Ok, see if you can follow this because I’m not sure I did…
A stripper (Rose McGowan) quits her job and walks down a secluded road. A truckload of military people almost run her over causing her to cut her leg really badly. She limps into a restaurant where she bumps into her old boyfriend Ray. The military trucks meet a scientist who has more of the “secret chemical” than originally planned so military guys (Bruce Willis) try to kill the scientist. The scientist releases the chemical agent, turning everyone in the area into zombies.
The stripper and her boyfriend come to the hospital because of her badly cut leg and Ray is taken into custody by the sheriff and moved to the jailhouse. At the hospital is a husband/wife doctor team who are having problems and she is planning on leaving him for a woman. The stripper’s leg has been amputated and the wife/doctor’s other woman shows up in the hospital as a victim of the zombies. The husband attacks his wife after finding out about her plan to leave him and that is when the zombies attack the hospital and the jail. The sheriff still doesn’t trust Ray but he agrees to go to the hospital with him to kill the zombies. Ray goes into the hospital and jams a table leg into the stripper’s stump and they escape the hospital. The wife doctor escapes in her car and the husband doctor has been infected and escaped as well. Everyone agrees to meet up at the restaurant and fight the zombies.
While the group organizes, the stripper and Ray start to have sex in the back of the restaurant. They are interrupted by a melted film and “missing reel” message. When the film resumes, the zombies have arrived, the sheriff is dying and the restaurant is on fire. They all decide to make a run for Mexico in a truck a convertible and a custom chopper. They looked like the processional from “Escape From New York” and just as I thought that, the music kicks in and it is the “EfNY” music. As they get to the bridge a group of zombies is stopping them and are then blown away by the military guys who have come up behind them. The military guys take the survivors into custody and lock them up with the scientist.
The scientist reveals that the reason the military guys are in a panic looking for the chemical zombie agent is that they ware intentionally infected by their superiors after they accidentally killed Osama Bin Laden. The only known cure is constantly inhaling the gas. Our little cast of survivors are apparently immune to the gas and the real cure must lie within their blood. The survivors fight back and take over the military crew holding them prisoner. Ray has modified a machine gun/grenade launcher to be the stripper’s new leg. She blows up the bad guys with her new leg and they all make it to the helicopter except for Ray who dies trying to protect everyone. The dying sheriff and his dying brother (owner of the restaurant) stay behind to blow up the base, killing the zombies and destroying the chemical.
It is a bright sunny day and the stripper is riding a horse leading a group of new survivors to her fortress on the coast of Mexico to join her fellow survivors in starting to rebuild the world. As the film ends we see the stripper’s back and she is carrying a newborn baby, apparently the results of whatever happened during the “missing reel”. The end.
No really, that’s really what happened. I couldn’t make this shit up. It was a whole lot worse than I made it sound, I left out all of the little details that just made this thing silly through and through. It was fun but silly. Buckets of blood splashing into the sky and limbs falling off just from a simple gunshot. Dreadful zombies with fantastic makeup effects. Tom Savini was one of the sheriff deputies in here so I’m sure he must have had a little input into the zombie makeup. This is the first time I’ve seen him in a movie with multiple speaking lines and after watching him I have decided that he is the grown up version of Dante from Kevin Smith’s “Clerks”.
But he was what made this movie endurable. I kept seeing him and remembering that this was a sick-gore-fest zombie movie. The splatter and gore was fun but the writing and acting was tough to sit through. Much like the other half of “Grindhouse”, “Death Proof”, I really liked the faux 70′s look to the film stock and the “missing reel” was brilliant. The best part of the movie wasn’t even part of the movie. It was a fake trailer for a movie starring Danny Trujillo called,”Machete”. Those of you who don’t know who Danny T is, he’s the scarred Mexican that is always throwing knives and taking off his shirt showing a full senorita tattoo on his chest. If you still don’t know him, you don’t watch the same movies I do. Anyway, this fake trailer looked better than the actual two features in “Grindhouse”. I wish they’d make that thing into a movie.
They say that this half of the “Grindhouse” flick was done by Robert Rodriguez but I get a lot of “Pulp Fiction”/Tarrantino vibe from this one. Almost all of the characters run across one another or have previous relationships. I suspect that Quentin probably had something to do with this half of the movie as well.
Overall it was a better flick than “Death Proof”. I liked them both for the bad 70′s look but this one didn’t make me want to leave halfway through. I can’t score it any higher than “DP” but if I did half skulls I’d give it half a skull higher than “DP”. But I don’t so…
2 of 11 Skulls
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