Zombie-A-Thon #8 - Planet Terror (2007) - With Peg-Leg Spoilers

When Grindhouse came out, I managed to see it not only on the big screen, but actually sitting in balcony seat in a classic movie palace. To me, that's about as good as you can get, short of seeing the movie at a drive-in. While I thought Tarantino's segment Death Proof was okay, I enjoyed Robert Rodrigeuz's Planet Terror. Overflowing with gore and goo, featuring over-the-top action and buoyed up by Rose McGowen looking exceptionally hot, I've gone back to see Planet Terror a few times since its release. But, it has been a while. Does it still hold up?

Synopsis

Rose McGowen (Cherry) is fed up with the life of a pole-dancer. She decides to leave the backwoods Texas town where she is living. At nearby military base, Colonel Muldoon (Bruce Willis) is meeting with arms dealer Abby (Naveen Andrews) to obtain DC-2, a nerve agent that he and his men need to survive. Without regular doses, exposure to DC-2 turns its victims into flesh eating zombies. In short order, the nerve agent escapes into the atmosphere and zombies overrun the countryside. Various characters show up, all basically bundles of cliches and one-liners. Cherry loses a leg, and replaces it with an M-16. There's a subplot about a brotherly rivalry between Michael Biehn (the town sheriff) and Jeff Fahey (restaurant owner) over a secret barbeque sauce. There is another about a hot blonde bisexual doctor (Marley Shelton), her one-time lover (Fergie, in little more than a cameo and dead soon after she is introduced) and her dick husband (the awesome Josh Brolin). We get violent twin babysitters, Freddy Rodríguez as former secret agent and current bad-ass Wray, gratuitous Tom Savini, and some gross medical photos, including one of penis with massive white pustules on it (don't watch this movie while eating!). In the end, much of the world is destroyed, but Cherry - now sporting a Gatling gun on her stump - has gathered together a band of survivors and is hanging out on a beach in Mexico. The End.

Analysis

How do you have a strip club with no nudity? Actually, how do you make a movie that's supposed to be a grindhouse film and not have nudity?

Bruce Willis is under there...someplace.

That question aside, Planet Terror superficially captures the gory, gonzo feel of Italian horror films like Nightmare City, Zombie and City of the Living Dead. The blood packs must have been loaded with extra squibs, since every bullet hit results in a fountain of red. The zombies are masses of pulsing, oozing sores, with limbs that tear off easily, and, in the case of Quentin Tarantino's rapist soldier, a melting penis. If you like cartoonishly graphic violence, you will like the effects in this film.

Quentin has looked...better.

The actions scenes are well done. In particular there is a great knife fighting sequence with Wray mowing down zombies in a hospital (see below). Director Robert Rodriguez delivers a good looking splatter film. He keeps the gross-out fun rolling along at a steady pace. At no point does the film slow down, and there is enough variation in the action and effects to keep the visuals interesting. The acting is fine. As mentioned before, the characters are collections of quirks and one-liners. While usually this would be an issue, for this kind of movie it's appropriate. By the end of the film - where Cherry has an assault rifle for a leg and characters are using helicopter blades like a weedwhacker to kill a horde of zombies (done less humorously in 28 Weeks Later) you're pretty much ready to accept anything.

There are some gross-out moments (like Abby's testicle collection) that don't work as well as others. And, Marley Shelton seems to not have gotten the joke, delivering blandness in a film that demands over-the-top performances. The film is too jokey and excessive to be scarey, serving more as a showcase for splatter effects. It's unfortunate that we don't get a shower scene (come on, ladies, you're covered in gore; you need to scrub each other down) and the movie starts to wear out it's welcome near the end.

Notes

The film this most reminds me of is Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City. The tone of City is more serious and it is a traditional horror film. However, it has the same gonzo feel to the violence and a similar plot (except the zombies in City are victims of radiation, not a nerve gas). Even the names of the films seem to reference each other. Where is Nightmare City located? On Planet terror, of course.

In keeping with the "grindhouse" feel, the film has print damage and is missing a reel, so we get a jump in the action. This is pretty clever and is used to gloss over what would've been another long action scene where one wasn't needed.

Cherry when she still had two legs.

The film was billed as an homage to grindhouse cinema of the Seventies. But, what is a grindhouse film? The term refers to exploitation movies that were shown in second-tier (or worse) theaters in certain areas of major cities. Often, these theaters were run-down and in rough areas, something that added to their transgressive appeal. The films themselves offered sex and violence not yet in mainstream films, although many grindhouse movies promised more than they delivered. Prior to the Seventies, these kind of films would have been seen as b-movies and drive-in fodder (although they would not have been, in general, as explicit). After the Seventies, the home video revolution wiped out most of these theaters. Some elements of grindhouse/exploitation cinema went mainstream (the graphic violence in particular). The kind of low-budget fare previously offered in grindhouse theaters went into the straight-to-video market, where it remains to this day, although video now can mean Netflix, SyFy, online streaming, VOD, etc. By the end of the Eighties, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to find the kind of movies that we think of as grindhouse films on a big screen. So, does a movie that got widespread release, featured name actors still in the midst of successful careers and had a budget of $53 million really a grindhouse film? Or, is it just a big budget zombie splatter film? I would say the latter. Quite frankly, it is too self-aware and to aggressively an homage to qualify as the kind of film that it wants to be. The performances in grindhouse movies are often excessive or laughable because of poor acting, poor writing, no budget, a compressed shooting schedule or all four. Here, they are very calculated. The gore in the grindhouse films was meant to titillate, to show audience something they couldn't get in mainstream films. That is not the case with Planet Terror. After years of high-intensity violence in films like Commando and Die Hard and splatter in even high-budget films like Hannibal, exploding blood packs don't have the impact they may have had in 1975. The movie teases at nudity, but fails to deliver. While not ever exploitation film had nudity, it is a cheat to open a movie in a strip club and, even if McGowan isn't going to doff her top, not even have a naked extra.

And, Cherry with a bit more boom-boom.

Finally, and most importantly, I think that Rodriguez misses why exploitation/grindhouse movies still have an appeal. They are mostly low-budget affairs, but you have to admire the creativity, the effort, that people with limited time, resources (and in many cases, talent) were able to muster. These movies have a manic energy about them, the sense that filmmakers who found themselves with more on-screen freedom than before, just went a little nuts (in a good way). Planet Terror for all it's blood and guts, is a very tame, controlled affair. It may have been better to give Rodriguez a $5 million budget, a 2 week shooting schedule and an actress who wouldn't mind an explicit shower scene.

How does it fair as a zombie film? Pretty good. It does not have the dour charms of Romero's more serious horror/social commentary films. And, it is not a relentless thriller like28 Days Later. It lacks even the shallow drama of action-horror films like the Dawn of the Dead remake. Its humor is not the the more thoughtful brand found in Shaun of the Dead or even the alien-zombie flick Night of the Creeps. Like the Italian zombie films cited earlier, it really has more to do with stripping the zombie film down to it's visual essence; gore, gore and more gore. And in this aspect, it succeeds. The gore, however, is not the painfully realistic dismembering of Day of the Dead or the sad, slow decay of the protagonist in Contracted. It is so excessive that the film quickly because a Three Stooges film, an exercise in gruesome slapstick.

Verdict

Planet Terror is entertaining, if you like bloody horror movies. But, along with it's fellow Grindhouse feature Death Proof it fails to capture the spirit or energy of the movies it is an homage to. If you want to see a real grindhouse zombie movie, check out Nightmare City, Lucio Fulci's Zombie or even Cannibal Apocalypse. Still, Planet Terror is worth watching. Check it out.

Here's your trailer.

And, here's the knife fight I mentioned.