Movie Review: Planet Terror

Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is a brilliant homage that cleverly blends zombies, gore and 1940s screwball comedies. Filled with buckets of witty dialogue and even more blood, Rodriguez has crafted an action packed survival horror story featuring over the top, cartoon-like violence that only the man behind Desparado and Sin City could produce.

In an example of melodrama in its purist form, Planet Terror lets the action drive the story. Though one could argue that the characters are paper thin, they are in fact entertaining, stereotypical archetypes of the genre that Rodriguez is paying homage to. When a biochemical weapon is released into the atmosphere above Austin, Texas the majority of the city's population turns into, ravenous, boil infested zombies. A small band of survivors, led by El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez), a weapons expert with a mysterious past, and Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), a go-go dancer who equips her missing leg with a high powered machine gun, must try to find safety, while simultaneously blowing the roof off the controversy behind this infectious outbreak, and everything and anything else in between. (Click Here to Read the Full Theatrical Review)

Special Features:

If there is one thing that Robert Rodriguez does better than action, it's DVDs. Like his innate talent for filmmaking, Rodriguez has a killer instinct when it comes to cramming his home video releases with great, technical special features. While Planet Terror is sadly being released separately from its Grindhouse counterpart, Death Proof, Rodriguez's ode to John Carpenter and splatterhouse cinema not only remains the better half of the double feature, it is the superior DVD as well.

Compared to Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, which mostly featured the director yammering on about the film's production, filled with more verbiage than behind the scenes footage, Planet Terror is stacked. While the DVD has one of the same flaws as Death Proof, trying to pass off previously released online promotional footage as exclusive DVD features, Rodriguez crams the rest of the disc with exceptional content.