Tarantino Week: Revisiting ‘Death Proof’

Two tons of metal, 200 miles an hour, flesh and bone and plain old Newton… they all princess died.

It’s almost unfair that most people (in the US, anyway) who saw ‘Death Proof’ in the theater had to sit through the barrage of mayhem and massacre that was ‘Planet Terror’ beforehand.  Not to say that Robert Rodriguez’s half of ‘Grindhouse’ is bad, but it’s easy to see why so many people were disappointed in Quentin Tarantino’s half of the entire film.  ‘Death Proof’ served as a bit of a comedown after the left and right pummelling of Rodriguez’s movie.  In fact, ‘Death Proof’ itself is like two movies under one roof.  The first half is incredibly dialogue heavy, and, if you’re not a lover of Tarantino’s brand of dialogue, you might be turned off before the whole thing gets going, before the engines begin to rev up for the second half.

It’s just one more instance in Tarantino’s career as a filmmaker that he looks at the rules of movie making and says “To hell with that.”  The first half of ‘Death Proof’ follows three women, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, and Sydney Tamiia Poitier.  Like ‘Jackie Brown,’ this half takes its time establishing these three women.  We follow them as they go about their evening, preparing themselves for heading out to a lake house for some weekend partying.  Little do they know a psychopath is stalking them.  When they first meet Stuntman Mike Mikke, played by Kurt Russell, they just think he’s creepy but nothing too harmful and nothing they should concern themselves with.  Over the course of the night, Stuntman Mike maneuvers his way into their good graces, even convincing one of the girls, Ferlito, into giving him a lapdance.  In keeping with the Grindhouse style of the whole experience, Tarantino gladly hacked this scene out of the finished version, as if some, horny projectionist had spliced it out for his own collection.  Needless to say, the night doesn’t end well for any of these girls.

If you haven’t seen ‘Death Proof,’ it’s probably a pretty good idea you not play this video.

Like with so many of the genres he has tackled, Tarantino takes the modern slasher and turns it on its ear.  ‘Death Proof’ is unlike any slasher film we have ever seen, setting up a first act that makes you believe the remainder of the film is going to be about this killer working his way through one group of helpless victims.  Fortunately for us, we are dealing with a filmmaker who has no intentions of running along the rails.  Therefore, what we are given is a film in two halves, the first of which is a slasher movie where there are no survivors from the clutches of the villainous killer.

The second half of ‘Death Proof’ is a whole other matter.  It takes place 14 months after the events of the first half, and Stuntman Mike has moved on to a whole new cropping of women to victimize.  This time around, he sets his sights on a group of women working on a local film crew.  Among these women is stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who plays herself here.  The others in the group are Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thomas, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.  The group of girls, at the behest of Bell, go to look into test-driving a white, 1970 Dodge Challenger, just like the one Kowalski drives in ‘Vanishing Point.’  After getting the car out on the road, Bell unveils her true plan.  She wants to play a game called Ship’s Mast, in which she ties herself to the hood and someone else drives at top speeds.  It isn’t long after they begin playing that Stuntman Mike takes the opportunity to try to run the women off the road.

The culminating car chase is arguably one of the greatest car chases ever put to film.  Tarantino was never impressed by car chase sequences that utilized CGI.  He felt the last, great car chase sequence came from ‘Terminator 2,’ and, as such, he filmed his car chase without the usage of computer special effects and without speeding up the film.  He wanted to make a car chase that he could “feel in his stomach,” like the ones found in ‘Vanishing Point,’ ‘Dirty Mary Crazy Larry,’ and the original ‘Gone in 60 Seconds.’  Like those films, ‘Death Proof’ wasn’t simply a film that had a car chase somewhere within it.  The car chase was a part of the film, it became a part of why the film is so memorable, and the way it is devised and executed is breathtaking.  When the cars smash into one another, you can almost feel the metal hitting metal.  I’ll be the first to admit I enjoyed the shit out of the car chase in ‘Matrix Reloaded,’ but the way that car chase was shot and the usage of CG just made it all feel plastic.  ‘Death Proof’ is hardcore steel through and through, and you notice the weight of the objects flying down the road in excess of 100 miles per hour.  This chase scene and the delicate way Tarantino wanted to handle it is also, more than likely, the reason the director served as his own director of photography for the first time in his career.  With full control on what was being shot, he could pin-point every, little detail that made the car chase found in ‘Death Proof’ work so well.

But car chase and amazing stunts aside, there is so much more working under the head, if you’ll excuse a pun, in ‘Death Proof.’  Back to the dialogue, it is undeniably Tarantino, and, just as he does with all of his films, he has chosen actors and actresses who can sing those lines of dialogue.  It’s not kitschy and quirky like something you might find in a film written by Diablo Cody, although that isn’t all bad either, but there’s a rhythmic way Tarantino’s converse with one another that you just don’t find anywhere else.  Some of the lines are monologues, some of them are redundant, and some are just, plain cool, but you know once someone says a line of dialogue Tarantino is proud to have written down.

It was a stroke of genius for Tarantino to hire Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike.  Russell wasn’t Tarantino’s first choice, though.  Actors like John Travolta, Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich and Sylvester Stallone were all considered.  None of them worked out due to prior commitments.  Even Kal Penn was approached at one point to star in the film.  However, Tarantino knew how much of a badass Russell was in his early career.  The films Russell collaborated with John Carpenter were enough to make Tarantino hand over the reigns of Stuntman Mike to him, and Russell does not disappoint one bit.  There are so many, different aspects Russell has to pull off in his performance of Stuntman Mike.  At one point, he has to be cool, but not too cool to overpower any amount of creepiness the character might need to convey.  Late in the film, he has to turn the character in a completely new direction, as the second set of would be victims turn their sights back on their attacker.  For the last, few moments of the film, alone, Russell deserved awards for his performance in ‘Death Proof.’

The film, as with all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, has a booming soundtrack full of eclectic and lost greats.  Tracks like “Paranoi Prima” by Ennio Morricone and “Jeepster” by T. Rex bring the full force of the film’s badass potential to a head.  But it’s the end track, the song that would cap off the entire evening for those who attended the full ‘Grindhouse’ experience, that really sticks with you.  April March’s “Chick Habit” is not only an incredibly inspired choice for the end of ‘Death Proof,’ it is a song that commands your attention.  It is also a song that you will not get out of your head anytime soon.

As part of the three-hour-plus ‘Grindhouse,’ ‘Death Proof’ didn’t generate much box office buzz.  ‘Grindhouse’ cost the Weinstein Company a total of $67 million, and it only made about $25 million back.  Of that $25 million, there is no telling the amount of people who even stuck around for ‘Death Proof.’  Many people, after ‘Planet Terror’ and the fake trailers that ran between the two films, got up and left, not being able to handle the cumbersome running time of seeing two features in one evening.  Internatinoally, ‘Death Proof’ was released by itself, just as ‘Planet Terror’ was.  27 minutes were put back in to the film, scenes that included the “lap dance” sequence taken out for effect in the ‘Grindhouse’ double feature.

While it ended up being a box office failure, and while many consider ‘Death Proof’ to be Tarantino’s first step towards his decline as a filmmaker, it remains, for me, anyway, as a true Quentin Tarantino film.  It has all the essential parts that make a Tarantino film so recognizable, measured and seasoned dialogue, beautifully crafted sequences of extreme violence, and a complete thumbing of the nose to modern, filmmaking convention.  It is Tarantino’s passion for film that drive him, and each of his films are his answer to a love he has for that particular genre.  While ‘Death Proof’ might be considered his version of a grindhouse movie, his version of a B-movie that is a long way from high art, it is still no less remarkable in its conception or execution than any of Quentin Tarantino’s other films.