Weekend Forecast for April 5-7, 2007
By Reagen Sulewski
April 5, 2007
An unusually staggered slate of four films makes this Easter weekend a bit anticlimactic at the box office, but one potentially controversial film makes it one to pay attention to.
Grindhouse is an unusual release for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's not just one movie, but two; Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have collaborated to each produce one half of a double feature. Also, the subject matter is one not usually reserved for big budget pictures – they both are callbacks to the days of ultra-violent, exploitative, low-budget cinema that was a hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s underground scene. Of course, these films were a heavy influence on these two directors and many of their copycats, so in a sense, this is an attempt to return to their roots, as it were.
Rodriguez's film is called Planet Terror, involving a zombie-like plague. It's also responsible for the most iconic image of the film's ad campaign - Rose McGowan with an assault rifle for a leg. It's a rather literal blend of sex and violence and possibly the birth of a new fetish. Mark this date down, people. Tarantino's film is called Death Proof, and stars Kurt Russell as the owner of a "100% death proof" car that he uses to stalk a group of women. Additionally, intercut between the films are fake trailers for other grindhouse films in the same style, though one may actually be made.
The obvious comparisons for this compilation film are from the filmographies of the respective directors, like Sin City and Kill Bill. The ultraviolent and ultrastylish 300 also shares a significant overlap with the audience for this film. Even with this pedigree and the groundwork laid by a firey spring box office, Grindhouse will be a difficult sell. At over three hours in length, it's a tough slog for even the most dedicated gore hounds, and its style is more in the realm of grit as opposed to the shine and glitz of a 300. With that in mind, this is going to be a very popular outing, and should earn in the neighborhood of $24 million this weekend.
A marginal competitor for Grindhouse is The Reaping, a biblically-based horror film that's perhaps hoping to capture some vague tie in with the holiday weekend. It stars Hilary Swank as a religious paranormal debunker called down into the Louisiana Bayou area to investigate some mysterious phenomena, like rivers turning red, swarms of locusts - you know, standard everyday stuff. These occurrences seem to be based on the seven plagues of Egypt, and are progressively getting stronger, moving all the way up to that "first born" bit.
The film is from Dark Castle, the rebirth of William Castle's old production company that has brought us such cinematic classics as Thir13en Ghosts and Gothika. What these films have provided have been some reasonably professional looking, high-concept horror films that are light on plausibility. They seem to have hit on a pretty effective hook for The Reaping, although they might be a couple years too late on the religious based horror front. Swank is more or less a blank slate as far as star power goes for this – she's a well known name that adds credibility, but not a star that anyone would deliberately seek out in a film, a la Naomi Watts and The Ring. I give this one about a $13 million opening weekend, based mostly on some slick ads and one spooky catchphrase.
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