I have a feeling that if Quentin Tarantino released movies more than every four or five years, he’d have been stripped of his Golden Boy title years ago.

For the three or four of you who don’t know, Tarantino’s latest is a dual (duel?) effort with fellow auteur Robert Rodriguez titled Grindhouse. It’s a provocative title, taken from those grand old grindhouse pictures whose best features were almost invariably their title and their poster art, in that order. An actual grindhouse picture almost always falls short of its promise, but there’s a certain sleazy joy to be gotten from watching the dregs of under-Hollywood.

In small doses, anyway. Past a certain point, crap is crap.

Grindhouse is an experiment for the two directors. They both filmed an original grindhouse picture, put them back to back in classic “double bill” style, and asked some director friends (Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth) to cook up previews for nonexistent grindhouse pictures of their own. The idea was to make trashy movies as good as their posters made them out to be. Rodriguez’s is a zombie apocalypse flick called Planet Terror, and Tarantino’s is a… it’s kind of a car thing with a guy who uses his stunt car to kill women. And some of his would-be victims fight back. That one’s called Death Proof.

Rodriguez really gets into the spirit of things. Planet Terror is fast, crazy, hilarious, and steeped in the kind of logical leaps and disconnects that are hallmarks of any solidly good piece of crap. It’s fun. The blood splatters with joy, too bright and too gooey to be anything but Karo Syrup. The zombies are gross. The women are beautiful. Marley Shelton, with her huge desperate eyes and running mascara, looks like she stepped right off the cover of an E.C. Comic. You know, the one about the woman who kills her husband with an axe. Which is about half of them.

Robert Rodriguez is real hit-or-miss with me. I think about half of his work has promise and the other half completely misses the mark, like he’s just too excited to bother giving us a coherent story or a reason for caring about anything that’s going on on-screen. He got where he is now by doing things his own way (with occasional exceptions; he did The Faculty to secure funding for Spy Kids) and he’s not likely to learn extra discipline any time soon. But I admire his energy, and who can’t get behind a guy who went from subjecting himself to medical tests to fund his movies to doing anything he damn well pleases?

His career hasn’t been frictionless, either. The filmmaking techniques in Sin City are almost certainly responsible for 300, and if you ask me (and I know you did), that seamless blend of human actors and CGI to create literally anything the filmmaker can imagine is a bigger revolution than the introduction of digital. Though my fondness for Sin City has gone cold with time, I can still appreciate what it means for filmmaking.

Tarantino, on the other hand…

Let’s put it this way. Rodriguez took his assignment—“make a grindhouse picture, and make it as good as your poster”—and went balls-out. The crazy logic, the “missing film reel” gag that skips right over all the character development bits and takes us right back into apocalyptic action, the imaginative use of both A- and B-list actors, the scratches in the film, and all that gooey pus-blood. Oh, my god. The man knows how to make you squirm. Planet Terror – and Grindhouse overall – is another interesting landmark on the path of Robert Rodriguez’s career.

Tarantino just makes a Tarantino film with a bad filter.

All the hallmarks are there. There’s the foot fetish thing, with loving shots of some pretty young thing’s bare feet prominently in the foreground. There’s that shot from under a car’s hood when two characters open it up and look inside. (You know the one.) Everyone dresses like it’s 1974, or possibly 1984, regardless of when the story’s supposed to take place. There’s the “talking in the diner” scene, with the steadily rotating camera to take in everyone’s facial expressions. And all the very pretty girls talk, and talk (and talk, and talk, and talk) about muscle car movies and obscure music trivia, so you get the idea this is what little 15 year-old Quentin hoped and dreamed girls talked about.

Seriously, they just talk. Endlessly. After Planet Terror’s slam-bang climax and the trio of gut-bustingly hilarious “prevues” (Wright’s is the best, and he’s in good company), Tarantino gives us four women who ride around in cars and talk. About nothing. About who’s holding. About what one girl (a DJ) said about her friend on the radio that morning. This goes on for approximately 28 hours. In Tarantino’s world, all conversations are fabulously trite and tritely fabulous. In my world, I was tapping my fingers on the armrest, listening to the sound of one writer-director spinning his wheels on-screen because no one has the balls to tell him “stop.”

The girls finally cross Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, finally put to good use as a villain) and he kills them with the aid of his “death proof” stunt car.

Then we start over, with a new set of four girls, who talk, and talk, and talk… and you begin to forget Stuntman Mike is even in this movie. All that needless setup work with the original four girls is nixed in their graphically brutal deaths. And you realize we’re going to have to listen to it all again, with four new girls. By the time we actually get to the payoff, where the four new women duel with Mike on back roads in Texas, you realize with a sinking sensation that Tarantino doesn’t know how to film an exciting car chase. Death Proof ends up being a lot of aimless wandering capped by almost perfunctory action.

Now, it’s true that a lot of actual grindhouse pictures were way too talky for their own good. But that’s not exactly a trait you want to stay faithful to, QT. You very obviously wanted to build this movie around your memorable villain, so why does he only get about 15 minutes of scattered screen time?

A better question: Why did Tarantino and Rodriguez bother making Grindhouse? Both have covered this territory together before, and better, in From Dusk Till Dawn. I suppose Rodriguez wanted to see if he and his buddy could get a double-bill of enjoyable trash into mainstream theaters. It’s a fun challenge for someone like him, and he’s no stranger to collaborative directing projects. Just ask the DGA.

But Tarantino?

I think this is what he’s wanted to do all along. He’s part of that crop of fanboy artists whose greatest ambition in life is faithfully recreating the stuff he dug as a kid, stuff which by now is 30 years old. I won’t get all revisionist and say Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and True Romance were not shots of brilliance, but latter-day work like Kill Bill is nothing but a self-important mess that could have just as easily ended with the death of Vivica Fox and still said as much as the full feature, just with two hundred fewer minutes. No, his best and most recent work was Jackie Brown, a mature story confidently told. There was some of Tarantino’s “drift” in the meandering dialogue, but these moments were bolstered by fantastic performances. Of course, Jackie Brown was an adaptation of someone else’s work. Coincidence?

Death Proof kills so much of Grindhouse‘s momentum that I have to call the whole thing a wash. If you must see it, watch Planet Terror, watch the mock previews, and then walk the hell out. You’ll miss Kurt Russell’s performance, but you’ll save 90 minutes of wasted time.

God, I am tired of typing the word “grindhouse.”