Tarantino.info at the Grindhouse

From The Quentin Tarantino Archives

The Tarantino Archives takes you to the Grind House

A short lecture to get you in the mood for a great night out at the movies

It is the late 70s, you live in a small town in the outskirts of a big city. Your older sibling is taking you and your loved one to the drive-in theater down the road. You decide on a double-feature of two flicks that sound like your mum would never let you watch them: Dirty Mary Crazy Larry and Zombi 2. You pay just a few dollars, get some pop corn and park your car at a really good spot, because the place is empty. Your older sibling is leaving you two alone, and you are hoping to make out with your date, but you didn't count on the movies. Three hours later, you stare bedazzled at the screen, your palms sweaty and your adrenaline pumping. You just saw two crazy ass movies that kept you gasping, totally forgetting about the date in the seat next to you. You just had a grind house experience. You saw two great movies for the price of one, you got violence, action, suspense, sexuality and all kinds of crazy shit that the Hollywood picture at the downtown theater would not even think about showing. You still have images of flesh-eating zombies in your head, of wild car chases. You blink.

It is the spring of 2007, and out of all likelihood, you have probably never had en experience like the one I wrote about above. You might be in your early or late 20s, maybe older, maybe younger. Exploitation movies you only know from some very well-stocked video stores or the geek movie lists on Amazon. You saw the trailer for GRIND HOUSE at the theater a few days ago and wondered, wow, what the hell is this? This is awesome! Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are bringing the grind-house experience back, and with all their celebrity status, backed by a major studio and their film full of crazy ass wild shit, they will conquer even multiplexxes around the country and globe, creating the experience for everybody. Those who remember it from the old days, the wild days, the Vanishing Point days, and those who have heard of it in stories told by their parents. April 6 will mark the day in movie history where Grind House will hit the big screen and audiences will go wild.

The Quentin Tarantino Archives devotes the final two weeks before the release solely to Grind House. We will publish a wide array of interviews with the cast of Grind House, we have already posted a pre-release review of the film, that rates the movie as ultra cool, we will take a first look at the Grind House making-of book that will ship shortly, and we will most of all present you the first ever conversation of Tarantino.info with Quentin Tarantino, a 30 minute interview conducted this last Sunday. We will take a good look at the film and beyond, we will update our wiki pages with tons of information about the film, we will follow the heated debates in your message boards, and we will come up with a lot more stuff to feast your eyes on. 12 interviews, roundtable interviews, audio bits, reviews, pictures, videos and links, soundtracks and more. Stay tuned for The Quentin Tarantino Archives' biggest pre-release event ever.

But hold on a second, what the hell is Grind House? Grind House is the latest collaboration between Robert Rodriguez, who brought us Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and Sin City, and Quentin Tarantino, the legendary director of Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Grind House is not just one new film. It is two movies for the price of one. It is Rodriguez' Planet Terror, an 80-minute action extravaganza about a group of accidental heroes fighting off hordes of sickos. It is Tarantino's Death Proof, a high-octane thriller about a stunt man who is out to kill 8 women with his muscle car. To set the atmosphere right, the two films will screen back to back, together with vintage ratings advisories, concession stand commercials, intermission title cards and fake trailers. The film will look like it is a bad print, just like back in the 70s, where you never knew how good of a condition a film would be in by the time it came to your little town's grindhouse movie theater. Because the grind houses were places were the off-mainstream films were shown, the independent films, the porno flicks, the blaxploitation classics, the horror films and the classics that took years to get circulated to the smaller franchises. Films that were off-the-hook, violent, outrageous, foreign or featured enough sexual content to be shunned. Those theaters used to show double features in order to lure audiences in, they would pair unlikely movies and sell them for the price of one. Sleazy movies. Shady places. Or drive-ins. Exploitation films that are treasure gems for film geeks today.

What Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had decided to make, is just that. But unlike the films of the old days, that had no budget and no good actors, that promised hell on earth and the craziest shit imaginable on their posters, but did not keep those promises, Grind House will deliver. The two director friends had the idea years ago and decided to make a double feature, with each directing a full-length film and they would play it back to back. With stars like Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell attached to it, and a roughly 50 million dollar budget, Grind House will hit the screen April 6, and The Quentin Tarantino Archives predicts a wildfire of a success, that will spread slowly and end up exciting the entire movie-going world. While the entire idea is not without its problems, and certainly, the fact that the films had to be cut down to meet the shorter running time, and considering that most countries outside the United States might only see the two movies separately, the entire project will ignite another wave of love for exploitation films. Kill Bill proved that a film full of references and homages can revive many a niche genre on DVD. Robert Rodriguez has shown that innovative filming techniques can be put to work easily and audiences loved Sin City's new style. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are back. But this time, they are back to back, in a double feature that will tear you in two.

--Sebastian 03:37, 29 March 2007 (CEST)

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