Friday, September 28, 2007

Tarantino's DEATH PROOF only half the equation

As for my ranting about the chop job the Weinstein camp did on GRINDHOUSE - killing its theatrical run (a whole two weeks) before it could garner word of mouth then deciding to put out the film hacked in half for two separate DVDs - I have to say that the recently released second half of GRINDHOUSE - QT's DEATH PROOF - is truly a sight to behold.

Its a different experience (besides the fact that you're watching it on a TV screen) in that it doesn't look at all the same as it did when it was the second half of GRINDHOUSE. First, there's barely a scratch in sight - sure there's some dents and there's soundtrack fall out, but DEATH PROOF is absolutely gorgeous on this disc release.

Its also cut differently with some scenes extended and placed in different parts of the movie, the inclusion of a black and white sequence when Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) first comes upon the second group of Hollywood girls (Abernathy, Kim and Lee before they hook up with Zoe) at a convenience store and the insertion of Butterfly's (Venessa Ferlito) "infamous" lap dance.

I can't be pissed at this "version" because I like DEATH PROOF an awful lot - just not as much as I did when I saw it in GRINDHOUSE...

Why? Well, in GRINDHOUSE, DEATH PROOF was a mad reflection of PLANET TERROR (Robert Rodruguez's take on a zombified apocalypse), with some of the same characters, plot turns, musical stings, auditory flashes, etc. And PLANET TERROR sets a disconcerting mood to the event as a whole - by the time you get to DEATH PROOF (after a set of gnarly trailers - MIA on the DEATH PROOF disc), you're immersed in a miasma of insanity with DEATH PROOF working as a bone crunching dreamscape.

While I was incensed at the thought of chopping GRINDHOUSE apart, I took solace in this thought - maybe the disc release of DEATH PROOF is supposed to represent - as near as possible - the original incarnation of the film. In the true spirit of grindhouse cinema - where movies were roughly passed from theater to theater enduring all kinds of manhandling, scratching, cutting - perhaps by the time GRINDHOUSE is released, we can imagine that the original DEATH PROOF was literally beat up by theater owners, including the fact that scenes such as Butterfly's dance would have been excised by horny projectionists for their own gratification and personal "libraries." Hence, this scene "missing" when it shows up in the GRINDHOUSE run of DEATH PROOF. And maybe those same projectionists burned or damaged other scenes in DEATH PROOF, causing a "different" cut of the film...

Anyway - its a fun way to justify the Weinsteins' decision to bastardize a classic film and soak unsuspecting consumers for their already hard earned nickels and dimes.