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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Quentin Tarantino's 2007 film Death Proof is considered the only bad movie written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. For the uninitiated the film seems like a boring film where 90% of the time nothing happens. And for those who know Tarantino it feels like Tarantino is trying too hard to flex his dialogue muscle while forgetting to tell an actual story.

In the basic sense the film has 2 big chapters, each starting with a group of young women hanging out and having a good time, until at the very end of each of the chapters something violent happens to this group. That's basically all of it.

For almost an hour you watch people talk and talk and keep talking and then BAM! something happens briefly. And then again, for about an hour people talk and talk and keep talking until BAM! another something happens. The end.

When I saw it for the first time it felt kind of like a chore to sit through, and for most of you, if you want a cool, exiting movie to watch, it would also feel like a chore.

But re-watching it now, knowing what Tarantino was, in my opinion, doing here and paying much closer attention, I can tell you, the movie fucking rocks! It is an action cinema masterpiece.

Being a part of Grindhouse ( a double feature project of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof ) this movie is technically a parody picture of 70s exploitation films. It is shot in a very dirty style, with a lot of film scratch marks and some strange editing choices. It plays almost like an old school horror film from the 70s.

Tarantino even casts a very powerful horror director Eli Roth ( and himself ) in the first chapter of the film, which is more obviously a horror film. The second half is more of an action film.

And then for the second action half, he casts Zoë Bell ( the stunt woman he used in Kill Bill for The Bride ) as herself, doing her own stunts in the film. And those are some insane stunts, by the way.

The idea here is to build the movie to this insane battle of the stuntmen. We learn in the first half that the bad guy serial killer antagonist is one perverted motherfucker called Stuntman Mike ( Kurt Russell ) and he's got a special car that lets him survive car crashes. Which he uses as a weapon.

The first half plays like an old school horror film, building tension around this creepy stalker-type stuntman guy. And Tarantino refuses to pay off this tension, instead creating a whole bunch of situations to keep this tension in the air, until finally he pays it off in the end of the first half, when Russel's character kills his victims using the car.

By the second chapter we already know that this asshole is in fact an asshole and we already learned to hate him. And the next tension builds around the second group of girls. But this time two of those girls are stunt women.

I don't know if we should feel like they have a fighting chance against the Stuntman Mike, but it does build to an eventual standoff between them. Maybe Tarantino uses the sexism of the audience against them here. Like I use the ageism of the audience against them in Moria's Race. We expect another vehicular murder sequence. But then something unexpected happen, and ( spoiler alert ) the girls start to fight back.

As if the entire movie is one big red herring messing with the audience expectations, until in the end Tarantino shows you what he really wanted you to see. A fucking good chase scene, where a group of girls murder a fucking serial killer rapist creep dude.

It's like the movie is specifically trying to make you feel like the girls are hopeless in the first half. And then also makes it specifically a boring and slow chore to watch, to then explode out of nowhere with absolute insane level of excitement by the end of it.

You can't hear a loud noise if everything is always loud. You need there to be silence before it is loud, for it to be loud. There should be this contrast. And Tarantino is deliberately making this very contrast by making a boring and kind of depressing movie for the majority of it, to then completely flip it around and surprise you with the most insane chase scene he could ever pull off by the end. The whole tone shifts so rapidly and so in your face that you cannot not enjoy the ending. It is specifically designed to manipulate the fuck out of you, to give you the best fucking time ever.

And yet even though the talking sequences are designed to be boring, there is a lot of very good writing in them, to keep you watching. There is obviously the tension from the Stuntman Mike that is almost immediately established as a creep to be afraid of. And there are a lot of other little nuances, like the lap dance subplot, which is a very cool Tarantino way to make you continue listening to people talk. Or the whole getting a Dodge Challenger from a creepy farm guy subplot, which builds into both Stuntman Mike and the Stuntgirls having unique cars to do their vehicular violence with.

If you know the way Tarantino builds tension, and the way he likes to start quiet and grow into something that suddenly bursts into an explosion of violence. And you are willing to watch that kind of painfully slow burn. This movie fucking rocks as hell. I'm willing to watch it again right now. This is some mastery of tension of some mastery of delayed gratification here.

Explaining the movie in Tarantino terms would be something like this: Instead of Marty jerking us off the whole movie with Taxi Driver, Quentin is lightly touching our cocks, teasing us very slowly with something that might come next. And then in the very end, Quentin just straight up rapes us so hard we cannot stop cumming for half an hour straight!!!

Happy Hacking!!!

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