The highly anticipated (at least in my household) Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature GRINDHOUSE opened this weekend, and although it came in 4th at the box office (behind an Ice Cube family comedy?!), it’s far and away my favorite movie since, well… KILL BILL. I was lucky enough to see it at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater, an old movie palace with a huge screen and live organ music before the show. The place was packed and the audience was ready for action. GRINDHOUSE did not disappoint. I hate when movie critics use the term thrill-ride, but I have to admit that the GRINDHOUSE experience felt much more like being strapped into zombie-infested ‘fun house’ car, rather than sitting in a theatre.

I stayed away from reading any reviews or press coverage before seeing the film(s), but now that I’ve dug through a pile of them, this one from Ain’t It Cool News sums up the experience pretty well:

Remember, when George W. Bush was elected, and he said that thing about how, by 2008, we’d have “movies that would explode in our balls like a shotgun filled with handjobs”?

Well, that promise came true two days ago when I saw GRINDHOUSE in Hollywood. Except not only was it a shotgun full of handjobs exploding in my balls, but also my balls suddenly knew how to make fire using karate. All from seeing GRINDHOUSE, a movie that’s made of screaming car crash zombie boobs.

There’s also a slightly less hyperbolic review from Harry at Ain’t It Cool that’s also worth a read.

Seems like everybody has an opinion about which of the two features is the better one, with many people coming down in favor of Rodriguez’s dead-fest Planet Terror. It’s certainly the wilder, showier, funnier, and bloodier of the two, but A.O. Scott puts his finger on the real difference between it and Tarantino’s car-chase co-feature Death Proof:

At a certain point in “Death Proof” the scratches and bad splices disappear, and you find yourself watching not an arch, clever pastiche of old movies and movie theaters but an actual movie. You are not laughing at deliberately clumsy camera work but rather admiring the grace and artistry of the shots — in particular a long take in which the camera circles around a group of women talking in a diner. At his best — in parts of “Pulp Fiction,” in “Jackie Brown,” in sections of “Kill Bill, Vol. 2” — Mr. Tarantino strips away the quotation marks and finds a route through his formal virtuosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history back to the basics of character, action and story.

Both films are fun and satisfying in their own way, and I think both compliment each other perfectly. I’ll be going back to see GRINDHOUSE again before it’s gone from the theaters.

One last note: As if I didn’t enjoy GRINDHOUSE enough, the cherry on the top was the inclusion of April March’s recording of Chick Habit on the soundtrack. Chick Habit has been one of Thrillpeddler’s favorite songs for years, and we’ve even named our currently running homage to Jack T. Chick after it. Here’s hoping it becomes as popular as the Woo Hoo song from Kill Bill.

For all you fans of Chick Habit, the original French version, Laisse Tomber Les Filles, was written by Serge Gainsbourg and sung by France Gall: