A "grindhouse" was a kind of run-down cinema you'd see in inner-city USA in the 1970s, so called because it would "grind out" endless double bills of B-grade schlock.

This film is a modern homage to one of those trashy double bills, made by people who want to parody, wallow in and transcend - all at the same time - the guilty delights of those crummy old movies. And I believe they have succeeded. As in a real grindhouse, the print is scratchy, there may be missing reels, and there will be no interval (you wouldn't want the lights to come on before the final credits - someone might see and recognise you).

In addition to a few bonus trailers for even more juicy and obscure features, the program consists of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror - a night-of-the-zombies type film (the "planet", perhaps for reasons of economy, is Earth), unique in that the strained exposition at the start and the hasty explanations at the end are every bit as much fun as any other part of the film - and Tarantino's Death Proof, in which a psychotic stuntman stalks pretty women on the highways of US backwaters.

Watch for yourself and see which of two camps you fall into. While I like both, I think it's just obvious that Tarantino's is the better film of the two - certainly, it was exactly the kind of meal I wanted to settle down to at that point. Yet there are other, misguided souls who think it equally obvious that Rodriguez's is preferable. Nobody is ever in any doubt on this point. I'm curious to see how our audience divides.