Grindhouse may be better remembered for the films that weren't in it—the fake trailers complementing its 1970s double-feature gimmick—than for the films that actually were. As for the features themselves, the lions' share of attention went to Quentin Tarantino's stripped-down stunt thriller Death Proof, instead of the enormously entertaining Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's delightful paean to B zombie movies.
Rodriguez's half of the Grindhouse project more than stands up to Tarantino's Death Proof; in fact, this ultra-squelchy zombie movie is considerably more entertaining, and keeps much better faith with the exploitation genre it's supposedly emulating.
Planet Terror aims for big spectacle and retro silliness... It’s colourful, fun and stylishly designed, but the tone is all over the place. Is Rodriguez spoofing cheapjack flicks (and why bother spoofing something that’s bad in the first place?) or trying to make a proper film?
Where Tarantino’s [Death Proof] was, for better or worse, a formal variation on several genre themes, this is a straightforward zombie pastiche... Gross, grimy, occasionally funny but not terribly satisfying.
The cast slips into many of the beloved stereotypes familiar from grindhouse fodder, but it's filmed with a gritty grandeur and technical brio that makes it worth watching even for non aficionados of sleaze.