Settling down into my seat at last night's press screening for Planet Terror, I overheard the chap sitting next to me giving his friend a crash course in the film's back story. "You know Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof was originally part of a double-feature called Grindhouse? Well, this is the other bit." Quite how Robert Rodriguez would respond to having his film referred to as the "other bit", I don't care to imagine, the Mexican temprament being notoriously fiery. It's a stroke of luck, then, that his name appears 7 times on the opening credits, just to reinforce the fact that there's more to Grindhouse than just Tarantino's movie.
In fact, Planet Terror is far and away the better of the two movies, Rodriquez cannily remembering to include some of those elements in his film Tarantino left out -- plot, character, humour, simple things like that. Though, thankfully, Planet Terror conspicuously lacks the rather nasty, misogynistic streak that made Death Proof such an uneasy viewing experience for me.
