Planet Terror is a
American action/
horror/
sci-fi/
thriller written and
directed by
Robert Rodriguez, about a group of people attempting to survive an onslaught of zombie-like creatures as they feud with a military unit, including a go-go dancer searching for a way to use her "useless talents." The film, a tribute to the
zombie film genre, stars
Rose McGowan,
Freddy Rodriguez,
Josh Brolin,
Marley Shelton,
Naveen Andrews,
Michael Biehn,
Jeff Fahey, and
Bruce Willis.
Planet Terror was released theatrically in
North America as part of a
double feature with
Quentin Tarantino's
Death Proof under the title
Grindhouse in order to replicate the experience of viewing
exploitation films in a "
grindhouse" theater.
Grindhouse was released on April 6, 2007, and ticket sales were significantly below
box office analysts' expectations, despite mostly positive reviews. In much of the rest of the world, each feature was released separately, with
Death Proof screened in an extended version.
Two
soundtracks were also released for the features and include music and audio snippets from the film.
Death Proof was released separately in international theatrical markets, and on DVD in the United States and Canada on
September 18, 2007.
Plot
In a rural town in Texas,
go-go dancer 'Cherry Darling' (
Rose McGowan) decides to quit her low-paying job and find another use for her numerous 'useless' talents. She runs into her mysterious ex-boyfriend 'El Wray' (
Freddy Rodriguez) at the Bone Shack, a BBQ restaurant owned by JT Hague (
Jeff Fahey) and his sheriff brother (
Michael Biehn). Meanwhile, a group of military officials at a nearby US military base, led by the demented Lt. Muldoon (
Bruce Willis), are making a business transaction with a scientist named Abby (
Naveen Andrews) for mass quantities of a deadly biochemical agent known as DC2 (codename "Project Terror"). When Muldoon learns that Abby has an extra supply on hand, he attempts to take Abby hostage, and Abby intentionally releases the gas into the air. The gas reaches the town and turns most of its residents into deformed bloodthirsty psychopaths, mockingly referred to as "sickos" by the surviving humans. The infected townspeople are treated by the sinister Dr. William Block (
Josh Brolin) and his possibly abused, unfaithful
bisexual anesthesiologist wife Dakota (
Marley Shelton) at a local hospital.
Random
zombie attacks begin along the highway, leading to El Wray, with Cherry as passenger, crashing his truck. In the aftermath, several zombies tear off Cherry's right leg. Also falling victim, fatally, is Tammy (
Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson), who was on her way to into town to reunite with her former lover Dakota. When Tammy's body arrives at the hospital, Dr. Block recognizes her and by comparing
text messages on the
cellular phones of Tammy and his wife, realizes Dakota was about to leave him. He then attacks Dakota with her own anesthetic
syringe needles, stabbing her repeatedly in the hands, rendering them useless, before locking her in a closet to tend to other patients, including multiple arrivals showing signs of infection and Cherry, who despite her injury does not.
El Wray is disarmed and detained by Sheriff Hague based on past encounters between the two men. As the patients transform into zombies, El Wray escapes the police station and arrives at the hospital, attaching a wooden table leg to Cherry's stump. As El Wray and Cherry fight their way out of the zombie-infested hospital, Dakota escapes to her car, but in struggling to open its door with her numbed hands, accidentally breaks her left wrist. She eventually manages to drive away. Meanwhile, Block becomes infected and others, including Cherry and El Wray, take refuge at the Bone Shack.
Dakota retrieves her son Tony and takes him to her father,
Earl McGraw, a
Texas Ranger. Tony, who was given a
revolver by his mother, accidentally shoots himself in the face after being told not to point it at himself. Cherry and El Wray make love in JT's bedroom. Due to
a missing reel, what happens immediately following this is unknown, but when the film returns, Sheriff Hague has been shot in the neck by one of his own officers, and zombies are massing outside the Bone Shack, which is set on fire. Dakota, Earl, and Tony's crazed babysitter twins arrive at the Bone Shack. With Sheriff Hague badly injured, the group decides to flee to the
Mexican border, before being stopped by a large mob of zombies. Muldoon's men arrive, and kill the zombies before arresting the group. They learn from Abby that the soldiers are stealing Abby's supply of the gas because they are infected with it and the only treatment is by constant inhalation of the gas, which delays mutation. They also learn that a small percentage of the population is immune to the gas, suggesting a possible treatment, which is why Muldoon quarantined the survivors.
As Cherry and Dakota are taken away by two soldiers (
Quentin Tarantino and Greg Kelly, credited as "Rapist #1" and "Rapist #2"), the others defeat the security guards. J.T. sustains a gunshot wound in the process, and the group searches for Muldoon. Discovered by El Wray and Abby, Muldoon explains that he killed
Osama bin Laden before he and his men were infected with DC2 and were ordered to protect the area. El Wray offers a respectful recognition of Muldoon's military service before he and Abby shoot the mutating Muldoon.
Meanwhile, Cherry is forced to dance by Rapist #1 while being held at gunpoint. Cherry attacks by breaking off her wooden leg across his face and stabs the remaining jagged-point in his eye. Dakota, after realizing she's regained feeling in her hands, quick-draws her syringe launcher and stuns Rapist #2. El Wray and Abby arrive to rescue Cherry and Dakota, and El Wray replaces Cherry's broken wooden leg with a modified
M4 Carbine with a grenade launcher attachment. She promptly kills Rapist #1 and other zombies with it.
J.T., wounded and lying beside his dying brother, stays behind to detonate explosives (and himself) to eliminate the zombies still in the complex while the others flee. The survivors make plans to escape by stealing
helicopters but must fight past the remaining zombies. Abby dies from a gunshot to the head. An infected Block then arrives and is killed by Earl, shortly before the survivors use the blade tips of their transport helicopter to decapitate all the remaining zombies. However, while saving Cherry from a zombie, El Wray is fatally wounded. In the epilogue, Cherry (now sporting a
minigun prosthetic leg) leads the group to the
Caribbean beach at
Tulum,
Mexico, where they start a peaceful new society amid a world-wide zombie infection. In the final moments of the film, it is revealed that Cherry Darling has given birth to El Wray's daughter (alluded to earlier during El Wray's final scene when he puts his hand on her stomach and restates his motto "I never miss".)
Cast
History and development
Robert Rodriguez first came up with the idea for
Planet Terror during the production of
The Faculty."I remember telling
Elijah Wood and
Josh Hartnett, all these young actors, that
zombie movies were dead and hadn't been around in a while, but that I thought they were going to come back in a big way because they’d been gone for so long," recalled Rodriguez, "I said, 'We've got to be there first.' I had
script I’d started writing. It was about 30 pages, and I said to them, 'There are characters for all of you to play.' We got all excited about it, and then I didn't know where to go with it. The introduction was about as far as I'd gotten, and then I got onto other movies. Sure enough, the zombie
[1] invasion happened and they all came back again, and I was like, 'Ah, I knew that I should've made my zombie film.'" The story was reapproached when the idea for
Grindhouse was developed by Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
is preceded by a fake trailer for a film titled
Machete, starring
Danny Trejo and
Cheech Marin, as it had during the original "double feature" presentation of
Grindhouse. 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
Mexican exploitation 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."
It was later announced that the trailer will be made as a
feature film Machete.
As for the reference to "Project Terror," Rodriguez paid homage to the late night horror show "Project Terror" which aired in Rodriguez's hometown of
San Antonio, Texas on
KENS-TV during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Production
Directing
According to actress
Marley Shelton, "(Rodriguez and Tarantino) really co-directed, at least
Planet Terror. Quentin was on set a lot. He had notes and adjustments to our performances and he changed lines every once in a while. Of course, he always deferred to Robert on
Planet Terror and vice versa for
Death Proof. So it's really both of their brainchild."
Tarantino has stated, "I can't imagine doing
Grindhouse with any other director in the way me and Robert did it because I just had complete faith and trust in him. So much so that we didn't actually see each other's movie completed until three weeks before the film opened. It was as if we worked in little vacuums and cut our movies down, and then put them together and watched it all play, and then made a couple of little changes after that, and pretty much that was it."
Rodriguez acted as
cinematographer on
Planet Terror, as he had previously done on some of his earlier films.
Casting
Many of the cast members had previously worked with Rodriguez. Before appearing in
Grindhouse, Marley Shelton had auditioned for
The Faculty, but Rodriguez chose not to cast her. She was eventually cast in the role of the Customer in the opening sequence of
Sin City.
had appeared in
Sin City.
had previously acted in
From Dusk Till Dawn,
Michael Parks reprises the role of Earl McGraw, a role the actor first portrayed in
From Dusk Till Dawn, and Quentin Tarantino himself appears in a small role, as he also does in
Death Proof.
Special effects
The film uses various unconventional techniques to make
Planet Terror appear more like the films that were shown in grindhouse theaters in the 1970s. Throughout the feature and the
Machete trailer, the film is made to look damaged; five of the six 25,000 frame reels were edited with real film damage, plug-ins, and stock footage.
makes heavy use of digital effects throughout the film, mostly for Cherry's fake leg. During post-production the effects teams digitally removed McGowan's right leg from the shots and replaced it with computer-generated props — first a table leg and then an assault rifle. During shooting for these scenes, McGowan wore a special cast which restricted her leg movement to give her the correct motion.
Editing
During editing, Tarantino and Rodriguez came up with the idea of inserting a "missing reel" into the film. "(Quentin) was about to show an Italian crime movie with
Oliver Reed," Rodriguez recalls, "and he was saying, 'Oh, it's got a missing reel in it. But it's really interesting because after the missing reel, you don't know if he slept with a girl or he didn't because she says he did and he says that he didn't. It leaves you guessing, and the movie still works with 20 minutes gone out of it.' I thought, 'Oh, my God, that's what we’ve got to do. We've got to have a missing reel!' I'm going to use it in a way where it actually says 'missing reel' for 10 seconds, and then when we come back, you're arriving in the third act. [...] The late second acts in movies are usually the most predictable and the most boring, that's where the good guy really turns out to be the bad guy, and the bad guy is really good, and the couple becomes friends. Suddenly, though, in the third act, all bets are off and it's a whole new story anyway."
Music
The music for
Planet Terror was composed by Robert Rodriguez. Inspiration for his score came from
John Carpenter, whose music was often played on set.
A cover version of
The Dead Kennedys' "
Too Drunk to Fuck" performed by
Nouvelle Vague was also featured in the film. A
soundtrack album was released on April 3, 2007, alongside the soundtrack for
Death Proof. Both albums featured dialogue excerpts from the film.
Theatrical release
Planet Terror was released in the United States and Canada alongside
Death Proof as part of a
double feature under the title
Grindhouse. Both films were released separately in extended versions internationally, approximately two months apart.
The Dutch poster artwork for
Planet Terror claimed that the film would feature "coming attractions" from Quentin Tarantino.
In the United Kingdom,
Planet Terror was released in cinemas on November 9, 2007.
In reaction to the possibility of a split in a foreign release, Tarantino stated "Especially if they were dealing with non-English language countries, they don't really have this tradition ... not only do they not really know what a grind house is, they don't even have the double feature tradition. So you are kind of trying to teach us something else."
Alternate versions
With the exception of
Grindhouse and
Single Theatrical versions of the movie, Rodriguez shot an alternate version where Tony Block did not shoot himself accidentally and survives throughout the film. The official theatrical version features a snippet of Tony on the beach after the end credits and snippets of scenes from this version appears on Rodriguez's
10 Minute Film School feature on
Planet Terror DVD. Rodriguez mentioned that this version is especially made for his son Rebel, and has shown Rebel the film with the happy ending rather than the version where he is dead. He also mentioned that Tony's death makes his "horror film...more horrifying in his way".
Home release
Planet Terror was released on DVD on October 16, 2007 in a two-disc special edition featuring the extended version of the film, audio commentary with Rodriguez, an audience reaction track, several behind the scenes featurettes about casting and special effects, and a "10 Minute Film School" segment,
in which Rodriguez confirmed that a box set of the two films will be available soon, and that his 10 Minute Cooking School on Texas BBQ will appear on it.
[Confirmed by Robert Rodriguez on the 10 Minute Film School feature on the Planet Terror DVD]
The film was released on
Blu-Ray on December 16, 2008. This version ports over the features from the DVD special edition, and also includes a "scratch-free" version of the movie, which doesn't feature the aforementioned intentional "damaged" look to the print. However, all American home video releases of the film are the extended version only and do not include the theatrical cut.
In mid-February 2009, Germany also released a steel box collector's edition for
Planet Terror which comes with the famous BBQ sauce recipe and 2 scratch-and-sniff discs of the film which smell like the BBQ sauce. The pack also contains a limited edition
Planet Terror blood pack.
See also
