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.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.