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.

Planet Terror is indeed a thrill ride, with Rodriguez deliberately scuffing up the print with simulated negative scratches and projector tics (both films are missing frames). Watch out for Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey, Fergie from Black Eyed Peas and Bruce Willis, who appears in an un-credited role as the leader of the evil military unit.

Next up - after an eight-minute "intermission" for three more tasty trailers - is Tarantino's unapologetically low-brow contribution, Death Proof. This one is characteristically wordy, as the director develops his characters by keeping them chattering away for a painfully long time. In fact, it starts off like a female version of his Reservoir Dogs, with four girls talking about sex and drugs, yet doesn't manage to be quite as hip or cool.

When the plot does kick into action, we follow the girls out for a night on the town in Austin, Texas. But things go downhill when Stuntman Mike (an absolutely simmering Kurt Russell as a serial killer who terrorizes women in death-proof his lethal race car) strikes up a conversation with Pam (McGowan again, this time as a blonde). Before long, Pam and a girl crew - Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier) and Shanna (Jordan Ladd) and Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito) - find themselves on a collision course with Stuntman Mike.

This all builds into a ladies' revenge tale in the second half when Mike finds yet another group of girls - actress Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), make-up artist Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), and stuntwomen Zoe (Zoe Bell, best known as Uma Thurman's stunt double in Kill Bill) and Kim (Tracie Thoms) – who decide they want some payback on Stuntman Mike for attempting to ride them off a cliff. We finally end up with a doozy of a car chase that takes up the last part of the second half, and, after all the talking, the pedal-to the-metal is appreciated.

With its endless gore and cartoon-ish action, Planet Terror will be more popular with moviegoers; by contrast, Tarantino gives us copious freeze-frames, vibrant colour schematics and the chick-ogling that emulate drive-in movies. The action itself is some of the most amazing stuff put on film in recent years, with exciting shots of high-octane car chases, none of which were accomplished with an ounce of CGI.

With the superior Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez has paid a fine tribute to the zombie flick of the 60s and 70s that has inspired him, and has ended up with what could be the best script of his filmmaking career.

As a side note: While Canada and the U.S. have the Grindhouse package released as one combined double bill, European distributors will be releasing each picture separately in longer versions. - S.W.