Editorials
‘Planet Terror’ is 100x More Badass in 2017 Than It Was in 2007
Ten years later, we revisit Robert Rodriguez‘s Grindhouse film in a whole new context.
In 1997, Rose McGowan was blacklisted from auditioning for any movies produced by the Weinsteins. In 2007, she became the ultimate badass… in a Weinstein movie.
But let’s back up here for a second.
If you’ve been paying any attention to the news or social media chatter these last couple months, you’re surely aware that there’s a healing fire blazing deep within the heart of Hollywood right now. In the wake of multiple women, including Rose McGowan, coming forward with sexual abuse allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein, several other prominent figures in Hollywood have also been outed as vile predators who have abused their power to prey upon women and men alike over the years – names such as Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman, for starters.
But it all started with Harvey Weinstein.
Rose McGowan’s nightmarish encounter with Weinstein took place in a hotel room during the Sundance Film Festival in 1997, and McGowan bravely coming forward with her story has allowed others to tell their own stories. In many ways, McGowan has become the leader of this particular revolution, using her large fanbase and following on social media to champion all women to speak up and take a stand. Whereas there was fear before, now there’s a safety net. And we’re seeing real change as a result.
What does any of this have to do with Planet Terror, you ask?
Last month, Robert Rodriguez published a piece on Variety about McGowan’s story from his perspective, revealing that McGowan had told him what Weinstein had done to her way back in 2005. At the time, Rodriguez says, there wasn’t much he could do (McGowan had signed a NDA years prior, meaning she wasn’t even supposed to be telling Rodriguez her story), but that didn’t stop him from firing a shot at his longtime producer and hitting him where it really hurt: calling Weinstein out in a movie produced by… the Weinstein Company.
That movie, of course, was Grindhouse, a double feature collaboration between Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and contributing filmakers such as Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie.
“Incensed at what I heard, I told Rose that she was not blacklisted from MY movies and that Harvey couldn’t tell me who to cast,” Rodriguez wrote in the aforementioned piece for Variety. “The reason was that Harvey didn’t work on my movies; I made movies all those years for Dimension and Bob Weinstein. So I explained that if I cast her in my next film, Harvey couldn’t suddenly tell me no, because my first question would be ‘Oh, really? Why can’t I cast her?’ And I was sure he would not want to tell me why.”
He continued, “I then revealed to Rose right then and there that I was about to start writing a movie with Quentin Tarantino, a double feature throwback to 70’s exploitation movies, and that if she was interested, I would write her a BAD ASS character and make her one of the leads. I wanted her to have a starring role in a big movie to take her OFF the blacklist, and the best part is that we would have Harvey’s new Weinstein Company pay for the whole damn thing.”
And so McGowan accepted the deal: Rodriguez would write the most badass role imaginable for her in his new movie, and Harvey Weinstein had no choice but to finance it.
“Since the Weinstein’s had a first look at any project of mine or Quentin’s, I knew they’d never let this project go to another studio,” Rodriguez explains. “Casting Rose in a leading role in my next movie felt like the right move to make at the time – to literally make [Harvey] pay.”
In Planet Terror, McGowan plays the role of Cherry Darling, a down-on-her-luck go-go dancer who loses her leg right at the start of the zombie apocalypse. In the wake of her life-altering nightmare, Cherry, in Rodriguez’s own words, “transforms into a superhero that rights wrongs, battles adversity and mows down rapists.” In a film full of badass characters, it’s Cherry who stands out from the pack, literally being outfitted with a high-powered gun as a replacement leg and rising up the ranks as one of horror’s most iconic heroines.
Revisiting the film with this newly-learned context in mind, one sequence in particular appears to have been a direct shot at Weinstein. Quentin Tarantino plays a character literally dubbed “The Rapist” in Planet Terror, and he has his sights squarely set on McGowan’s Cherry. A super sleazy rapist on a power trip, Tarantino sure seems to be playing Weinstein himself, and it’s likely no coincidence that the character eventually turns into a literal mass of disgusting goo. Infected by the film’s zombie-like virus, “the rapist” attempts to rape Cherry in his final moments on screen, but his dick gruesomely melts off and hits the floor. Cherry then points her machine gun leg directly at his crotch, blasting her would-be attacker to kingdom come.
That scene, we now know, is what Rodriguez and McGowan intended Planet Terror to be on the whole: an ass-kicking, guns-blazing attack on a vile, disgusting rapist.
Almost prophetically, it’s Cherry Darling who leads her fellow survivors out of the apocalypse and into a better, more peaceful world at the end of Planet Terror. In Rodriguez’s super entertaining homage to retro B-movies, he notes in the Variety piece, the heroic Cherry “leads the lost and weary into a land of hope,” making McGowan’s character in the film not all that different from who the actress has become in real life here in 2017. When Cherry puts on a pair of sunglasses and surveys the fiery carnage she reigned down upon the infected towards the end of Planet Terror, it’s hard not to think about McGowan herself in a similar context, standing brave and tall amid the cleansing fires raging through Hollywood at this very moment.
“I’ll admit it felt really good at the time to realize we could use our art form to help Rose right a serious wrong in both how he victimized her years earlier, but also what Harvey was doing to a wonderful actress by blacklisting her and keeping her from working with filmmakers that would have wanted to work with her,” Rodriguez recalls, looking back. “At the time, it was the only thing we could do.”
Ten years ago, Harvey Weinstein paid for his actions. Literally. And that film, Planet Terror, can now be viewed as the first shot against a system that has long allowed terrible people to get away with terrible things. But not anymore, says star Rose McGowan and her real-life “Rose Army.”
Not anymore.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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