The Danger of Believing Your Own Hype...

One thing we were told repeatedly on my university course (Scriptwriting For Film & TV) is that no one sets out to make a bad film.

It was always my understanding of the "grindhouse" ouevre - the object of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's love letter double-feature (Death Proof and Planet Terror) - that the majority were films that were so bad they were good... or, at least, mildly entertaining, like Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS.

Unfortunately, these once bullet-proof directors seem to have started to take seriously what many of their die-hard fans have been saying: that they can do no wrong.

But, like Tarantino's vanity piece, Planet Terror tries too hard to be bad... and ends up being just that.

Even when it starts to look like things might be picking up, about an hour into the messy nonsense, Tarantino himself turns up on screen for one of his painful cameos and sucks away the final shred of hope I had for this over-the-top film.

Just prior to this I was getting so bored that I turned the DVD off for a refreshment break and for a while considered not bothering to go back to it - something that goes against everything I believe in when it comes to giving films and TV programmes the critical benefit of the doubt. As it turned out, I wonder if I might have been better off going with my earlier gut reaction - that was a long 101 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Sure, there are some smart lines and lots of striking images for the necessarily lurid posters (no one will ever forget Rose McGowan's one-legged go-go dancer with her automatic rifle attachment), but the glue that holds it all together is virtually non-existent.

While the actors are clearly having fun goofing around with a variety of weaponry and gunge, the audience is left to scratch its head and suffer.

What passes for a story is a deal gone sour at an old army base that allows the escape of an experimental biological weapon (Project: Terror) that turns people in a nearby town into puss-dripping, flesh-eating zombie mutants.

Some people are affected but a minority are not. Those that aren't get hold of firearms and shoot those that are.

That's about it.

McGowan is the only thing to recommend this awful mess; although there are plenty of other potentially interesting characters most are teasingly undeveloped.

Freddy Rodriguez is the nominal hero of the film, El Wray, the former boyfriend of McGowan's Cherry Darling; a troublemaker with a mysterious past. His 'secret' is revealed during the film's 'missing reel'... which is actually quite funny and was about the point the movie started to look up.

Bruce Willis is in here as well, picking up his pay cheque as a renegade military man and terrorist leader (although his ultimate goal seems quite vague), while Naveen Andrews (Sayid from Lost) turns up as an Iraqi biochemist to supposedly make some sense of everything.

As with Death Proof, the footage has been doctored to make it look like aged, '70s film stock, with scratches, shakes, colour changes and so on; thankfully this gimmick is used sparingly.

I really wanted to like Planet Terror: every so often all you really is a sick, gruesome horror film with a bevvy of hot babes to turn a frown upside down, but I should have noticed that the only quote the film company could find to put on the front of the DVD box was from The Sunday Sport. Sometimes the clues are staring you in the face!