Planet Terror (2007)

There's a moment in Planet Terror where Rose McGowan, having had her leg ripped off and replaced with a machine gun, opens fire on a horde of flesh-melting zombies whilst balancing on her one remaining limb. It is, objectively, one of the most gloriously stupid images Robert Rodriguez has ever committed to film. And I mean that as both a compliment and a complaint.

Because here's the thing: that image works. It's punk, it's absurd, it's the kind of thing that makes you bark a laugh and shake your head at the same time. McGowan is genuinely brilliant in this film, defiant and magnetic, and the character's arc from go-go dancer to one-woman army has a strange, trashy empowerment to it that I wasn't expecting to respond to as much as I did. The cast around her is stacked too. Freddy Rodríguez, Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, Bruce Willis doing his best haunted-soldier routine. On paper, this should be an absolute blast from start to finish.

So why does it wear me out?

Rodriguez goes all-in on the grindhouse aesthetic, fake film scratches, missing reels, deliberately jumpy edits, a plot held together with gaffer tape and good intentions. And honestly, when it clicks, it really clicks. The bar shootout has proper kinetic energy. The syringe chase is genuinely tense. There are pockets of this film that pulse with the exact midnight-movie madness Rodriguez is chasing. I thought back to From Dusk Till Dawn, another film that throws genre conventions into a blender and hits frappe, but that one lands because beneath the mayhem there's a lean, mean structure holding everything upright. Planet Terror doesn't have that. It has vibes, and vibes only carry you so far.

The pacing is the real killer. The film lurches from action setpiece to melodrama to slapstick to gore gag without any real rhythm, and after a while the relentless noise stops feeling energising and starts feeling exhausting. There's a military conspiracy subplot buried somewhere under all the blood splatter, something about chemical weapons and infected soldiers, and it never amounts to much more than wallpaper. The satire, if you can call it that, is too half-baked to land any genuine punches.

What makes this especially frustrating is that Rodriguez clearly knows his craft. I've followed his career from El Mariachi right through to the bigger, louder stuff, and at his best he builds films with a scrappy ingenuity that's genuinely thrilling. Here, the ingenuity is still present in flashes, but it gets buried under self-indulgence. The grindhouse conceit, the fake wear-and-tear, the missing reel joke: all of it is clever for about twenty minutes, and then it becomes a crutch. Calling your film a tribute to bad movies doesn't excuse it from being a good one.

There's a version of Planet Terror that tightens up, trusts its cast a bit more, and lets the genuine weirdness breathe without cramming every frame full of excess. That version would probably be a four-star film. What we actually got is a two-hour exercise in diminishing returns, brilliant in places, bewildering in others, and structurally all over the shop. Rodriguez went on to make Machete, which takes a lot of the same energy and, I'd argue, handles the exploitation-homage trick with a bit more discipline.

I don't regret watching Planet Terror. Rose McGowan alone makes it worth a look, and there are enough genuinely inspired moments scattered throughout to justify the runtime, just about. But it mistakes chaos for creativity a few too many times, and by the third act I was less swept up in the madness and more waiting for it to be done.

Great cast, great vibes, terrible structure. Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-09-30

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Robert Rodriguez: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) · Machete (2010) · Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) · El Mariachi (1992)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)