i saw this a second time yesterday and other than saying i still agree 100% with RK, i will elaborate with a few more thoughts....
i think one's enjoyment of these films depends on three factors:
1. your expectations.
2. an appreciation of "good" bad movies or at least some knowledge of bad movies.
3. the audience.
if you saw the trailers (not the horrible tv spots, the actual trailers) or read a single article about the film i would think you knew what to expect. however, if you went in expecting "the 5th film from Quentin Tarantino" or whatever then i think that was your mistake. despite Tarantino's insistence otherwise, it really seemed to be more of an experiment (like Four Rooms) than a follow-up. he said he just wanted to be free to try something without having the weight of the world on his shoulders to deliver a follow-up. he and Rodriguez just wanted to deliver a fun balls-out night at the movies and i think they totally succeeded.
while i probably haven’t seen a single one of the exploitation movies that Tarantino references during his film, i have seen enough movies good and bad to be able to appreciate what he and Rodriguez were doing with their films. my touchstones may be different than theirs but i grew up watching whatever action movies i could get my hands on going from the A (Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Russell) to B (Segall, Van Damme) and even in a trailer like Machete those references seem to come back for me. later on in middle and high school i moved onto watching more horror films including some truly terrible ones (like Blood Diner) but some great ones also. so while i may not have seen Vanishing Point or Dirty Marry Crazy Larry i did used to watch Big Trouble In Little China every few months on the Fox Sunday Afternoon Matinee and i did see Cliffhanger at the $1.50 theatre when I was 11 or 12 years old and during one of the big “kill” scenes there was about 15 seconds of missing film where the film jumped from Stallone fighting one of the baddies to being underwater. i wasn’t even sure i had missed something at the time until i saw the film again on video and saw the moments in between. i just remember there was a sense of discovery back then sifting through the video store for whatever title you could get your hands on and occasionally finding a gem, or finding the gem moments during an otherwise bad film.
this seems almost retarded to have to spell it out like this but a big part of enjoying these films is being a part of an audience who ‘gets it’. seeing the films again yesterday afternoon was a completely different experience from my first viewing which was full of critics (who have seen their share of bad movies) and geeks (ditto that). yesterday the audience did not seem to be as 'in on the joke' and much of the laughter and applause was absent which really affected the way the film played for me. because of this i actually found that during the first 30 minutes of Death Proof i actually found myself thinking that i enjoyed it more than Planet Terror. if the crowd is full of people like GT sitting there “bored”, it’s not going to seem like the film worked. if you saw Spinal Tap in the theatre expecting it to teach you about rock n roll lore and nobody laughed you probably would’ve thought it wasn’t very funny.
if i had wanted to be critical there are a dozen things i could point out that didn’t quite work but when i left the theatre and thought about the experience i just had i decided not to. it was SO MUCH FUN and SO OVER-THE-TOP it really just seemed like a waste of time to nitpick these films. yes, it was a fanboy film made for fanboys and it has no intention to convert anyone else. (see: it flopped). so like i said if anybody went and was bored and couldn't have fun with it, then i'm sorry for you that you couldn't get past the pretension and just have a good time.
