...almost everywhere else has a more sophisticated understanding of film than America...

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." -- Henry Mencken

And back in the day (B.V. - before video), I'd say international audiences especially in the smaller markets were very familiar with the "grindhouse" experience. Many crazy B-movies which didn't require a high degree of English comprehension, were circulated to small overseas theatres till the prints were all scratched to hell and indeed missing reels...

I gave it an "A", but far from a "RESOUNDING" one, due to Tarantino's failure to make a grindhouse style movie -- it's just another Tarantino movie, and not a very good one. (However, the rest was indeed resoundingly awesome!)

Disappointing for Grindhouse but not really surprising. Most people haven't a clue about cinematic history and perhaps no clue what the word "homage" even means. It's fun experience (I liked Planet Terror better than the way too talky Death Proof).

Tarantino's film was closer to true grindhouse than Rodriguez's was.

Oh and my theatre experiences seem to be getting troubling as I was at a respectable theatre but I had the misfortune of sitting in front of a drunk emo prolly homo guy who did the One person clap at least three times during the film and at one point was pointing out things to his friend to his left about every 10 seconds and also prolly being intoxicated too. As for the film(s), trailers: Machete and Don't were A and Planet Terror A and Death Proof B but A for some amazing scenes.

Oh and I think we should drop the "too smart for america" attitude not because the statement is self absorbed but more to do if you look at Grindhouse, what really is the redeeming value of the film (Im speaking as someone who absolutely loved the Planet Terror segment). Now if you were saying something like no one having taste for missing stuff like Children of Men or In America, its understandable but for Grindhouse?? Its a subconscious guilty pleasure roller coaster ride nothing more

Im not saying other countries didnt have it, I mean theres a whole world of Italian low budget horror along with German, and Switzerland, but Grindhouse was coined in America.

Takes 300's spot for best film of all time.

A+

So, Planet Terror is a Lucio Fulci movie with a big budget and a name cast. Like to an absolute tee. I love it.

Death Proof is great, too. It's the more cinematic of the two, and probably the better overall film, if you want to look at it like that.

It feels silly to compare the two because they are each trying to accomplish two completely different things in the world of exploitation cinema, and I think they each do their own thing perfectly.

The trailers are great, too. I can't decide if I like Don't or Thanksgiving more. Thanksgiving makes me want to run out and re-watch all of the great, truly scuzzy slasher films like The Burning, Silent Night Deadly Night, the Slumber Party Massacre movies, and Sleepaway Camp. Don't hit the nail on the head with it's attempt to ape the style of trailers for European horror movies shown in the states.

Are people just saying Death Proof is better than Planet Terror just because its Tarentino?

Is it worth putting up with if you (meaning me) hate Rodriguez and everything he's ever created?

Death Proof ends up being two almost completely distinct movies; the first movie is a killer movie where the killer uses his car to take out the nubile young girls, while the second movie is a female revenge film where the nubile young girls give the killer what’s coming to him. I guess I’m more of a structural formalist than I had ever imagined because this set up bothers me – what Tarantino has essentially done is make a two act movie, except that the acts have almost nothing to do with each other (the killer is even driving a different car in the second act).

The first act is my favorite: it follows a couple of girls out for a night on the town in Austin, Texas. One of the watering holes where they end up happens to be where a strange character named Stuntman Mike hangs out. Stuntman Mike, as his name suggests, works as a movie stunt man, and his car is a movie stunt car – it’s been rigged so that no matter how badly he crashes, the driver will remain safe from mortal injury. Tarantino builds subtle dread throughout act one, having Stuntman Mike creepily interact with the girls he’s going to kill. And not only is Tarantino at his best here, giving his characters real conversations that, as always, are laced with pop culture minutiae, the actresses in this segment can carry the weight. What’s great is that the talky Tarantino style fits perfectly with low budget exploitation movies – most of these films contain arduous stretches of dialogue and filler because there was no room in the budget for much action. Anyone who has spent a lot of time sitting through real grindhouse movies will be familiar with slogging through interminable scenes that are poorly written and terribly acted; thankfully Tarantino isn’t aping his influences too much here and while by no means the best stuff he’s ever written, a lot of the dialogue and bar hopping business in the first act is pretty great.

Once he gets to the second act, everything loses steam. Act one builds to an incredible car crash, and we’ve become intrigued by Stuntman Mike and his bizarre modus operandi. But instead of building on that, we’re back at square one, this time with four new girls and in a different state (in a lot of ways the second act of Death Proof feels like Death Proof II, where the sequel is a slight retread of the original). This time the girls aren’t just random hotties – two of them are professional stuntwomen. They go out to test drive a classic car (forgive me for not knowing the model, I’m not a gearhead, but it’s the white car from Vanishing Point) when they find homicidal Stuntman Mike on the backroads and turn the tables on him. Gone in act two is the creepy build up and interaction between Stuntman Mike and his victims; this time it’s quite literally wham, bam, thank you ma’am, as Stuntman Mike comes from nowhere to wreak havoc. What follows is a masterful car chase that shows that you don’t need to spend hundreds of millions and wreck thousands of cars to have a chase that will keep you on the edge of your seat – good old fashioned filmmaking chops will do just as well.

Kurt Russell is what connects these two halves, and his Stuntman Mike is yet another great character for the Russell oeuvre. I like a psycho who talks to his victims and engages in a mental cat and mouse, and Russell does that well, nicely straddling the line between ‘creepy dangerous guy’ and ‘creepy old guy hitting on girls at the bar.’ The first set of girls is anchored by two performances: Sydney Poitier as sexy radio DJ Jungle Julie and weird nosed (I’m thinking bad plastic surgery) Vanessa Ferlito as her out of town friend Butterfly. These girls – and the rest of their friends – have an easygoing chemistry that I liked and was drawn into.

Nothing drew me into the second set of girls – not even Rosario Dawson’s nipples poking through her shirt at different times. Where the dialogue of the first act feels natural and real, the dialogue here – especially in a diner scene with a distracting long shot – is flat and without pizzazz. And what’s worse is that these actresses all seem incapable of delivering any of Tarantino’s dialogue naturalistically. Dawson’s acting is just right for a broad Kevin Smith movie, while Jordan Ladd is sort of just there. Most infuriating is Tracie Thom, from Rent and Wonderfalls, as the sort of sassy black lady who should be relegated to comedies making fun of black caricatures. In act one Poitier is given some of Tarantino’s occasionally cringe-inducing ‘race talk,’ but she just delivers it like a person. Thom shucks and jives through most of her dialogue, and I found myself wondering how these other people in her clique could stand to be around her when she’s making like Florence from The Jeffersons multiplied by everyone who has appeared on Maury Povich to find out the identity of their baby daddy.

But the real trouble at the heart of the second act of Death Proof is Zoe Bell. Undeniably lovely and exuding honest charm, Bell is an actual stuntperson and not an actress… and it shows. She reminded me of Gerri Jewel from Facts of Life – not that she is disabled but that she’s been cast for who she is in real life as opposed to what she can do as an actress. Having Bell at the center of the second half of Death Proof is terrific from one point of view, which is that you can be sure that’s her doing some insane stunts on the hood of a car. And it creates a nice feeling about the whole second act – what a lovely mash note QT has made for this stunt woman. But the performance just isn’t there.

The two halves of Death Proof are very different in other ways. Tarantino does the missing frames and bad splicing gags in the first half only, and that’s also where the missing reel is (both films are missing a reel). The first half feels much more like Tarantino is succeeding at creating a modern grindhouse film, but then in the second half he throws all that away in one very long shot – a dialogue scene in a diner where the camera dances around the girls at the table in a sustained shot for quite some time. It’s like the opening of Reservoir Dogs all over again, and it’s just wildly out of place here (it’s not helped by the fact that the dialogue and the acting in this scene, which is just an extension of another long talking scene in a car, fell totally flat for me). And the scene just feels so Tarantino. Maybe if I was a Tarantino partisan this would be a good thing for me - God knows someone saying a certain scene in a Scorsese movie is so Scoresese would excite me - but I'm just an admirer of his. Tarantino seems to have grown tired of his formal experiment by this point, and he doesn’t just shrug it off but throws it off completely. He gets back into the spirit of things in the final car chase that takes up the last half of the second act, and it’s very appreciated.

Devin from Chud's take on Death Proof is spot on.....

Theres an interesting theory about part 1 and 2 of Deathproof that people on the boards are thinking part 2 happened before part 1 since part 1 shower the female doctor from Planet Terror in the same hospital as Stuntman Mike and pretty much the sequence was shot around the time the zombie outburst began. Did stuntmanmike have that big scar on his face on part 2 of the sequence?

For the trio in part two to be the very first time and for Mike to walk away from the ending would pretty much shatter the point of the film.
I'm also going to see it again before it gets pulled or split or whatever, but I think it went chronologically.