Well, me and the wife caught this at a matinee yesterday afternoon. As with Kill Bill, I have to say, Yes yes yes - I get it. I get it already. The over the top sleaze, the scratchy old prints, the missing reels, the B-list actors turning up in both halves of a double feature (and in some of the trailers). This is what happens when film directors skip Film School and spend their formative years working in video stores seeing every piece of crap on the shelves as 'gold in the rough'.
The trailers were hilarious, Werewolf Women of the SS, Don't, Machete, etc, but most of the double feature was pure tedium. Rodriguez's 'Planet Terror' had a few moments here and there but was so over-the-top with the splattering violence that it became tiresome to watch. Don't these guys remember the fact that those old movies they are paying homage to, almost always promised a lot more than they delivered? I almost would have prefered that Planet Terror were one of the trailers and we got to see 'Machete' instead.
Tarantino's 'Death Proof' is what I came for, and it also nearly drove me out of the theater, not from the violence, but from the sheer boredom of the first 20 minutes of the film. But once it started revving its engines, it was worth the wait. A fun classic car demolition fest that makes the 3 hour torture worth it.