No... It's Your Car...

I eventually got round to watching Death Proof and it really was a rather strange film. If you hadn't guessed so far, I'm a big Tarantino fan and so was expecting great things. Better things even than from Rodriguez's other half of Grindhouse. Which was ambitious considering that Planet Terror had appealled to me more and really had surpassed my expectations.

Death Proof's first appeal is Kurt Russell of Escape From New York fame. The second appeal for guys (or girls who possess a particular world view) is the numerous females who spend the film either drinking, talking, driving cars very fast or dying in unfortunate ways. Don't be mislead though. We're not talking another Hostel here. The dying seems to be an unfortunate conclusion that stems from the rest of the events. Tarantino really does seem more concerned with the character development rather than advancing the story. It seemed like hours spent watching the girls hang around a bar, only to be knocked off in five minutes. After the first group of girls, a second group is introduced with the so brilliant sub-title 'Two Months Later'. It's only inventive directing and blatant references to previous Tarantino films that kept me watching, which was made especially hard to do due to the (apparently deliberate) similarities between the previous group of guy obsessed girls and the new group of guy obsessed girls. And the conclusion of this second segment left very little to the imagination. I don't want to give anything away, but put it this way, it seems like Mr Tarantino just didn't know where he was going with this film and so decided to have a finish that would be most jaring the the audience. The ending was sudden, oddly filmed and left loose ends hanging somewhere above Australia.

There. Are you happy Quentin? You made me write my first negative review. This is a whole new can of worms...