It sounded like a fun idea at first. Two movies in one, a prepackaged double feature, in emulation of, or tribute to, the Golden Age exploitation films of the Sixties and Seventies, the last of the B-pictures, the Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movies, the 42nd Street grindhouse fare. Planet Terror and Death Proof by name, directed by separate hands, each preceded by one or more fake trailers for nonexistent titles such as Machete and Werewolf Women of the SS. So far, so fun. But the designated directors, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, those tasteless connoisseurs of cinema, were bad bets to carry it off with straight faces and restrained egos. (Hadn't they, in any event, done this already, Rodriguez directing and Tarantino writing, in From Dusk till Dawn, a schizophrenic graft of two distinct genres?) And the running time of three hours and ten minutes -- a concrete measure of unrestrained egos -- proves to be wildly excessive, a grind indeed, despite the quaint device of the "missing reel" in each film, complete with apologetic title cards from the theater management: "Sorry for the inconvenience." This device, not just from the time-saving standpoint (another "missing reel" or two would not have been missed), is genuinely a good idea, redolent of Poverty Row moviegoing. So, too, is the simulation of scratched celluloid, splicelike skips, loose-sprocket jumps. But the modern settings of the films (text-messaging in both of them; a topical allusion to Osama bin Laden, the late Osama bin Laden, in the first one; the ludicrous casting of an A-list star, Nicolas Cage, as Fu Manchu in one of the fake trailers) transport these devices to the realm of the alternative universe, where badly beat-up prints with missing reels are still showing in the shopping-mall multiplex of the 21st Century, and where even the lowest budget can afford the swankiest CGI. With Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Marley Shelton, Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Zoë Bell. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd