Muscle Cars, Guns, Satan Worshippers, and Boobs.

It's been awhile.  Like two fortnights.  Or, you know, a month, if you're not a complete nerd.  Been busy.  Had work and two plays going on (the second closes on Sunday).  I missed out on a lot, but was able to squeeze in Drive Angry yesterday afternoon before my call.  And I'm glad I did.

When Tarantino & Rodriguez released their Grindhouse double feature in 2007 I was pleasantly surprised, and hopeful for the future. Would we be getting a new Grindhouse (™) feature a couple times a year? Even one a year? Ok, one every 2 years? EVER AGAIN?  Last year we were handed Machete, which rekindled my hope in a future of occasional low-budget, laid-back-yet-crazy, B-level-yet-oddly-quality exploitation... until I saw it.  Sadly, it just didn't "go there."  Or, more accurately, it tried waaaaay too hard to "go there".  So hard, in fact, that it ended up a convoluted mess that pandered to it's own fake low-budget BS while at the same time trying to get some kind of message across instead of delivering something even semi-coherent and, you know, fun. As far as I was concerned, the neo-grindhouse "movement" was dead.


And now Nic Cage has come along and made me a believer again.  Go figure.

No, Drive Angry is not a Rodriguez/Tarantino joint.  Nor does it claim to be a grindhouse movie.  But grindhouse it is.  Violence, T&A, muscle car chase scenes, a taste of the supernatural, all in eye-gouging 3-D!  And they got it all done without the need for fake bad film stock, fake missing reels, and fake in-house editing repair jobs for melted film.  I mean, I dug the use of those things in Planet Terror and Death Proof, but gimmicks are gimmicks.  Drive Angry manages to pull it off without the use of such things.  It's an exploitation film that, thanks to the way we both film and view movies these days, will never degrade in those ways.  It's non-retro retro.

But enough about  that stuff.  How was the movie?

Great.  Not the best thing I have seen so far this year, not the best thing I WILL see this year, and I'm probably being a little generous in my rating, but damn was this a fun little movie.  It stretched pretty far in scope, story-wise, but remained relatively humble in its execution.  The opening and closing shots (of Nic Cage driving out of and back into hell, respectively) were the most CGI-tastic.  The rest of the movie used it sparingly, as far as I could tell.  Stuff like car parts flying at the camera and enhanced explosions, and stuff.  The supernatural element to the story was underplayed until the 3rd act, with only small reminders here and there, like the "Godkiller" gun Cage is toting and the fact that even a bullet to the head won't kill him (for long).  It really was more about chasing down (and running down) satanic cultists in a '69 Dodge Charger and stopping occasionally for sex with roadhouse waitresses and bloodbath shootouts.  At the same time.  Not kidding.

The plot?  Well, that last sentence pretty much sums it up, but if I had to get all official-like, it would look like this: John Milton (Cage) escapes from hell to save his infant granddaughter from the cult that murdered his daughter and intends to sacrifice the child to Satan at midnight during the next full moon.  He enlists the help of a small-town waitress named Piper (Amber Heard) after saving her from her asshole fiancee and takes to the road in her badass car after said cult, all the while being chased by a being known as "The Accountant" (William Fichtner), sent from hell to bring Milton back.

Yeah.  That about sums it up.

Cage has been surprising me lately.  Even in over-the-top nuttiness like this he's learned to reign in that annoying crazy-eyed, faux-lunatic, fits-and-starts dialogue thing he always does.  It's like he wants to be an actor again.  I even liked him in the just-there The Sorcerer's Apprentice last year.  Anyway, yeah, Drive Angry is no exception.  He keeps it pretty quiet.  Amber Heard is unrelentingly beautiful, so I can't truly tell you if she was any good.  I'm pretty sure she was, though.  And then there's William Fichtner.  Is there anybody cooler than this guy?  He even managed to turn 30 seconds of screen time as a banker during the opening sequence of The Dark Knight into a memorable character.  He walks through Drive Angry with an unflappable blank expression and calmer-than-thou speech, belying the invincible, single-minded bounty hunter (for lack of a better term) that he is.  Sort of like the T-1000, but, you know, from hell.  The scene where he overturns a hydrogen truck aimed at a police blockade and serenely steps off of it and onto a cop car, both moving at highway speeds, is one for the ages.  Très cool.

Now, as you may know, I'm no advocate of the 3-D.  If it ain't computer animation, the 3-D blows, with a capital B.  But here it sort of worked.  More because of the grindhouse exploitation aesthetic than anything else.  This movie is marketed as being "Shot In 3-D"- it's on all the posters, almost as if the actual title is Drive Angry: Shot In 3-D [check it out here], and, yeah, it's probably the best live-action use of the technology I've seen.  I'll be OK, though, when it comes to home video and I can't see it that way.  The 3-D in this case, is more about going to the theatre and experiencing the batshit-craziness of it all than actually enhancing the storytelling.  I'm a little sad that I didn't see it closer to its release, though.  Empty theatre.  There was only one creepy older guy there.  NO, not me- one OTHER creepy guy.  Actually, two ladies walked in literally one hour after it started and stayed until the end, and they weren't shy about vocally reacting to the extravaganza, which I loved... but a theatre full of that would have been awesome.  Oh well.  I still "got it."

For out-grindhousing Grindhouse: 7 out of 10 Empty Skulls (to drink a cold beer out of).