Grindhouse is a 2007 American anthology film written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Presented as a double feature, it combines Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a horror comedy about a group of survivors who battle zombie-like creatures, and Tarantino's Death Proof, a thriller about a murderous stuntman who kills young women with modified vehicles. The former stars Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, and Marley Shelton; the latter stars Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rose McGowan, and Zoë Bell. Grindhouse pays homage to exploitation films of the 1970s, with its title deriving from the now-defunct theaters that would show such films. As part of its theatrical presentation, Grindhouse also features fictitious exploitation trailers directed by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, and Jason Eisener.
The film was released theatrically by Dimension Films on April 6, 2007, to positive reviews for its tone, thrills, and tribute to exploitation cinema. However, Grindhouse was a commercial failure, grossing $25.4 million on a $53–67 million budget. Due to underperforming at the domestic box office, Planet Terror and Death Proof were released separately in other countries. Initial home media releases also separated Planet Terror and Death Proof; the theatrical version with both films and the fictitious trailers did not appear on home media until 2010. Despite the box office failure, Rodriguez and Tarantino have expressed interest in a possible sequel due to Grindhouses positive reviews and successful home media sales. The fictitious trailers directed by Rodriguez, Eisener, and Roth later became the basis for their feature films Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Thanksgiving.
Planet Terror
An ordinary evening in a small Texas town becomes a grisly nightmare when a horde of flesh-eating zombies goes on the prowl. Cherry, a go-go dancer, and Wray, her ex-lover, band together with other survivors in a no-holds barred effort to escape the carnage. The odds become a bit more even when Cherry, who lost her leg to a hungry ghoul, gets a machine-gun appendage and lets the bullets fly.
Cast
Death Proof
Stuntman Mike is a professional body double who likes to take unsuspecting women for deadly drives in his free time. He has doctored his car for maximum impact; when Mike purposely causes wrecks, the bodies pile up while he walks away with barely a scratch. The insane Mike may be in over his head, though, when he targets a tough group of female friends, including real-life stuntwoman Zoë Bell, who plays herself.
Cast
Fictitious trailers Before each segment, trailers advertising fake films are shown, as well as vintage theater snipes and an ad for a fictional restaurant called Acuña Boys. According to Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino had the idea to film fake trailers for Grindhouse. "I didn't even know about it until I read it in the trades. It said something like 'Rodriguez and Tarantino doing a double feature and Tarantino says there's gonna be fake trailers.' And I thought, 'There are? Rodriguez and Tarantino had originally planned to make all of the film's fake trailers themselves. According to Rodriguez, "We had so many ideas for trailers. I made Machete. I shot lobby cards and the poster and cut the trailer and sent it to Quentin, and he just flipped out because it looked so vintage and so real. He started showing it around to Eli Roth and to Edgar Wright, and they said, 'Can we do a trailer? We have an idea for a trailer!' We were like, 'Hey, let them shoot it. If we don't get around to shooting ours, we'll put theirs in the movie. If theirs come out really great, we'll put it in the movie to have some variety.' Then Rob Zombie came up to me in October at the Scream Awards and said, 'I have a trailer: Werewolf Women of the SS.' I said, 'Say no more. Go shoot it. You got me. Each trailer was shot in two days. While Wright and Roth shot only what ended up on screen, Zombie shot enough footage to work into a half-hour short film and was particularly pained to edit it down. Some Canadian screening releases included the South by Southwest-winning trailer Hobo with a Shotgun.
Machete
Rodriguez wrote Machete in 1993 as a full feature for Danny Trejo. "I had cast him in Desperado and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this guy should have his own series of Mexploitation movies like Charles Bronson or like Jean-Claude Van Damme.' So I wrote him this idea of a federale from Mexico who gets hired to do hatchet jobs in the U.S. I had heard sometimes FBI or DEA have a really tough job that they don't want to get their own agents killed on, they'll hire an agent from Mexico to come do the job for $25,000. I thought, 'That's Machete. He would come and do a really dangerous job for a lot of money to him, but for everyone else over here it's peanuts.' But I never got around to making it." Trejo had previously portrayed the character in a supporting capacity in the Spy Kids film series, also directed by Rodriguez. The trailer was made into a feature film, which was released in September 2010; a sequel, Machete Kills, followed in 2013.
Werewolf Women of the SS Rob Zombie's contribution, Werewolf Women of the SS, starred Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu, Udo Kier as Franz Hess, the commandant of Death Camp 13, Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Sybil Danning as SS officers/sisters Eva and Gretchen Krupp (the She-Devils of Belzac). Professional wrestlers Andrew "Test" Martin and Oleg "Vladimir Kozlov" Prudius also featured, plus Olja Hrustic, Meriah Nelson, and Lorielle New as the Werewolf Women. According to Zombie, "Basically, I had two ideas. It was either going to be a Nazi movie or a women-in-prison film, and I went with the Nazis. There're all those movies, like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Fräulein Devil, and Love Camp 7—I've always found that to be the most bizarre genre." Zombie is also quoted as saying, "I was getting very conceptual in my own mind with it. ... A lot of times these movies would be made like, 'Well, you know, I've got a whole bunch of Nazi uniforms, but I got this Chinese set, too. We'll put 'em together!' They start jamming things in there, so I took that approach."
Don't Edgar Wright's contribution, Don't, was produced in the style of a 1970s Hammer House of Horror film trailer featuring a trio of upper class ivy leaguers being attacked at an estate inhabited by a murderous inbred family of deranged blade-wielding attackers. The trailer featured appearances from Jason Isaacs, Matthew Macfadyen, singer Katie Melua, Lee Ingleby, Georgina Chapman, Emily Booth, Stuart Wilson, Lucy Punch, Rafe Spall, Wright regulars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and a voice-over by Will Arnett. Mark Gatiss, MyAnna Buring, Peter Serafinowicz, Michael Smiley, and Nicola Cunningham (who played the zombie "Mary" in Shaun of the Dead), among others, made uncredited cameo appearances. To get the necessary 1970s look, Wright used vintage lenses and old-style graphics. During editing, he scratched some of the film with steel wool and dragged it around a parking lot to make it appear neglected by wayward projectionists. According to Wright, "In the '70s, when American International would release European horror films, they'd give them snazzier titles. And the one that inspired me was this Jorge Grau film: In the UK, it's called The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. In Spain and in Italy, I think it's called Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead. But in the States, it was called Don't Open the Window. I just loved the fact that there isn't a big window scene in the film—it's all based around the spin and the voiceover not really telling you what the hell is going on in the film." On the Charlie Rose talk show, Quentin Tarantino also pointed out another aspect of American advertising of British films in the 1970s that was being referenced—none of the actors has any dialogue in the trailer, as if the trailer was intentionally edited to prevent American viewers from realizing that the film is British.
Thanksgiving
Eli Roth's contribution is a promotion for the slasher opus Thanksgiving. Produced in the style of holiday-themed slasher films such as Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and April Fool's Day, the trailer starred Jeff Rendell as a killer who stalks victims while dressed as a Pilgrim, Jordan Ladd, Jay Hernandez, and Roth himself as his intended victims, and Michael Biehn as the Sheriff. The design for the titles in Thanksgiving was based on a Mad magazine slasher parody titled Arbor Day. Excerpts of the score from Creepshow were used in the faux trailer.
According to Roth, "My friend Jeff, who plays the killer Pilgrim – we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher-movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who's in love with a turkey, and then his father killed it, and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town. I called Jeff and said, 'Dude, guess what, we don't have to make the movie, we can just shoot the best parts. "Shooting the trailer was so much fun," Roth has stated, "because every shot is a money shot. Every shot is decapitation or nudity. It's so ridiculous, it's absurd. It's just so wrong and sick that it's right."
Roth's fake trailer contained elements that almost earned Grindhouse an NC-17 rating, including a cheerleader simultaneously stripping, bouncing on a trampoline, and getting stabbed in the vulva, and three decapitations, the first victim dressed as a Pilgrim turkey at a parade gets decapitated and his headless body stumbles around in an exaggerated manner, the second occurs as the victim's girlfriend performs fellatio on him, and the last decapitation occurs on a man while he is being kissed by a female victim. According to Roth, "Instead of seeing it spread out in a feature, watching it all jammed together nonstop makes it more shocking. But we had a great discussion with the ratings board. They got it. Once they saw it with all the bad splices and the distress and scratches they were fine with it."
In 2010, Roth confirmed in an interview with Cinema Blend's Eric Eisenberg that he and co-writer Jeff Rendell were working on a possible feature film. Roth announced in January 2023 that he had left reshoots of the 2024 Borderlands film to work on shooting Thanksgiving, though was still involved with the Borderlands project and had given his replacement Tim Miller his blessing to complete the reshoots. The feature film was released in November 2023 by TriStar Pictures.
Hobo with a Shotgun
Some screenings of Grindhouse (mainly in Canada) also featured a fake trailer for a film titled Hobo with a Shotgun. The trailer, created by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia filmmakers Jason Eisener, John Davies, and Rob Cotterill, won Robert Rodriguez's South by Southwest Grindhouse trailers contest. In the trailer, David Brunt plays a vagabond with a 20-gauge shotgun, who becomes a vigilante. In the trailer, he is shown killing numerous persons, ranging from armed robbers to corrupt cops to a pedophilic Santa Claus. The trailer was available in certain selected movie theaters in the United States and Canada.
In 2010, the trailer was made into a full-length feature film starring Rutger Hauer as the hobo, with Brunt playing a dirty cop. Hobo with a Shotgun was the second of Grindhouses fake trailers to be turned into a feature film. The film was released March 25, 2011 in Canada, April 1, 2011 on American video on demand, and May 6, 2011, in U.S. theatres.
History and development