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Grindhouse is a 2007 American film written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Presented as a double feature, it combines Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a horror comedy about a group of survivors who battle zombie-like creatures, and Tarantino's Death Proof, an action thriller about a murderous stuntman who kills young women with modified vehicles. The former stars Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, and Marley Shelton; the latter stars Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Tracie Thoms, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Zoë Bell. Grindhouse pays homage to exploitation films of the 1970s, with its title deriving from the now-defunct theaters that would show such films. As part of its theatrical presentation, Grindhouse also features fictitious exploitation trailers directed by Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth, and Jason Eisener. The film was released theatrically on April 6, 2007, to positive reviews for its tone, thrills, and tribute to exploitation cinema. However, Grindhouse was a commercial failure, grossing $25.4 million on a $53–67 million budget. Due to underperforming at the domestic box office, Planet Terror and Death Proof were released separately in other countries. Initial home media releases also separated Planet Terror and Death Proof; the theatrical version with both films and the fictitious trailers did not appear on home media until 2010. Despite the box office failure, Rodriguez and Tarantino have expressed interest in a possible sequel due to Grindhouse's positive reviews and successful home media sales. The fictitious trailers directed by Rodriguez, Eisener, and Roth later became the basis for their feature films Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Thanksgiving. Planet Terror An ordinary evening in a small Texas town becomes a grisly nightmare when a horde of flesh-eating zombies goes on the prowl. Cherry, a go-go dancer, and Wray, her ex-lover, band together with other survivors in a no-holds barred effort to escape the carnage. The odds become a bit more even when Cherry, who lost her leg to a hungry ghoul, gets a machine-gun appendage and lets the bullets fly. Cast Death Proof Stuntman Mike is a professional body double who likes to take unsuspecting women for deadly drives in his free time. He has doctored his car for maximum impact; when Mike purposely causes wrecks, the bodies pile up while he walks away with barely a scratch. The insane Mike may be in over his head, though, when he targets a tough group of female friends, including real-life stuntwoman Zoë Bell, who plays herself. Cast Fictitious trailers Before each segment, trailers advertising fake films are shown, as well as vintage theater snipes and an ad for a fictional restaurant called Acuña Boys. According to Rodriguez, Tarantino had the idea to film fake trailers for Grindhouse. "I didn't even know about it until I read it in the trades. It said something like 'Rodriguez and Tarantino doing a double feature and Tarantino says there's gonna be fake trailers.' And I thought, 'There are?'" Rodriguez and Tarantino had originally planned to make all of the film's fake trailers themselves. According to Rodriguez, "We had so many ideas for trailers. I made Machete. I shot lobby cards and the poster and cut the trailer and sent it to Quentin, and he just flipped out because it looked so vintage and so real. He started showing it around to Eli Roth and to Edgar Wright, and they said, 'Can we do a trailer? We have an idea for a trailer!' We were like, 'Hey, let them shoot it. If we don't get around to shooting ours, we'll put theirs in the movie. If theirs come out really great, we'll put it in the movie to have some variety.' Then Rob Zombie came up to me in October at the Scream Awards and said, 'I have a trailer: Werewolf Women of the SS.' I said, 'Say no more. Go shoot it. You got me.'" Each trailer was shot in two days. While Wright and Roth shot only what ended up on screen, Zombie shot enough footage to work into a half-hour film and was particularly pained to edit it down. Some Canadian screening releases included the South by Southwest-winning trailer Hobo with a Shotgun. Machete Rodriguez wrote Machete in 1993 as a full feature for Danny Trejo. "I had cast him in Desperado and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this guy should have his own series of Mexploitation movies like Charles Bronson or like Jean-Claude Van Damme.' So I wrote him this idea of a federale from Mexico who gets hired to do hatchet jobs in the U.S. I had heard sometimes FBI or DEA have a really tough job that they don't want to get their own agents killed on, they'll hire an agent from Mexico to come do the job for $25,000. I thought, 'That's Machete. He would come and do a really dangerous job for a lot of money to him, but for everyone else over here it's peanuts.' But I never got around to making it." Trejo had previously portrayed the character in a supporting capacity in the Spy Kids film series, also directed by Rodriguez. The trailer was made into a feature film, which was released in September 2010; a sequel, Machete Kills, followed in 2013. Werewolf Women of the SS Rob Zombie's contribution, Werewolf Women of the SS, starred Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu, Udo Kier as Franz Hess, the commandant of Death Camp 13, Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Sybil Danning as SS officers/sisters Eva and Gretchen Krupp (the She-Devils of Belzac). Professional wrestlers Andrew "Test" Martin and Oleg "Vladimir Kozlov" Prudius also featured, plus Olja Hrustic, Meriah Nelson, and Lorielle New as the Werewolf Women. According to Zombie, "Basically, I had two ideas. It was either going to be a Nazi movie or a women-in-prison film, and I went with the Nazis. There're all those movies, like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Fräulein Devil, and Love Camp 7—I've always found that to be the most bizarre genre." Zombie is also quoted as saying, "I was getting very conceptual in my own mind with it. ... A lot of times these movies would be made like, 'Well, you know, I've got a whole bunch of Nazi uniforms, but I got this Chinese set, too. We'll put 'em together!' They start jamming things in there, so I took that approach." Don't Edgar Wright's contribution, Don't, was produced in the style of a 1970s Hammer House of Horror film trailer. The trailer featured appearances from Jason Isaacs, Matthew Macfadyen, singer Katie Melua, Lee Ingleby, Georgina Chapman, Emily Booth, Stuart Wilson, Lucy Punch, Rafe Spall, Wright regulars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and a voice-over by Will Arnett. Mark Gatiss, MyAnna Buring, Peter Serafinowicz, Michael Smiley, and Nicola Cunningham (who played the zombie "Mary" in Shaun of the Dead), among others, made uncredited cameo appearances. To get the necessary 1970s look, Wright used vintage lenses and old-style graphics. During editing, he scratched some of the film with steel wool and dragged it aro.... Discover the Nate Plissken popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Nate Plissken books.