Planet Terror

Robert Rodriguez did more than direct: he was his own cinematographer, cut it with Ethan Maniquis and wrote the score. Filming was in Austin. It began not as a standalone picture but as half of Grindhouse, the double bill shared with Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof; the 67 million dollar programme took 25.4 million dollars worldwide. The two were then separated and released individually in extended cuts, so the 105 minute version in circulation is not what screened at Grindhouse. The boldest decision is the missing reel: the film says a reel is gone and skips the end of the second act. Rodriguez’s reason: that stretch is the most predictable in any picture. The damage is authored too; in his own DVD lesson he explains aging the print, splicing at every chopping motion, flicking fake blood onto the lens. Tarantino appears briefly as one of the attackers. Marley Shelton’s Dr Dakota Block loses the use of her hands when her husband drives her own anaesthetic syringes into them; the cruelty that lasts longest comes from the marriage, not the zombies. A good fit if you treat a vanished reel as a joke, not a loss, and fill the gap yourself. Not for you if the domestic violence in the Dakota strand cannot sit in the same joking register as the rest.