McCarthy Reviews Grindhouse

I've been waiting to read Todd McCarthy's review of Grindhouse all week. Because of various embargos, it didn't post online until last night. Here's a sample:

The 1970s exploitation movie gropes, bites, kicks, slugs, blasts, smashes and cusses its way back to life in "Grindhouse," a "Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature" that lovingly resurrects a disreputable but cultishly embraced form of era-specific film production and exhibition. A pair of pictures devoted to re-creating their progenitors' grubby aesthetics and visceral kicks, but with vastly greater budgets, higher-end actors and a patina of hipster cool, they part company when it comes to talent and freshness. The numerous marketing problems for this bizarre pop-culture artifact begin with the three-hour-plus running time and young auds' unfamiliarity with the format. But the B.O. strength of "Sin City" and "Kill Bill" alone suggests the helmers' loyal followings will produce a very potent opening frame, with fairly steep fall-off thereafter in the manner of most horror films.
The United States may be the only territory, however, where the whole shebang will come out as one feature, as each picture will be released separately in slightly longer versions overseas.

As genre rehabs go, "Grindhouse" is more daring and audacious than most, partly due to its conception as an entire program complete with two pictures, four tailor-made trailers and various for-real interstitial bits, but more so because of its stylistic fidelity to its source material. Hollywood cinema, from "Jaws" and "Star Wars" onward, is filled with B-movie material served in A-picture bottles, but Robert Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" mean to reproduce the shot-on-the-run look and feel of genuinely down-and-dirty pics of 35 years ago, all the way to scratchy prints and missing scenes. One certain difference: Neither early George Romero nor the original "Gone in 60 Seconds" had seven-minute end credits scrolls listing things such as director's chef and greens gang bosses.

UPDATE: The NYP's Lou Lumenick adds some Grindhouse links and questions the Weinsteins' print campaign.