Answer This: How Good Can a Bad Film Be

Even with a running time of three hours and 11 minutes, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s "Grindhouse" is less a movie than an evocation. With it, the two attempt to re-create the energy (and bad taste) of ’70s B-movies. "Grindhouse" is their tribute to trash: blaxsploitation, sexploitation, slasher and the rest of the bottom drawer.

In Tarantino and Rodriguez’s world, there’s no such thing as a multiplex: no 16-screens, no air-conditioning, and certainly no soda served in cups the size of trash cans. The two are stuck in the grindhouse — the film’s reference to dirty, decrepit theaters you used to find in Times Square and the worst parts of L.A. Moviegoers over the age of 40 may recall the kind: The projectionist is a pervert; the man sitting next to you is drunk; and the stain on your seat? The less said, the better.

Obsessiveness is never far. The details are exact, which is to say, tasteless. To evoke the graininess of low-budget filmmaking, the directors resort to present day tricks. The scratches and cigarette burns that appear from time to time to add "texture" to the film stock were rendered expensively — with the assistance of a computer.

Just how serious are these guys, anyway?

As serious as a $50-million budget will make them. Invoking the Saturday double features of lore, "Grindhouse" is not one but two movies, first a zombie film by Rodriguez, then a car-chase thriller by Tarantino. In between run previews for imaginary movies, among them, Rob Zombie’s latest contribution to cinema, "Werewolf Women of the SS."

In Rodriguez’s case, capturing the energy of a bad movie is indistinguishable from actually making a bad movie. His contribution, "Planet Terror," plays like a film student’s thesis on "Night of the Living Dead." After an opening scene in which a man loses his testicles to a mad scientist’s sheers, "Planet Terror" proceeds through a series of beheadings and explosions. The plot is sloppy, deliberately so. After a cloud of toxins is released onto a small Texas town, the inhabitants begin turning into zombies. First, their tongues swell. Then, their eyes explode. Finally, their faces turn to pustules, bubbling like a science project made with baking soda. At some point, Bruce Willis shows up as a crazed army colonel.

Throughout, the element of a put-on prevails. How else to explain the suffering of Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), the film’s go-go dancing hero? After she loses her leg to a zombie, Cherry’s boyfriend replaces the appendage with an M-60. Cherry takes it in stride. Hobbling on one leg, she uses the other to machine gun the enemy. This, at least, settles the old question for filmmakers whose taste runs to trash. To make a good bad movie, you have to be able to make a good one, too.

Though it receives second-billing, Taraninto’s "Deathproof" is the far better of the two. A tribute to car chase movies of the 1970s — the semi-classic "White Lines" is referenced repeatedly — "Deathproof" rises above quotation. The movie opens with three women (Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Sydney Poitier) as they drive through Austin. The atmosphere is generous, profane. Tarantino has always had a thing for women who curse, and the talk among the three runs mostly to sex. It’s a lull. Arriving at the bar, they’re introduced to a local character, Stuntman Mike, a relic from old TV shows. Stuntman Mike has the advantage of being played by Kurt Russell, a B-movie charmer with a voice that sounds like tires over gravel.

Too bad he’s also a killer. Leaving for the night, the three are ambushed on the road by Stuntman, who arrives in the dark like a horseman of the apocalypse in his 1971 Chevy Nova. Tarantino — who never quite got out of the back room of the video store — is fascinated by the crash. When Russell smashes his car into theirs, the scene is slowed down to a crawl, then replayed four times from four different angles. Somewhere, a leg is severed like a suburban teen’s fantasy of "Death on Dead Man’s Curve."

In the next scene, we’re introduced to three other women (Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, Zoë Bell), first seen from the window of Stuntman Mike’s car, now in a 1970 Dodge Challenger. For a moment, it looks as though Tarantino is about to direct another massacre. Instead, a thrilling chase ensues. The elements are spare: two muscle cars; one tobacco road. If I’m not mistaken, I could smell the unleaded diesel, heavy and poisonous. Finally, in a moment unembelished by special effects or the weightlessness of a big budget, Tarantino reminds us of how good, bad films can be.