Grindhouse Presents, Planet Terror - Extended and Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)

This movie is fantasticly gorey and crazy and fun! It's a wild ride! Highly recommend

For those unhappy that the trailers were not included on Death Proof, let it be known that with Planet Terror, the Machete trailer is there just before the real movie begins! Grade A move there! Thank you Mr. Rodriguez! It's too bad the rest aren't there either. However, this movie is excellent. I loved Death Proof, but Planet Terror just rocks! Rose McGowan is hot and the movie is out right over-the-top gory and hilarious. Unlike Death Proof (whose picture mysteriously cleans up), Planet Terror stays true to it's Grind House roots with the shoddy picture, missing frames, including the meltdown during one of the steamiest scenes in the movie. What I really like is something Rodriguez did with the DVD release of Sin City: including an audience reaction track during a showing of the film. It makes you feel so much a part of the experience when the movie was shown to the public. Disc 2 contains the normal stuff you expect from Rodriguez, including the 10-minute film school, a feature on the babes of Planet Terror and more. Overall, much better than the Death Proof release and including the Machete trailer really helps. Own both movies to complete the collection though. And hopefully, with enough people crying for it, maybe we can also get the original theatrical release as well. Would that be useless talent #151? Oh, and during one of the features, Rodriguez speaks about an upcoming 2-disc edition of Grindhouse which will include his 10-minute cooking school, so maybe that is the theatrical release? We can only hope!

I’ve seen this movie about four times in my life, love it. Genius director. Very fun to watch. Hilarious too.

You know Hollywood has probably gone too far when film-makers consciously set out to make bad films. Or at least "so-bad-it's-good" films. In this case action director Robert Rodriguez of Sin City and Desperado fame and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) sought to replicate the whole "grindhouse" cinema effect with a movie called... drum roll please... Grindhouse. Grindhouses were cheap cinemas in the 1970s which showed B-rate exploitation flicks all day long -- usually in the form of double bills. Grindhouse (the movie) consisted of a "double bill" of two movies, namely Death Proof and Planet Terror. The cinema prints of both movies were deliberately "aged" with scratches, faded colors and so forth to replicate the whole watching a battered print at a grindhouse cinema effect. Planet Terror actually has a faux trailer before the movie itself starts (it is quite funny and very reminiscent of those 1970's action flicks) for a fictional movie titled Machete. It even has a deliberately "missing reel," letting the audience fill in the dots between scenes themselves. The DVD, by the way, goes one step further: you can select an audio track that replicates the cinema experience - you can hear an audience jeering and a guy eating pop corn in the seat next to you. Death Proof starred Kurt Russell as a serial killer who drives a 1970s muscle car and targeted young women -- that is, until a group of them fights back. In Planet Terror -- Rodriguez's flick -- cannibalistic zombies overrun a small town when a top secret virus is set loose at the nearby military base. The gore and violence is way over the top with some scenes directly stealing from movies such as The Thing, Evil Dead and Total Recall. The most notable image from the movie is of a sexy Rose McGowan as an amputee with a machine gun as a prosthetic. Sensitive viewers should take care to avoid it. It stars several Rodriguez regulars and Bruce Willis in a small cameo. Watching it is like watching some forgotten straight-to-video effort from the early 1980's -- Highly stylized and reminiscent of B-movies from that era, the color palettes are often a sickly green with a dated synth music score (of the sort Carpenter's films were noted for) on the soundtrack. Its like watching a movie you have never seen before, but feeling as if you had, but can't remember when. Cinema audiences however never got the joke as the whole "grindhouse" experience was as alien to today's young teenaged audiences that frequent today's multiplexes as were the concept of a drive-in. There were many incidents of audience members not realizing that the movie consisted of a double bill and leaving the cinemas before the second feature started. Cinema owners weren't too happy at the film's long running time either and didn't go to any trouble to keep the movie running when the film proved to be a box office disappointment. For the non-US. market (as well as the DVD release) it was thus decided to market and release the two movies separately. Thus with padded running times Death Proof and now Planet Terror are released as separate movies. All that remains of the whole "grindhouse" title is the "Grindhouse presents" moniker. Back when Grindhouse was released as one feature in the cinemas director Tarantino remarked on the film's odd concept that audiences were desperate for something fresh, new and different. It would seems that he was wrong as Grindhouse proved to be a major box office disappointment. Or was he? Perhaps this was a film that proved to be too creative for its target audience, in this day and age of high tech video games, and instant gratification movies that have to 'dumb themselves down' so audiences 'get it'. I think this was a film that the target audience needed to be kids - if not teens back in the late sixties, early seventies to appreciate what had just been viewed. THE DISC: The movie plus audio commentaries are to be found on the first disc. As stated previously, the film print has been deliberately aged to look much older than it is with all kinds of scratches, splotches, color fades and the like. The second disc is filled with behind-the-scenes making of featurettes and interviews with the various actors and creative people involved. Unfortunately no time is spent on explaining the whole "grindhouse" phenomenon and inspiration to any newbies. But it is interesting -- and ironic! -- to see how 2000's high-tech computer technology is used to replicate a low-tech early 1980's B-grade look and feel to the movie. RECOMMENDATION: Worth a look-see, particularly if you miss those genuine early 1980's B-grade straight-to-video efforts from that era's home video boom, and want to take a trip back to a time when movies were what they were - enjoyable, smart, and full of effort.

Love this movie

Many people are complaining that the two Grindhouse features are being released seperately. I'm probably one of the few who actually saw the two seperately in theaters because that's the way they released it in France, so I didn't have the possibility of viewing them back-to-back with the trailers, etc... like in the US. That being said, I'm glad that they're releasing it like this. Each movie stands well on its own, and even seperately I'd have to agree and use the term "masterpiece". The uncut version of "Death Proof" that was released in theaters over here is completely genius. There is a lot of talking, but once you get what Tarantino is trying to do, it makes it that much better. Add to that Vanessa Ferlito's lap dance (that was cut in the US version), and really you can't ask for much better. In the version I saw there also wasn't a "missing reel" because it wasn't cut out. The performances by the girls are amazing, and it's thanks to those that the movie reaches its full potential. While "Death Proof" was my personal favorite of the two, I also had a blast watching "Planet Terror", which is a zombie flick, a really gross one at that, thanks in large part to their appearance, and it's up to Cherry (McGowan), El Rey (Rodriguez) and the rest to save the uninfected. Anyone who says that these aren't masterpieces just didn't get the point. It's supposed to look like a bad horror flick, that's the genius of it. It's supposed to be ridiculously hilarious and have a nonsensical storyline. The performances are great, and Rose Mcgowan is just hot, even with one leg and a gun where the other should be. Whether this helps or not : if the DVD release of "Planet Terror" is actually the same as the theatrical release over here, then the trailer for "Machete" should be included and should be right before the beginning of "Planet Terror", that's how it played over here. In any case, if you boycott these movies because they're being released seperately, then you're missing out on not one, but TWO great movies that are a guaranteed good time.

This film far exceeded my expectations, and instantly became my favorite zombie film of all time! (Just for the record, the Resident Evil films are lame in the zombie department, but I'm a big fan of Milla Jovovich. I recommend Peter Jackson's gore fest, "Dead Alive," and also "Lifeforce," an offbeat space/zombie/vampire flick.) Anyway, "Planet Terror" is phenomenally good, and will be one of those films that I will watch again often (read: one of my elected classics). I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never heard of Rose McGowan, but she was terrific, and I've just ordered "Devil in the Flesh" based solely on her performance in this film. I also bought and watched the Grindhouse companion piece, "Death Proof," which I enjoyed. However it doesn't have "repeat viewing" written all over it. By the way, I loved "300" and "Sin City." I disagree with one reviewer that didn't like "Sin City" because its plotlines didn't make sense. I suggest that individual watch it again a few times. It makes perfect sense, and is a top-notch film on all counts (Jessica Alba notwithstanding). "Planet Terror" is riveting entertainment. Fun, scary, and exciting. A zombie masterpiece!

A very entertaining film that serves as a companion to the Grindhouse Presentation.