Following Wednesday’s abortion-themed blog, today I’d like to open a debate on which is the best religion….
….kidding. No, today I’m going to talk tat (no change there then, everyone cries).
Death Proof? Schmeath Proof. Planet Terror? Whatever. If you want a true, old-school grindhouse experience, watch the new Rambo. I have. It’s ace. It’s also rubbish. It’s ace rubbish, the kind of guilty pleasure that makes you want to walk straight from the stalls to the nearest confessional.
Don’t get me wrong – I lapped up the QT/RR sleaze-tribute project, both individually and as a double-bill. But it felt a bit… cosy. Playful. Affectionate. Knowing.
Rambo is none of these things. It’s exploitation in the dodgiest sense of the word, using real-life human horror (genocide in Burma) as a springboard for its cheap thrills. And they /are/ a bit cheap; where the Grindhouse movies betrayed the 70s shoestring ethos by utilising state-of-the-art CG, you can often see the joins in Rambo’s FX.
Death Proof and Planet Terror were both in on the joke; you laugh /at/ Rambo, not with it. Like the truest kitsch, the film’s camp as hell but doesn’t know it. Ok, there is some degree of self-awareness. As the Machete-esque trailer puts it, “You KNOW his name… You KNOW what he’s capable of!” Stallone KNOWS what his audience expects, and rubs their faces right in it, with all his crude, manipulative might.
The crowd I caught it with last week were the bloodthirstiest bunch I’ve ever seen in a cinema. (The hour of free boozing prior to the 9pm start might’ve had something to do with it…) They whooped every severed limb, cheered every exploding skull, went nuts whenever John J drew back his bow. When one of the bleeding-heart liberal pantywaists Rambo escorts up river mewled, “It’s never right to take a life”, someone down the front hollered back “Fuck you, asshole!” Like Stallone, that guy (was he from the Daily Mail?) was standing in a moral minefield, but he did kinda capture the disreputable, down-and-dirty, regret-it-in-the-morning spirit of the occasion. Pure grindhouse…
