With Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino have created a gloriously violent and unabashedly sleazy three-hour love letter to exploitation cinema. While their previous movies, like Rodriguez's Sin City and Tarantino's Kill Bill, may emphasize style over substance, it's a job these directors do very well, and their latest, most ambitious outing is no exception.   

The bulk of Grindhouse includes two feature-length films crafted to look straight out of a '70s movie house, complete with scratches and missing reels which give the flicks a real wear-and-tear feeling. Rodriguez's contribution, Planet Terror, offers an apocalyptic tale of puss-oozing zombies -- the result of biochemical weaponry gone out of control -- taking over a Texas town, leaving such unlikely heroes as go-go dancer/aspiring comedian Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) and her ex-boyfriend Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) to save the day. Quentin Tarantino wraps up the double-feature with Death Proof, a sort of "Friday the 13th on wheels" story about a man known only as Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) stalking and killing sexy young women in his souped-up, "death-proof" stunt car. Scattered throughout Grindhouse are also fake trailers to coming attractions, from a vigilante opus titled Machete to Rob Zombie's over-the-top Werewolf Women of the S.S. (featuring none other than Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu).

It's not often I get to say this without sounding like a quote-happy critic, but Grindhouse is truly more of an experience than an actual movie. Those expecting a typical jaunt to the multiplex will be thrown for a loop once Rodriguez and Tarantino open wide their bag of tricks. You don't have to be familiar with the grindhouse style to fully enjoy the movie as a whole, but it helps to be in on the joke, to realize from the beginning that these guys are resurrecting an era of cinema that stood for pretty much the exact opposite of "safe" Hollywood fare. The melting reels, the hilarious ads for nonexistent movies, and the overall disregard for subtlety are all part of the show, and Grindhouse does a great job of bringing these elements together to form one very unique and very entertaining cinematic ride.

Planet Terror stands out as the better half of the double-feature. It's a gore-soaked, action-packed horror flick combining what looks like George A. Romero's shuffling zombies and John Carpenter's heavy artillery. Basically, it's a zombified version of Rodriguez's own horror/actioner From Dusk Till Dawn, only with an even quirkier set of characters, an amped-up violence factor, and a greater tendency to throw realism to the four winds. Rodriguez definitely knows what he's doing when he amputates a character's leg, replaces it with a machine gun/rocket launcher, and makes it all look cool as ice. In short, Planet Terror is a big, bloody, explosive blast and one of the most fun times I've had at a movie in ages.

Death Proof, on the other hand, seems like a talky mess, one that almost completely detracts from the grindhouse experience. Tarantino's premise may be intriguing  (essentially, it's a slasher movie with a car instead of a machete, chainsaw, et al), and Russell does a fine job of projecting menace as the coldhearted Stuntman Mike. But whereas Tarantino's trademark of lengthy conversations about life, love, and pop culture fit in his other films, the same doesn't apply to Death Proof, which features extremely attractive starlets trying to gain the audience's sympathy with droning monologues about their vain existences, only to meet the business end of Stuntman Mike's deathmobile without so much as a flinch from the viewers. The car chases are quite impressive, but it's hard to become invested in the road trip when you don't really care about who's behind the wheel.

Though only half of Grindhouse comes across as a true blast, the whole shebang is worth checking out for the presentation alone. Part movie and part journey into pure exploitation, Grindhouse is a movie you won't forget anytime soon.

MY RATING: *** (out of ****)

(Released by Miramax Films and rated "R" for strong graphic bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, some sexuality, nudity and drug use.)