Death Proof

Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film follows a stunt driver who uses his car as a weapon and splits into two halves on nearly the same template. It reached cinemas on 6 April 2007 as half of Grindhouse, paired with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. That double bill took about 25 million dollars in North America against a 67 million dollar budget, so Death Proof was pulled out and released abroad alone in a longer cut. The clearest difference between the versions is the lap dance: the Grindhouse print replaces it with a missing reel card; the standalone version restores it. The long cut competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007. Zoë Bell appears as herself, under her own name, having doubled Uma Thurman on Kill Bill. She performs the hood ride herself, gripping belts strapped to the doors, and describes it plainly: no double, no CGI, all practical. The second chase took six weeks to yield some twenty minutes of film. Tarantino is credited as his own cinematographer. At a directors roundtable in 2012 he called this his worst film. A good fit if you accept the first half sitting at a bar table almost throughout so the second half can invert the same setup. Not for anyone who reads the deliberately scratched, jumping, degraded image as a fault.