Grindhouse Looks Like Crap -- And That's Why It Rocks

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Grindhouse *directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez used high tech to make their new flick look low budget. Tarantino told SciFi Wire that the movie comes from an alternative universe where people never stopped watching low-budget films in drive-in theaters where the prints would get scratched and mangled beyond all recognition:

We didn't want to make it '70s. We actually wanted to pretend as ifthis type of filmmaking had never stopped, this type of exhibition hadnever stopped. So it made sense that, you know, they pull out cellphones and do text messaging, and they're dealing with computers. It iscontemporary, it just has that look and style of cinema then.

How meta can you get? This movie isn't a recreation of the 70s -- instead, it's a recreation of the production values and film distribution infrastructure of the 70s. Wow. I'm in awe. This also proves something I've long believed, which is that cheesy flicks are not so much characterized by a particular kind of content but rather by their production values. (I actually wrote an academic article about this for Social Text back in 1999, which shows you what an uber-dork I am.)

I am suprised that Tarantino doesn't know that the "grindhouse" tradition in movie-making isn't just a 70s thing -- it goes back to the 1930s. Read more about the tawdry origins of grindhouse flicks below the fold . . .

I have an amazing coffee-table book history of the genre called Grindhouse [pictured above the fold],
by Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris, which gets into the genre's tawdry30s origins with sex hygiene films that were shown in tents outsidetown limits. Another great history of the genre is the brilliant book Bold, Daring, Shocking, True!, by Eric Schaefer (published by Duke UP, who also published my book about monster movies). Schaefer gets into the very early roots of exploitation films of the late teens and early twenties, bringing you up through 1959, which he argues (rightly) is the end of the "classic exploitation" age. So do a little research before you head over to see *Grindhouse *when it comes out tomorrow night, kids!

Tarantino and Rodriguez were so obsessed with recreating the feel of a grindhouse film that they even have a few "missing" sections of the movies where reels of film were allegedly lost. Reports SciFi Wire:

Each film stops abruptly in the middle, at which point a title cardcomes up reading "missing reel." Will the missing reels ever turn up?
"Well, hopes are high that we find them," Tarantino said, with tonguein cheek. "I have a little detective working on finding mine. He saysthere's a possibility mine might be in a basement in Holland. So when I
get through all this big press-junket stuff, I intend to go down thereand see if I can find my missing reel. There's talk about Acuna,
Mexico, there might be Robert's missing reel, but the English-languagesoundtrack is completely gone, so we don't know."

Oh Quentin, you are just too cool for school. Seriously, I want to invite you over for bong hits and Donald G. Jackson movies.

Grindhouse mixes old and new[via SciFi Wire]