Planet Terror is an unsung masterpiece. Made by Robert Rodriguez it was originally released as a double feature with Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Planet Terror was by far the better of the two.

Things start with a shady scientist trying to sell some type of military gas to a group of soldiers only for things to go utterly wrong. First his henchmen allow some people exposed to the gas to escape. Then the soldiers demand their gas only to get into a shoot out with the scientist. During the gun battle the gas is released into the atmosphere which leads to the all the surrounding people to be infected. They go around attacking and eating people ala zombies although they are not quite the living dead. In the middle of things Wray played by Freddy Rodriguez and Cherry Darling played by Rose McGowan collect together a rag tag group of survivors attempting to escape the chaos.

The movie really captures the best of old 70s B-movies. There’s real sexiness to the female characters without the gratuitous nudity. There’s all kinds of action, gun battles, blood and guts, and monsters galore. The movie never takes itself seriously either which adds another great element. For example Cherry loses her leg and gets it replaced by a M16! What more could you ask for.

I love this movie. It's a trip back to my drive-in theater days. The sound of the crappy metal speaker hanging from daddy's side of the wood panel station wagon. Playing on the playground equipment while the sun set. Theater popcorn, jammies, blankets, asleep before the second reel of the John Wayne western, or war movie. Mostly westerns. PLANET TERROR boasts perfect casting. Love the creativity in the story, like Marley Shelton having numbed hands, then broken wrists, starting her car with her teeth. This is the kind of stuff that makes it better than the genres it mocks, because it really does develop a story and really does have excellent production values. I love how quickly he accepts Cherry without a leg, as if to say, "So what? That's nothing. Let's go!" The movie sets out to be campy fun and it succeeds.

Robert Rodriguez is known for making fun, fast films, and this one works.

Part of the Grindhouse double feature with Tarantino's DEATHPROOF car movie, PLANET TERROR has zombies, an Army conspiracy, and enough horror movie soap opera elements (the cheating/escaping wife, the suspicious husband) to keep things moving when the green fog isn't converting people to the cause. Worth a few bucks for a night's viewing, plus you're supporting Rodriguez's brand of storytelling, which is always a good thing.

"Grindhouse" is a double-feature, in which one film, "Deathproof," was directed by Quentin Tarantino and the other, "Planet Terror," was directed by collaborator Robert Rodriguez. What I love about both films is the way they capture the B-moviegoing experience of the 1970s, with cheesy-looking "Coming Attractions" and "Feature Film" titles (both exactly duplicating the titles of the time), as well as the graininess, color fluctuations, grating electronic score, and rough film splices that I recall from my adolescence. The plot? Oh yeah. A bunch of small-town denizens battle zombies and military types when there is a major leak at a nearby chemical warfare plant. While retro in its appearance, the film is set in the new millennium, replete with cell phones. Wonderful melodramatic characters, but especially look for Josh Brolin as a vengeful doctor and of course Rose McGowan as the stripper heroine with the machine-gun leg.

One of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen. First note, it's an adult movie, so be cautious around kids. Second, if you want a zombie movie but a little different, I'd recommend this. I watch this over and over. Robert Rodriguez was at his best in my opinion. Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez were good and killed the zombies! The DVD works great!

You know Hollywood has probably gone too far when film-makers consciously set out to make bad films. Or at least "so-bad-it's-good" films.

In this case action director Robert Rodriguez of Sin City and Desperado fame and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) sought to replicate the whole "grindhouse" cinema effect with a movie called... drum roll please... Grindhouse.

Grindhouses were cheap cinemas in the 1970s which showed B-rate exploitation flicks all day long -- usually in the form of double bills.

Grindhouse (the movie) consisted of a "double bill" of two movies, namely Death Proof and Planet Terror. The cinema prints of both movies were deliberately "aged" with scratches, faded colors and so forth to replicate the whole watching a battered print at a grindhouse cinema effect. Planet Terror actually has a faux trailer before the movie itself starts (it is quite funny and very reminiscent of those 1970's action flicks) for a fictional movie titled Machete.

It even has a deliberately "missing reel," letting the audience fill in the dots between scenes themselves. The DVD, by the way, goes one step further: you can select an audio track that replicates the cinema experience - you can hear an audience jeering and a guy eating pop corn in the seat next to you.

Death Proof starred Kurt Russell as a serial killer who drives a 1970s muscle car and targeted young women -- that is, until a group of them fights back.

In Planet Terror -- Rodriguez's flick -- cannibalistic zombies overrun a small town when a top secret virus is set loose at the nearby military base. The gore and violence is way over the top with some scenes directly stealing from movies such as The Thing, Evil Dead and Total Recall.

The most notable image from the movie is of a sexy Rose McGowan as an amputee with a machine gun as a prosthetic. Sensitive viewers should take care to avoid it. It stars several Rodriguez regulars and Bruce Willis in a small cameo. Watching it is like watching some forgotten straight-to-video effort from the early 1980's -- Highly stylized and reminiscent of B-movies from that era, the color palettes are often a sickly green with a dated synth music score (of the sort Carpenter's films were noted for) on the soundtrack. Its like watching a movie you have never seen before, but feeling as if you had, but can't remember when.

Cinema audiences however never got the joke as the whole "grindhouse" experience was as alien to today's young teenaged audiences that frequent today's multiplexes as were the concept of a drive-in.

There were many incidents of audience members not realizing that the movie consisted of a double bill and leaving the cinemas before the second feature started. Cinema owners weren't too happy at the film's long running time either and didn't go to any trouble to keep the movie running when the film proved to be a box office disappointment.

For the non-US. market (as well as the DVD release) it was thus decided to market and release the two movies separately. Thus with padded running times Death Proof and now Planet Terror are released as separate movies. All that remains of the whole "grindhouse" title is the "Grindhouse presents" moniker.

Back when Grindhouse was released as one feature in the cinemas director Tarantino remarked on the film's odd concept that audiences were desperate for something fresh, new and different. It would seems that he was wrong as Grindhouse proved to be a major box office disappointment. Or was he? Perhaps this was a film that proved to be too creative for its target audience, in this day and age of high tech video games, and instant gratification movies that have to 'dumb themselves down' so audiences 'get it'. I think this was a film that the target audience needed to be kids - if not teens back in the late sixties, early seventies to appreciate what had just been viewed.

THE DISC: The movie plus audio commentaries are to be found on the first disc. As stated previously, the film print has been deliberately aged to look much older than it is with all kinds of scratches, splotches, color fades and the like.

The second disc is filled with behind-the-scenes making of featurettes and interviews with the various actors and creative people involved. Unfortunately no time is spent on explaining the whole "grindhouse" phenomenon and inspiration to any newbies. But it is interesting -- and ironic! -- to see how 2000's high-tech computer technology is used to replicate a low-tech early 1980's B-grade look and feel to the movie.

RECOMMENDATION: Worth a look-see, particularly if you miss those genuine early 1980's B-grade straight-to-video efforts from that era's home video boom, and want to take a trip back to a time when movies were what they were - enjoyable, smart, and full of effort.

Despite the homogeneous nature of cinema, I keep going to the movie theater. Largely, it's because of dudes like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Taratino, both of whom go their own way and offer up something that's so distinctively theirs that their names have become name brands for a certain type of film. When they collaborated on GRINDHOUSE, I knew it was gonna be something outrageous and offbeat, something decidedly unhomogeneous. With fanboy nudges and winks galore, these two maverick directors take us back to 1970s shlock with their gleefully offensive homage. In its sheer excess and blatantly hokey sensibilities, their efforts pull no punches. The audience is treated to crass, old school sensationalism, incidental nudity, fake-looking geysers of blood, and rampant and visceral disembowelment. I loved the hell out of it. In their simulation of that grungy sensation one feels when in them cruddy, shady theaters of old, Rodriguez and Tarantino willfully insert scratches on the print, projector miscues, sound goofs, and bad dubbing. We even have title cards apologizing for missing reels, which occur in the most inconvenient of times. My neighbor, who is old as dirt and had also frequented this film, remarked that that exactly was what it was like when he attended those low-rent, B-movie playhouses of yesteryear. I realize that this DVD only has PLANET TERROR, but I'm stubborn enough to not split the two films. I'll be mentioning both as watching them back-to-back in the theater enriched my original viewing experience. The double-feature bill trots out Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR and Tarantino's DEATH PROOF. Let's start with PLANET TERROR or, as I like to call it, Rodriguez's cheesily apocalyptic PLANET TERROR.

THE film title alone is reminiscent of many of those old time, sci-fi/horror B-movies. The plot centers around a mass zombie attack. We witness humanity's last stand as embodied by a one-legged go-go dancer (played with jaded brusqueness by Rose McGowan), her inexplicably lethal boyfriend (Freddie Rodriguez), an adulterous, needles-touting nurse, and a few others. It's a cup overflowing with campy dialogue and over-the-top, hilariously staged horror and action sequences. It also offers up a print that is marvelously grimy and grainy, and Rodriguez himself comes up with a pretty effective John Carpenter-like synthetic score which helps to drive the storyline. By the way, creature make-up artist Tom Savini gets a bit part here as he plays a digit-less deputy, while Naveen Andrews is great fun to watch as a testic1es-collecting bio-engineer. Fun, fun, fun.

The second billing is Tarantino's very talky DEATH PROOF, which is a callback to films such as VANISHING POINT, DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY, and the original GONE IN 60 SECONDS (all of which are referenced in this flick). And, if anyone's seen the 1965 flick FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! then DEATH PROOF will strike a certain familiarity. Kurt Russell does a deliciously villainous turn as the scarred Stuntman Mike who applies his death-proofed vehicle to do away with gorgeous females. But he makes the worst mistake of his life when he picks on fellow stuntperson Zoe Bell (who doubled for Uma Thurman in KILL BILL and who, here, plays herself).

With respect to the very natural Zoe Bell and her awesome ship's mast stunt, to me, the one to watch is Sydney Poitier (yes, it's his daughter) who plays the casually sexy Jungle Julia, she of the ravishing feet. Meanwhile, Rosario Dawson again can't help but sizzle on screen, while the very pouty-lipped Vanessa Ferlito... pouts her lips. If you're into extended dialogue which bears that distinctive Tarantino flourish, then the first half of this film is right up your alley because it's all significantly verbal and catered to the gentler sex - "gentler" being qualified here in that f-bombs are dropped with relished abandon. However, if you're an action fan, just wait 'til the second half because, then, Tarantino not only pulls out the stop signs, he smashes you in the mouth with 'em.

I have to mention the quartet of coming attraction trailers which ran in the theater. They ranged from the hilarious (MACHETE - "He just f***ed with the wrong Mexican!") to cliched shlock (DON'T and WEREWOLF WOMEN OF THE SS) to vaguely disturbing (I don't even want to know what was going on in Eli Roth's THANKSGIVING). MACHETE's faux trailer was so outrageous that it inspired an actual motion picture. There's also an ad for some kind of Tex-Mex restaurant with dubious shots of its menu samples, which made me queasy just looking at 'em.

Rodriguez and Tarantino, in their celebation of exploitation films, inject GRINDHOUSE with their exuberance and subversive humor and their love for shlocky cinema. By doing so, they elevate this film tiers above the basement genre of their intended tribute. Their gifts for crafting cinematic icons are again on display as Cherry Darling, Stuntman Mike, and Zoe Bell - à la the Bride or El Mariachi - have become film cult figures. At three hours long, yeah, my bum did fall asleep, but it's a small price to pay to gain admittance into blissfully trashy paradise.

It was a throwback to the old horror movies but it went with the dumb style instead of the this is almost believable style. Yet the plot and special effects worked but much of the casting was a letdown. Rose McGowan is just terrible and even hard to look at plus Willis seems like he’s only in it to smirk because he’s not doing anything else. It was worth a watch but the potential was much less than the execution.