Seeing as how I can’t sleep because the narrator of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving disturbs my inner frightened eight-year-old to a fairly unhealthy degree, I might as well tell you what I spent three and a half hours on today: watching Grindhouse on a cold Saturday afternoon in a near-empty theatre. I guess gratuitous, over-the-top violence isn’t really daytime fare. Let’s cut to the chase: Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez, and Death Proof, helmed by Quentin Tarantino, are two very different paths to the same source of low-grade b-movie nirvana.

Rodriguez’s Planet Terror is a pretty straight zombie meatgrinder, with a whole lotta shootin’ and a whole lotta explosions and a whole lotta blood. Neatly split into two halves by a jokey “MISSING REEL” conceit (extended cut on the DVD, anyone?), Planet Terror does a whole lot better with its setup than its conclusion, but overall we get more than enough thrills per minute that you actually start to miss the missing reel a bit.

Of course, there are problems. For one, the gritty look and feel of the grindhouse isn’t really there, aside from the laughably bad blood and gore effects; in some ways it’s just too epic, the cinematography too well done, the spirit of the movie too current (the appearance of 21st century tech like mobile phones occur in both movies but feels more out of place here). The second, more serious problem, is that Planet Terror holds back. As is usually the case with action movies, and especially one so over the top as Grindhouse, the movie doesn’t live up to the trailer.

This is a shame because the trailer promised essentially one thing: Rose McGowan with a giant gun for a leg. I’ll tell you right now: not enough of Rose McGowan with a giant gun for a leg. How everyone involved in the making of this flick managed to miss this glaring oversight, I have no idea. But of course it’s more than that; for a movie that should be splatterrific, Planet Terror pulls its punches a bit and never quite becomes the gloriously ridiculous spectacle we all came to see. With some rehabilitation (hint: more of Rose McGowan with a giant gun for a leg) and a script for the missing reel, Rodriguez could’ve had another From Dusk Till Dawn on his hands—a pedal-to-the-medal joyride where everyone involved has a shit-eating grin on their face. As it is, it’s still a pretty good ride.

If Planet Terror is a consistently thrilling proposition that just falls short of its promise, Death Proof is a horribly flawed, masturbatory piece of cinema coupled with a final half-hour that completely redeems all wrongdoings. Again it’s a case of being promised one thing and delivering another. The whole concept of Grindhouse is supposed to be over-the-top and completely balls out, so what does Tarantino deliver? Far too much stilted dialogue and pedestrian setup that maybe, maybe, would be more acceptable had we not just witnessed an hour and a half of shit blowing up real good.

Whereas in Planet Terror the conceit of the missing reel was a slight disappointment, here it’s almost a mercy, and the only disappointment is that the missing reel didn’t swallow up more of Death Proof’s running time. Anyone who is at all critical of Tarantino’s various tendencies—dialogue that’s trying to be too clever by half being the big one—will find themselves ready to walk out of the theatre before too long. Even if you do appreciate Tarantino’s way with words, you probably still won’t appreciate his sense of pacing.

And though Death Proof abuses the viewer horrendously—even going so far as to waste half its running time on interminable conversation for little more purpose than setting up the second half and providing a bit of character detail—you should resist the temptation to run from the theatre. Handcuff yourself to your seat if you have to, even when Rosario Dawson’s crew shows up and subjects you to even more inane chatter. Because when Death Proof finally decides to kick into high gear, it delivers a thrill-packed car chase that packs more punch than the entirety of Planet Terror.

The whole thing culminates in a final two minute payoff that goes some way towards explaining why we had to sit through the rest of the movie to get to this point: because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate the glorious ending. Tarantino still needs someone to smack him around when he starts to get too enamoured of his own dialogue, or drops too many gratuitous references to great movies he really liked, or tells his sassy black characters to limit their vocabulary to “muthafucker” and “nigga, please.” But if you can make it all the way through…

Oh, and of course, you already know about the previews inserted between the two movies. Thanksgiving is the most convincing of the three, as well as the most authentic in terms of cinematography—it really does look like a low-budget, late-70s horror film, and is all the more menacing for it. Edgar Wright (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead) directed one of the trailers as well, a bullseye satire that quickly devolves into bizarre lunacy of the highest order. And if you’re in Canada, you’re in for a treat—you also get to see the made-in-Nova-Scotia winner of the SXSW Grindhouse trailer contest, Hobo With A Shotgun, on the big screen. It is everything the title promises and more.