Planet Terror is zombie-horror action comedy kind of thing directed by Robert Rodriguez as half of Grindhouse (the other half being Death Proof). It stars Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Marley Shelton, Bruce Willis, and Naveen Andrews.
Evil scientist Abby (Andrews), doing a deal with evil military guy Muldoon (Willis), releases an evil green gas into the world where it infects a nearby Texas town and turns people into "sickos" - basically zombies with big nasty pustules all over them. They overrun the town, and we get our plucky band of survivors, all of whom, of course, have their own little subplots.
Dakota (Shelton) is trying to get out of her abusive marriage to Dr. Block (Brolin) and escape with her lover Tammy (Fergie) and her son Tony (Rebel Rodriguez). J.T. (Fahey) is trying to perfect his barbecue sauce, and coping with the rent imposed by his brother, Sheriff Hague (Biehn), who also wants his recipe. Cherry Darling (McGowan), really our star here, is a go-go dancer who's trying to leave this shitty town, and her ex-boyfriend El Wray (Rodriguez) is trying to get her back...but is also dealing with his shady military background.
Into all of this, we get lots of exploding bodies, gore, death, gunplay, and a healthy dollop of gratuitous nudity. Little Tony shoots himself in the head by accident, El Wray and Cherry hook up (after which there's a missing reel, letting us cut right to the BBQ joint burning down and the survivors escaping), the survivors get captured by the military and we get our unnecessary Tarantino cameo, it turns out Muldoon killed Osama bin Laden and that's why the military gassed him and turned him and his men into sickos, and eventually Cherry gets a machine gun for a leg (oh, right, she gets her leg ripped off by sickos early in the movie), El Wray dies, and the surviving...um, survivors flee to Mexico to start civilization anew. Oh, and turns out little Tony didn't actually die (if you watch all the way through the credits).
So: In making a grindhouse horror movie, mission accomplished, I think? But I think Machete is better because it's more focused. Planet Terror is a fun zombie flick up to a point, but it misses the best bit of zombie flicks. To wit, the zombies aren't really the antagonists, they're just what traps the characters and builds the tension. We get a little of that in the beginning when Dr. Block takes a break in the midst of evacuating the hospital to kill his wife (he fails and gets infected), but then the movie kinda jumps around a bit.
The question is, I guess, if you're setting out to make a schlocky movie, does it matter if the movie is "good," or is the quality of the movie secondary to the tone you're going for? And if you achieve that tone, is the movie then "good" for whatever value of good you're going for? I don't know. I love schlocky zombie movies, I love action horror, and I generally love Rodriguez, but I think here he went a little too hard making it look like a cheap 70s movie, to the detriment of the movie itself (the camera work is so jumpy at times it made me a little queasy). The performances are perfect, and I really wish we got to see Freddy Rodriguez be a badass more often. I also wish Marley Shelton would have had a little more to do, because her character is one of the more interesting ones.
I see a lot of reviews say that this is the stronger of the two Grindhouse films, but I don't know. I remember thinking when we watched Death Proof that I liked the shorter cut that was paired with Planet Terror, and I wonder if this cut has some stuff added (though I don't have anything in mind; I think I remember all of this from the first time I saw it, but that was nearly 20 years ago). I think that my main criticism, apart from the camera stuff, is that there's too much going on plot-wise and it detracts from the intended tone. It's fun, but it could have been funner.
My Grade: B-
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
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