PLANET TERROR (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

I remembered enjoying Robert Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR pretty well when I viewed it as part of the GRINDHOUSE ensemble-feature, but for the past fifteen years I was never tempted to pull out my copy of the film and re-watch it on the small screen. Now, having watched TERROR on streaming (along with Rodriguez's faux-commercial for MACHETE, which spawned a real two-film series). And now, without seeing TERROR as part of the whole love-letter both Rodriguez and Tarantino wrote to seventies exploitation movies, this overbaked zombie flick has little more than gore effects to recommend it.

To be sure, zombie movies weren't a huge part of the seventies movie culture, but took fire more in the eighties in response to George Romero's big-budget zom-com DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1978. Of course it could be argued that the seventies were also the decade in which American filmmakers began making greater use of advances in makeup-appliances, and TERROR is replete with lots and lots of melting faces and whatnot. TERROR also resembles certain seventies sexploitation films in having a large ensemble of characters who each have separate story-lines that may or may not be brought together by some common peril.

I found that though I'd been able to disregard Rodriguez's flat characters in my first viewing of TERROR, they were far less interesting this time around. Some of them are not meant to be anything more than comic relief, like a barbecue chef who keeps telling his sheriff-brother he'll never give up his special barbecue recipe. I didn't expect much of those minor characters. But I found myself profoundly bored with the acrimonious relationship of the dysfunctional married couple, played by Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton. All we know is that Shelton's character wants to leave Brolin's character because he's some sort of violent control freak. But the wife is also a bisexual who apparently committed to the male doctor and had a child by him, and who plans to leave her husband for a former female lover. What then made Shelton commit to Brolin the first time? Rodriguez's script is too insubstantial even to give a hint.

The central relationship, though, is that of a mysterious gunman, El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and his former girlfriend, go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan). Rodriguez at least built up the failure of their relationship somewhat better than he did with the dysfunctional couple, but here too there are missing details that get plowed under as the zombie apocalypse begins, after which El and Cherry are forced to flee the brain-eaters and form a caravan of other fugitives.

Even less interesting are the schemers who created the apocalypse, bioengineer Doctor Abbington (Naveen Andrews) and rogue military man Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis). Muldoon still commands a presumably illegal operation oriented on recovering the chemical that unleashes the zombie plague. But since the plague is in the process of dooming the civilized world, Muldoon's activities don't have much resonance. At one point the detachment captures Cherry and some other women, and two soldiers, one played by Quentin Tarantino, attempt to rape Cherry. The best thing one can say about Tarantino's performance is that he's intending to place a one-dimensional scumbag, and so, aside from one very corny line, he accomplishes his task.

Since El Wray is so vague as to become inert, the only strong persona is that of Cherry Darling. Unlike the others, her character arc gets substantial development within the context of an exploitation film. When the film starts, she's a dancer disenchanted with her profession, and she even considers trying to branch out as a standup comedian. A zombie assault changes all of Cherry's plans, as one undead freak rips off the dancer's left leg. El Wray improvises to give her an artificial limb, first consisting of a table leg, and later, a machine gun. The image of a go-go dancer who can shoot enemies with her artificial gun-leg is the only part of TERROR that equals the most delirious of seventies exploitation cinema, and to my knowledge McGowan has never given a more three-dimensional performance.

I don't take  most of the sexual politics of TERROR seriously, though one could argue that all the "heroic bloodshed" is meant to escape the usual masculine priorities so as to pull in a feminine sensibility. But even speaking as a viewer who was never big on zombie-films, I think a lot of the zom-stomping becomes routine and therefore dull. And so I think it's unlikely I'll ever give TERROR another full viewing, be it in fifteen years or fifty.

Note: TERROR is a very minor crossover film in that it recycles Michael Parks' "Earl MacGraw" character from Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TO DAWN.