Good ol’ gore fest

A two-headed monster from fanboy kings Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, “Grindhouse” is a full-blooded attempt to summon up a bygone age of cinematic sleaze. Or, to put it more cynically, it’s an exploitation bonanza in which the most effectively exploited element is the marketing concept.

The filmmakers are not just celebrating an idealized notion of movie trash; they mean to simulate the experience of spending a night in a decrepit, sticky-floored movie palace. It’s a tough thing to pull off in the age of the faceless multiplex (suggestively scented scratch-and-sniff cards would have helped), so they pile on winking signifiers of authenticity. This three-hour-plus program includes two feature films, vintage “Our Feature Presentation” title cards and trailers for nonexistent but entirely plausible genre abominations. The movies themselves suffer “missing” reels and are disfigured with scratches and glitches (added, one assumes, with a few clicks of a mouse).

It goes without saying that Tarantino and Rodriguez, favorite sons of the Weinstein Co., have access to resources that were off-limits to the ‘60s and ‘70s schlock merchants they revere: money, technology, stars. The budget of this double feature could have funded literally hundreds of exploitation cheapies back in the day.

Truth be told, the films bear only superficial resemblance to the sordid spectacles that inspired them. Still, setting aside the dubious coherence and suspect nostalgia of the enterprise, “Grindhouse” is a fascinating exercise in genre reinvention, a showcase for two radically different approaches to homage. Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” is a whole-hog pastiche bordering on parody, with a scattershot method perfectly evoked by its most iconic image: one-legged go-go dancer (Rose McGowan) spraying her machine-gun prosthetic at all comers. Tarantino’s exhilarating “Death Proof” combines the sorority slice-and-dice with the automotive bump-and-grind and ends up with something greater and stranger than the sum of its parts.

Rodriguez’s movie pits a hardy band of survivors -- led by McGowan and her diminutive biker beau (Freddy Rodriguez) -- against a multiplying army of the living dead. Drenched in blood geysers and exploding pustules, it’s jokey juvenilia, lurching from one gross-out to another. The smirking disregard for basic narrative coherence gets tiresome, and the unvarying, unrelenting pace suggests Rodriguez misunderstood the assignment: His more-is-more attitude suggests a studio more than a grindhouse mind-set.

“Planet Terror” is especially disappointing given that zombie movies, even at their trashiest, are rarely ever dumb -- if anything, since they basically dramatize the return of the repressed, they often serve as ready-made sociopolitical allegories. Here Rodriguez throws in a biochemical connection and briefly involves the military, but he’s more interested in stomach-turning gags. The recent wave of zombie movies has encompassed a variety of approaches: the paranoid urgency of “28 Days Later,” the stoned humor of “Shaun of the Dead,” the anti-Bush sting of George Romero’s “Land of the Dead” and Joe Dante’s “Homecoming.” Rodriguez’s movie will be remembered as the one with the jar of pickled testicles.

Of the three guest-directed “prevues” that separate the features, Rob Zombie’s Nazi-werewolf faux-trailer features the most brilliantly deranged casting (Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu) and Edgar Wright’s haunted-house montage is the wittiest (to reveal its title would be a spoiler), but the one crying out for a real movie is Eli Roth’s “Thanksgiving” (“This year, there will be no leftovers!”).

After the nonstop frenzy of “Planet Terror,” Tarantino’s “Death Proof” is almost shockingly placid -- at least to begin with. Despite obvious debts to various source texts -- the hypnotic drive-in favorite “Vanishing Point,” the ludicrous sentient-car horror flick “The Car,” countless girls-in-peril slashers -- it’s a film that surprises at almost every turn.

Its structural boldness, though par for the course with Tarantino, sets it apart from standard grindhouse fare. Half of a double bill, “Death Proof” is itself split right down the middle. In each segment, a group of young women encounters Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a maniac in a muscle car. Identical scenario, opposite outcomes.

The first half, set in Austin, Texas, unfolds over the course of a lazy night out with a group of friends (Sydney Tamiia Poitier plays the ringleader). The ambience is cozy and relaxed: Beers are consumed, text messages sent. Shades of menace emerge. The evening ends with a bad case of road rage and a head-on smash-up, startling in its swiftness and brutality.

Tarantino hits the reset button and starts over, in rural Tennessee, with a fresh group of women (among them Rosario Dawson and Zoe Bell, Uma Thurman’s stunt double in “Kill Bill”). Suffice to say the targets are tougher this time.

Simply put, the cartoon grrrl power of the second half redresses -- or, indeed, avenges -- the cartoon misogyny of the first. (You could think of the yin-yang whole as “Kill Mike Vols. 1 and 2.”) In both halves, the spasms of action are preceded by a whole lot of yapping. Tarantino, of course, doesn’t write naturalistic dialogue but strives instead for a poetic strain of trash talk (sometimes just strained). The banter is based on his endearing if odd notion of how female friends converse -- the overall effect is rather like watching a foul-mouthed episode of “Sex and the City” that ends in violence and dismemberment.

If Tarantino’s dialogue becomes tin-eared (as it tends to do when he saddles African American characters with blaxploitation jive), his soundtrack instincts are unerring. From the opening engine rev of Jack Nitzsche’s “The Last Race,” “Death Proof” is scored to a typically unpredictable mix tape of retro obscurities.

The climactic car chase -- as attuned to the psychosexual implications of rear-ending and sideswiping as J.G. Ballard and David Cronenberg’s 1996 “Crash” -- should gain instant membership in the pantheon of vehicular action scenes. Bell performs all her own stunts, clinging to the hood of a speeding, increasingly mangled, Dodge Challenger.

This breathtaking, CGI-free sequence is the most convincing old-school gesture in all the “Grindhouse” package -- an implicit rebuke to the cheesy effects in Rodriguez’s splatter fest. Straightforward as it seems, “Death Proof” is one of Tarantino’s most peculiar films: at once controlled and indulgent, derivative and unique. In refining the language of homage, this singular filmmaker has made his most original movie since “Pulp Fiction.”

*

“Grindhouse.” MPAA rating: R for strong graphic, bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, some sexuality, nudity and drug use. Running time: 3 hours, 11 minutes. In general release.