With Grindhouse just about to leave theaters for good (it dropped down to 14th, garnering a paltry $1.4 million and a wincingly-bad $950 per screen), I ran out to see it while I could. I was especially alarmed by reports that the Weinstein Brothers, who released the film, where already screwing with it. Apparently in some theaters they are skipping the fake coming attraction trailers for imaginary films, and using the time to insert an intermission.
In any case, I’m not going to go through the film in any great detail. I really liked it, more than Slither (which was pretty good), and maybe as much or even more than Snakes on a Plane, which I loved. However, it confirms my belief, stated in an earlier blog entry, that such films are just too inside baseball to draw mass audiences. Nerds are an increasingly noisy minority, because of our dominance of the Internet, but yet a small minority. I’m glad I saw the film in theaters while I could, though.
With the film a bomb at the box office (although I imagine it will do well enough on home video to at least break even), there are supposed plans to break Grindhouse into its two constituent movies, expand each—both films, as a gag, have ‘missing reels’ that can be reinserted—and re-lease them separately. Eh, why bother.
There are tons of ’70s film nerd gags like the missing reels, and I’m sure many people have gone through and documented as many as they can. My favorite, though, is that for about half a second the second feature, Death Proof, flashes another title on the screen; “Thunderbolt,” I think. At this the screen cuts to a black card with Death Proof written on it in blocky letters.
The gag is that back in the drive-in circuit days, distributors would often cheat the then obligatory double or triple bills by re-releasing old exploitation fare as part of the package. To fool people into thinking they were getting something new, they would re-title the movie. This happened all the time. However, reshooting the opening credits would have cost money—although this was done sometimes—and if they just cut the old title out without replacing the footage the soundtrack would skip. So a lot of times they went to a black card, as they do here, or would freeze-frame an image just before the old title appeared, and superimpose the new title over that. (You sometimes see this on cheapie videocassettes, too, which would sometimes use the altered prints as their source.)
That’s a great reference, but even among hardcore geeks, probably only 10%, if that, of viewers are going to ‘get’ it. In a better world, larger audiences would come to enjoy the film’s many, many more obvious delights, while such spoofery would just add extra sugar for the knowing. However, ‘normal’ people just didn’t seem interested in this. Too bad.
Probably the best compliment I can pay Grindhouse was that when it was over, I surprised to have it end so quickly. And that’s with a 3 hour and 15 minute running time. (Although presumably that length, rather than striking people as a ticket-buying bargain, struck them as too long to keep their asses parked in a theater seat.) I’ve seen 90 minute movies that caused me to squirm with boredom, so this is something of an accomplishment.
By the way, I broke another Old Man milestone with this movie, as I went to see it at 10:15 in the morning, as that was the only time of the day I could see it for $5 rather than $10. It’s probably also the first time I’ve gone to see a movie by myself in a couple of years, at least.
