A MILLION LITTLE (SHITTY) PIECES

Do. Not. Go. See. Grindhouse. If you saw it and enjoyed it, let this sentence serve as warning that you may want to skip this entire entry.

I like Mr. Tarantino. Really. I own all of his movies on DVD, even the one I hated (Kill Bill Vol. 1). But he has unfortunately become the Oprah Book Club for hipsters. That is, attach his name to anything – no matter how obviously ridiculous or awful it looks – and mindless hordes of people in really tight jeans and Walkmen t-shirts will flock to see it like lemmings.

Seeing the previews for Grindhouse, I was struck by several things. I am a person who tends to trust my own eyes more than reviews, recommendations, etc. – and this movie simply looked awful. Second, it was patently obvious that without the hype and Tarantino's name, it would have been ticketed for a straight-to-cable release. It didn't even look good enough to merit straight-to-video. USA Network or TNT quality at best. Third, assuming that everything about the film was identical except for the name(s) of the director(s), there is no way in hell that you would even consider shelling out $9 to see it let alone actually do so.

In short, everything about it screamed "complete piece of shit, cleverly marketed."

So why did I see it? Believe me, I strenuously objected, but A) Liz really wanted to (we are now officially fighting as a result) and B) about 25 of my friends in Bloomington were going out to help cheer up a friend who was very excited about it and just had his relationship go "poof". So for Liz and said friend, I bit the bullet.

It is the biggest mistake I have made in quite some time.

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This film is, on so many levels, the worst I have ever seen. I am a man who adores bad movies (i.e., You Got Served, Battlefield:Earth) but only when they are unintentionally bad without irony. This did not fit the bill.

The very definition of "satire" implies that the object is somehow being tweaked in violation of social convention – satirizing those in power, the wealthy, the esteemed, or the otherwise socially elevated. So mocking the horror genre is, well, not really satire at all. It's just a combination of beating a dead horse and pointing out the fucking obvious. As such, I was prepared for the Robert Rodriguez portion of this film to be excruciating. Boy, what a visionary it must take to make fun of how bad horror movies are! The film was essentially 90 minutes of wink-wink-nudge-nudge-isn't it funny/clever how bad all of this is?

No, it isn't. If I wanted to see awful dialogue, ridiculous plots, gratuitious nudity/violence, and spurting fake blood everywhere I could just watch an actual horror film. Doing the exact same thing but adding a lot of faux-postmodern "it's somehow intellectually superior if we wink a lot and acknowledge how bad this all is while we're doing it" doesn't really add to the experience. It just makes a generally awful one – watching horror films – a lot more pretentious. As if it's somehow "better" because we're all good, jaded Gen-X liberal pseudo-intellectuals while we're watching it.

Strip all of that away and you're left with the typical shitty, gratuitous slasher movie aimed at the intelligence level of the average 12 year old boy.

"But Ed" you say, "didn't it get better once the Tarantino-directed portion rolled around?" I sure as hell hoped so. I was wrong.

Let me summarize: this was completely phoned-in filler.
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Start with 30 minutes of absolutely pointless character-development of people who were just going to get killed anyway, add in 20 minutes of horrendous dialogue as the main characters sat around a diner table (stop me if you've seen this before – I'm pretty sure it was just all the scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor from his other films, especially Reservoir Dogs), and cap it off with a 30-minute car chase. The end result? An hour-plus film that should have been about 15 minutes long. It was stupid, rambling, anticlimactic, and (in terms of script and dialogue) essentially like watching Tarantino masturbate for an hour.

In short, fuck this film, fuck everyone stupid enough to fall for its hype and its bald-faced efforts at stroking hipster egos, and fuck its nearly four hour run time. "But Ed, I found it funny / it was humorous in the fact that it was completely over-the-top." Maybe so, but all horror movies are gratuitious in their violence and inherently funny/stupid/ridiculous in how over-the-top they are. So the next time I'm in the mood for that (i.e., never) I'll simply rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something similar and spare myself the pretentious hipster wank-fest and all the "we're so much better than this awful shit that when we do it, it ceases to be awful shit and becomes art and/or brilliant social commentary on how awful said shit is" baggage.

I hated this film like few others. Everyone involved with it should die of AIDS. In closing, fuck you.