The cover of Zzyzx announces “Too Twisted for Theaters!” which I suppose is one way for a filmmaker to console himself when his movie doesn’t move much further than the festival circuit. Oh, and Zzyzx isn’t to be confused with Zzyzx Road, the movie that grossed $30.
Zzyzx isn’t too twisted for theaters – it’s not twisted at all, unless you consider pointless chatter and pretentious hallucination to be twisted. If anything, it’s too dull and amateurish for theaters.
It starts out with two friends taking a side trip down Zzyzx Road on their way to Las Vegas who wind up running a guy over. But, wait. Before that there was a Latino family wandering around the area. And before that was an intro about a cult down Zzyzx Road in the 1960s, the leaders of which had been missing since the FBI raided. And every once in awhile, a naked chick shows up.
These three things aren’t so much layered as they are dropped on top of one another and left to rot without contributing to one another in any way. It’s like Franken-movie of Lynch, Tarantino and Hitchcock influences sewn together with the overblown self-esteem of an upper middle class high school student whose daddy swoops in and fixes that little plagiarism problem (yeah, I’m not bitter about that – that kid’s career plans involved being a judge. Seriously).
Death Proof wasn’t the movie I expected, which was a adrenaline filled exploitation film with plenty or car crashes and Kurt Russell being scary and killing women with his car. I’d heard it described as a slasher flick with a muscle car in place of anything sharp and splattery. But, at its full length on DVD, Death Proof is really an old and new version of the same story slapped together into a single movie.
Russell’s Stuntman Mike stalks and attacks two groups of girls in Death Proof: one group in Texas, the other later in Tennessee. The Texas girls seem to live in a 1970s grindhouse movie, right down to their hair, their clothes, the way they talk, their surroundings and the music they listen to. The only thing that brings this section of the movie into present day is their use of cell phones and texting.
The Texas section is exploitative in that 1970s grindhouse spirit: the camera lingers on the girls for no reason and there are frequent close-ups of boobs and ass and legs. The Texas girls exist in Death Proof to titillate and then to die in what’s probably the most gruesome car wreck I’ve ever seen on film.
The Tennessee girls have similar conversations about men and sex and have the same dynamic as the Texas girls, but there’s no questioning that their story is happening in the present, even though they’re driving a 1972 Mustang Coupe (gorgeous car) and later a 1970 Dodge Challenger.
What stuck with me about Death Proof was that the Tennessee girls, the girls who turned the tables on Stuntman Mike and lived, are filmed in a completely different way than the girls who died. Their film is crystal clear – whereas the Texas girls existed in grainy, scratchy film with missing reels – and the girls aren’t objectified by the camera. The lens stays a reasonable distance away and there’s no ass shaking or boob jiggling.
Really, Death Proof isn’t about Stuntman Mike haunting the highways; it’s about how women’s roles have changed in the genre and how guys like Stuntman Mike are relics of their ages.
Death Proof wins. But then, Zzyzx was so bad, it wasn’t really a fair fight. It was like putting a three-legged, one-eyed puppy in the ring with a rottweiler. Or a really mean cat.
Tournament Prize Pack So Far…
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
I, too, loved Death Proof. I saw Grindhouse when it first came out, and everyone seemed to love Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” but find Tarrantino’s “Death Proof” boring. Meanwhile, I thought Rodriguez’s movie, while really fun and hilarious, was ultimately derivative and only an homage…”Death Proof”, though, starts as an homage then brings the genre into the 21st century, and I thought that was great. It did something to bring the slow, character-focused filmmaking of the 70′s into the current decade, and I thought that was inspired.
I love Tarrantino.
Can you tell?