ou never know where the day will take you with a grindhouse movie. At a whopping three-plus hours, this current Grindhouse is Quentin Tarantino's co-production with longtime creative partner Robert Rodriguez, as each wrote and directed a full-length film and asked industry friends like Eli Roth (Hostel) and Edgar Wright to offer up interstitial trailers – for fictional upcoming movies like Machete, Thanksgiving and Werewolf Women of the S.S… and Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu! – in order to capture the B-movie theatre experience.

The film's name comes from the period when theaters would grind out non-stop low-budget movies - violent action films, badly-dubbed kung fu movies, babes-and-bullets flicks - made on the cheap shown back to back, from the morning until the projectors shut down at 2 a.m. Rodriguez and Tarantino happen to be big fans of the schlock genre.

This Grindhouse is comprised of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof. Of the two, Death Proof is closer to the spirit of the grindhouse flick, but it is Planet Terror that kicks things off with a bang: a plague spreads through a small Texas town, turning people into blood-spewing, zombie-like predators.

William (Josh Brolin) and Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) are husband-and-wife doctors trying to fight off a spreading infection at a hospital. Meanwhile, a gang of vigilantes tries to take back the town, led by Freddy Rodriguez as a gunslinger known as El Wray and Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) a go-go dancer who loses a leg and gets a machine gun – of which she manages to fire without having to pull a trigger - in its place.