators' vision." Yet the reverse could be true.
Although Rodriguez delivered gory sci-fi horror inspired by the '70s in Planet Terror, Tarantino diverged with a contemporary girl-power road flick driven by dialogue in Death Proof. He also ignored the plan to make the films look like they'd been scratched and marred by bad projectors.
Each director also intended that his film would be longer, and on DVD they will be. So chopping them apart may be the best thing to happen to this project since Cherry Darling lost a leg and gained a weapon.
1 comment:
More Tarantino dialogue is always a good thing with me.
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