“Grindhouse” at the Nuart

Filed Under Movies

The first time I saw this was on opening night a little over a year ago at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. “Grindhouse” was a three hour-plus exploitation film double feature with movie one, “Planet Terror,” written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and movie two, “Death Proof,” written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Of course it had sold out. Tarantino was there with his all-girl cast. Torture porn guru Eli Roth introduced the film, his fake trailer for “Thanksgiving” that bridges the two films being the NSFW download of the moment.

I had somehow managed to talk a girl into coming with me on an unofficial date that night. We would never go out again. Coincidence? I think it just means the movie was every inch the masterpiece of genre filmmaking Rodriguez and Tarantino were going for.

The movie ultimately tanked at the box office, coming in fourth in its opening weekend with $12 million. Its budget was more than five times that. I try not to let a movie’s take at the b.o. color my opinion of it. The general movie going public are nimrods, and a movie’s success or failure during its theatrical run is hardly a yardstick for measuring its quality. “Grindhouse” almost gains a certain bit of cult movie cred for failing to reach a wider audience when it was originally released.

The Nuart in West L.A. programs some of the best midnight movies in So. Cal. Many of my dateless Friday nights have been spent watching obscure cult classics (”Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky”), blockbusters I’d never seen in the theater (”Back to the Future”) and even the occasional turd (”Diary of the Dead”). Last night they screened a print of “Grindhouse,” one they’d beefed up with a few extra commercials and trailers to enhance the experience.

I blame No Child Left Behind for most folks’ lack of knowledge about just what in the hell a grindhouse even is. Well, I also blame theater chains for buying up every last privately-owned mom-and-pop movie house or simply driving them out of business with their garish multiplexes that have two dozen or more screens, stadium seating and thirty minutes of commercials before the trailers even start to roll. Regal Cinemas went into bankruptcy back in the late ’90s with their campaign to have a near monopoly on movie theaters in every town on Earth. Several other theater chains followed suit. But that’s what happens when you’ve got five screens of the latest Rob Schneider P.O.S. just down the street from another multiplex with another five screens of the latest Rob Schneider P.O.S. You cannibalize your own business, and Hollywood’s typically flavorless output hardly puts asses in seats like it used to.

Years ago it was different. Movie theaters were smaller, independently-operated and the programming determined by the owner, not some corporate office in another state. Movies played as long as they continued to turn a profit for the theater, not just for a month or so before being dumped on DVD. Back in the day, there was no DVD. No Netflix. No TiVo. No Illegal Downloading. No Bootlegging. Not even VHS. You saw it in the theater or maybe eventually on one of the three TV stations you picked up via rabbit ears on your black-and-white at home. It’s amazing people didn’t descend into madness. But instead, they just went to the movies more often.

With independently run theaters, it was much easier to distribute your film if you didn’t have studio-backing. You didn’t have to hustle the one print of your masterpiece to Sundance and hope some mini-major would offer you a negative pickup deal. No, you just had to call around the local movie houses and see who’ll agree to screen your film for however long it generates an audience. A lot of these independently produced movies weren’t like the tame, PG-13 “Juno” crowd-pleasers dressed up in indie clothes you see today. These movies had to compete with the big Hollywood films, films with advertising budgets, production values and actors people had actually heard of. Enter exploitation movies — movies that made up for a lack in star power and budget with an overabundance of sex and violence, an absurdly high concept and a quick-and-dirty style.

Some movie houses were happy to program these films and “grind” them out for audiences, two or three at a time. And that is how the term “grindhouse” was coined, in reference to the type of venue that would screen exploitation films.

Rodriguez and Tarantino wanted to recapture that experience with their film. They were successful in that the film aesthetically nails the look of abused prints, the plots of “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof” are really just an excuse to get as many bullet-hits, car smash-ups and gorgeous women on camera as possible. The end result is like a shot of adrenaline in the eyeballs. I came out of the theater at 3:30 a.m. ready to explode zombie heads and beat the hell out of a maniac in a killer car.

It’s too bad that most audiences just don’t get the appeal of a movie like “Grindhouse.” They want their movies pasteurized and PG-13…when they actually go to the movies anyway. Isn’t attendance down again this year?

Today’s audiences, I think it’s safe to say, don’t know what they want. Studios don’t seem to know what will bring in audiences, either. Warner Bros. released “Speed Racer” this weekend. “Speed Racer?” Are you kidding me? I love the marketing campaign, too: “From the creators of ‘The Matrix’ trilogy.” Wow, there’s a new movie directed by the Wachowskis, the guys who made one movie I liked 9 years ago and two crap-tacular sequels since then that that were so bad, they made me retroactively dislike the first one.

Mainstream audiences can have “Speed Racer” if that’s what they think qualifies as entertainment when it’s really just sound and fury. I’m sure it’ll do mediocre business in its opening weekend before a greater than 50% dropoff next weekend. Hollywood will learn nothing from the movie’s failure to connect with the audiences. The fact that it sucks won’t occur to them.

Ten years from now, “Grindhouse” will have cemented its cult status and made its production budget back — several times over — with myriad midnight screenings at theaters like the Nuart. I’m hoping over time, the film will accumulate more commercials and trailers each time the print is passed along to another projectionist. Last night, there was a Pepsi spot, featuring a pre-Federline Britney Spears, and a trailer for Stallone’s “Judge Dredd” that were added to the mix. “Grindhouse” is more than a movie, it’s an experience. I hope you’ll experience it someday in theaters if you haven’t already.

-Brad Lohan