Once upon a time, in a dirty and slightly sticky corner of the motion picture industry, there were films produced purely for the sake of feeding audiences’ seemingly endless appetite for gaudy sex and near pornographic violence, often slathered with buckets of unnaturally red viscera and always with a splashy title and equally eye-catching poster. The rise of independent cinema in the 1970s made for an explosion of these low-budget features, and audiences hungry for a break from Hollywood had no shortage of options for any type of film that could have “-ploitation” tacked on to its genre. They showed in double features in dingy movie houses often transformed from low-rent burlesque clubs, the tastes of the audience essentially being the same, whether the subject on display was gore or go-go dancer.
The grindhouses are gone, and Hollywood has since dolled up B-movies in fancy clothes. Hollywood films that are thinly veiled excuses for nudity and violence now like to dress up in the sheep’s clothing of professionalism, but they’re rarely better for the added gloss. At least the low-budget escapism of the 70s was up front about its intentions. And it’s that spirit of honest love for shocking spectacle that directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino bring to their own loving homage to the gloriously filthy days of exploitation cinema.
The movies Rodriguez and Tarantino are celebrating were all about style over substance, wild celebrations of excess and eye-popping, gut-wrenching (often literally in both cases) visuals. The directors are well aware that aside from a contingent of hard-core film geeks who actually know names like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Monte Hellman, most multiplex audiences aren’t going to be that familiar with the grindhouse experience, and so they take great pains to recreate it as imaginatively as possible. From the colorful 70s-style “Prevues [sic] of Coming Attractions” and “Feature Presentation” clips (which, it should be noted, are still used at Fairfax’s great Cinema Arts Theatre) that are shown before and in-between the features, to the added scratches and flaws in the prints, to the trailers for fake exploitation-style films shown as part of the whole experience, the pair seem to have thought of everything. The fake trailers bear particular praise, for as anyone who’s ever watched any of the 42nd Street Forever collections can attest, watching exploitation trailers is often as much of a thrill as watching the movies themselves. Eli Roth’s nausea-inducing trailer for Thanksgiving feels the most authentic, squeezing as much gore and depravity as possible into three minutes of washed-out 70s film stock with a forboding ultra-bass voiceover, though Rodriguez’s own trailer for Machete, about a Mexican day-laborer with a serious vengeance streak, stands out as the fake film one would most like to see actually made (and a quick check of Rodriguez’s upcoming projects on IMDB indicates that he felt the same).
