One day, when Quentin Tarantino was still working in a video club, a strange man with a big scar over his face came by and asked him for a slasher film called Death Proof. Tarantino never heard of it, so the man dissapeared an left the young Quentin with an idea. Years later Quentin Tarantino and his friend Robert Rodriguez came up with the idea of Grindhouse. Finally, last month Death Proof had its European premiere at the Cannes festival. Death Proof was released in Europe as one separate film, and not as a double bill, including the fake movie trailers in between both movies, as it was supposed to be.

So when I saw the first part of this Tarantino/Rodriguez grindhouse project, I realized that the trailer had fooled me: A lot less car crashes and a lot more dialogs than expected. To start off with, the first minutes of the film were filled with women's feet and behinds. Especially those of Sidney Poitier's daughter Sydney Tamiia, who's filling the next half hour talking (the typical Tarantino dialogs) with her friends. I must say I'm disappointed, not about the quality of the dialogs, they were good, but the lack of action and the plot holes in the first part of the film.

The girls get stalked by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a freak with a big scar and a car, who takes a perverse pleasure in killing the girls with his ride. He killes them (a great part!) and ends up in a Texan hospital where we meet Texas Ranger Earl McGraw and Son Number One from Kill Bill 1. This is not the only reference to Tarantino's previous film, the pussywagon and the whistle are also present, amongst plenty of references to other films (posters on the wall, t-shirts, dialogs and the typical Tarantino brands like the Red Apple cigarettes). The film is stuffed with loads of Tarantino-isms like that, ...maybe a little too much, by the way.

A few months later our Slasher moves on to Tenessee and there he stumbles on four other girls. One of them is Zoe Bell, played by herself, who actually was the stunt-double for The Bride in the Kill Bill movies. Those girls end up being attacked by our psycho stuntman and almost get killed too. But they survive his attacks and then comes the best part of the film: Three angry women, almost straight from a Russ Meyer movie, pursue the suddenly less scary, yet shrieking Mike and go for vengeance.

I must say that I really enjoyed the film, it has a great soundtrack, the first part of the film has got a nice washed-out-colors seventies exploitation-flick look, including the scratches, the stripes, the goofs and the dodgy jump cuts. It has sharp dialogs and stunning action, including the necessary gore. Despite some slow parts and the unnecessary Tarantino-overkill it is absolutely worth watching. I can hardly wait for the second part: Planet Terror by Robert Rodriguez and also for Inglorious Bastards, Tarantino's next big feature.