Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I'm right in the middle of the GRINDHOUSE panel, but I had to post this up. Great news! Quentin Tarantino announced Kurt Russell as playing the slasher, Mad Man Mike, the baddie in DEATH PROOF, his segment in GRINDHOUSE!!!

I'll update this story with details from the rest of the panel... here are tidbits... John Carpenter in talks to score!!! Tarantino directing the COWGIRLS IN SWEDEN trailer! More to come!!!

- Saw footage (more on that later)... the footage was beat-up... scratches, sloppy splices, water damage, soundtrack pops, etc. Quick comment... this is the best looking movie Robert has done (scratches an all...) since FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.

- Each segment are real movies, not 1 hour each. You literally get a double feature. Tarantino says "This isn't something I'm doing with Robert... This is MY next movie. This is ROBERT's next movie."

- Quentin's script is 130 pages, Robert's is 110 pages long

- Michael Park's Texas Ranger Earl McGraw will appear in both PLANET TERROR and DEATH PROOF.

- Tarantino will shoot film on his

More coming... Panel is still running...

Okay, back... Sorry it took so long... had a little symbiotic company that distracted me (and you guys, too, I'd wager). Here's the rest of the panel and the pics!

- Rodriguez had an idea for a zombie movie, but could never get past 30 pages, so he shelved it. One day he looked at this original one-sheet he has for a drive-in double feature of DRAG STRIP GIRL and ROCK ALL NIGHT. He thought, "Hey... it'd be a good idea to do a movie that brings back the double feature feeling." And thought his zombie script could be stretched out to 50 pages or so, but not feature length, so it'd be perfect for that kind of format (that later changed apparently, as his script ended up feature lengthe).But he didn't do much with it. A while later he was at Tarantino's house where he saw the exact same double bill one-sheet. He told Quentin his idea for a double feature movie and Quentin flipped for it.

- Tarantino says he feels very sorry for the last couple generations who only know mall multiplexes and never got to experience that great crappy theater that played nothing but exploitation double bills every week..

- Tarantino mentioned one of the pitfalls with '70s exploitation is that due to their low budget they hardly ever lived up to their kick-ass posters. "We're going to make 2 sleazy grindhouse movies that deliver on their posters!"

- Tarantino also said the faux trailers for the films are so good that if he and Rodriguez make GRINDHOUSE 2 the audience will demand to see the feature movies from the trailers of GRINDHOUSE, they're that cool.

- Quentin said that PLANET TERROR is the zombie film John Carpenter would have done around the time between ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE THING. That's the tone, at least.

- Will Tarantino ever do a kid's movie? He said he loves kids movies, but if he ever does one "I don't know if it'll be recognizable as a kid's movie... but it'd be something I'd show my kids!"

- KILL BILL sequels? Tarantino said after he does GRINDHOUSE he has an idea for two KILL BILL anime prequels he wants to start going. One focuses on Bill's back story and it'll have Pai Mei, Esteban Vihaio and Hatori Hanzo, all of Bill's father figures. The other would be a prequel on The Bride. I'd assume on assignment as an assassin, but that's my speculation.

- Film moved from December '06 to April '07. "Took us from Christmas to Easter."

Footage:

They played a rather long clip, which had footage from Rodriguez's segment and one of the fake trailers they made. The footage opens up with the grindhouse snipe that played before KILL BILL (a real snipe used back in the day) and the brand new RIP logo (Rodriguez International Pictures, a play off of AIP, American International Pictures, which was Roger Corman's distribution company in his glory days). The logo is a tombstone with RIP etched on it. The tombstone is surrounded by flames.

Footage starts with Tom Savini playing a small town cop running into the station. Freddy Rodriguez is there, in shackles and Michael Biehn is there, another cop. Savini's hand is bloody and he screams about someone biting through his finger. Biehn tells him to calm down and put a band-aid on it. Savini holds his hand in front of Biehn's face. "Someone bit my finger clean off!" His ring finger is missing, only a bloody nub remaining. By the way, the whole thing is splicey, frames missing, scratched up, suffering from sprocket damage (the film flutters and slips, strobing), some water damage. The effect constant, but are less heavy as the footage went on. They aren't kidding when they say they're replicating the grindhouse experience.

The cops go outside to check everything out. The music, by Rodriguez, was so fucking John Carpenter it's not even funny. If you would have told me it was Carpenter I wouldn't have doubted you. There's a car with a broken window and something on the ground, laying in the glass. Biehn picks it up and returns to Savini. "Did you find my finger?" "No, but I found your ring," Biehn says, giving over the ring.

The footage got a little choppier around here. It cut to footage from one of the trailers starring Danny Trejo in a film titled THEY CALLED HIM MACHETE.

This trailer is really damn cool, Tarantino wasn't lying about that. It had a very ROLLING THUNDER vibe with Danny Trejo sharpening long, machete blades and making out with naked women. The women, by the way, were totally naked, but had black bars covering their nips, like a lot of exploitation trailers from the time. The font for THEY CALLED HIM MACHETE was right on the period, too.

Trejo also constructs a rolling death machine, a chain gun mounted between the handlebars of a big hog of a motorcycle. There was footage of him rolling, firing the gun, jumping the bike through flames, firing all the way. The footage ended with Trejo opening up his long duster revealing at least 40 machetes strapped in against his body and on the inside of his coat. He grabs one and throws it end over end past the camera.

There was also a sort of opening credits that featured the cast. Marly Shelton, Rose McGowan, Josh Brolin (a sleazy looking Doctor), Jeff Fahey, Freddy Rodriguez, , Naveen Andrews (holding up a bizarre looking knife... his hair is still very Sayid), Michael Parks and then two girls you never really see anything besides of their hot bodies. They're credited as "The Crazy Babysitter Twins" and we see them jumping all over a car at night. The car drives away, sprawling one out on the ground... hard.

We see a truck running down a zombie, it splatters on impact, but the torso still clings to the front.

We see Freddy Rodriguez in a hospital with McGowan. He wants to hurry up and get out, the hospital apparently under siege, but McGowan at some point had her right leg removed and points to her stump. Rodriguez looks around and breaks off table leg and rams it into her stump. They hobble out, Freddy supporting her as she clops down the hall. These "infected" zombie dudes attack and Freddy leaves McGowan trying to keep her balance as he knifes a bunch of them (one blade in each hand). He even does a "run up the wall flip backwards" thing and gets one. He goes back to get McGowan and she tells him he could have just carried her...

Next thing we see is Quentin Tarantinio himself, some sort of twisted back alley surgeon. He replaces the table-leg peg leg and attaches a machine gun. We see her use this in the footage and it kicks a large amount of ass. One shot has her leaping from a decent height, landing on her hands and knees and lifting her machine gun leg and blowing the shit out of a car with it. There was another instance where she was on the back of a motorcycle machine-leg-gunning down some zombies as they sped through the crowd.

There you have it, squirts! Done and done. I'm going to transcribe one interview before I let myself sleep tonight. Trust me, you're going to want to read this one, especially you comic book fans!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com