Grindhouse is a three-hour double bill from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez featuring two complete films, Planet Terror and Death Proof, paying homage to the flee-pit American movie houses of the seventies from which it takes its name, right down to the worn out film reels and gruesome (fictional) film trailers .

US critics revelled in the heady combination of violent thrills, movie genre references and aesthetic touches harking back to the days of grotty grindhouse cinemas, showing double features full of slasher gore and soft-core porn.

Dennis Lim, in the Los Angeles Times, describes Grindhouse as “a full-blooded attempt to summon up a bygone age of cinematic sleaze. The filmmakers are not just celebrating an idealized notion of movie trash; they mean to simulate the experience of spending a night in a decrepit, sticky-floored movie palace.

First up in the double bill is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. His installment “wins points for more exactly replicating the hollow, soul-sucking badness of many low-grade gore films” says Todd McCarthy in Variety, “even as he raids Romero's great “Dead” cycle of zombie splatter epics”. However, “given the recent surfeit of zombie movies, and pretty good ones at that, it's simply not enough to re-create a highlights reel of favourite genre motifs. Rodriguez occasionally extricates himself from the muck with some genuine gross-out moments, beginning with an exchange over a bulging bag of testicles between Naveen Andrews and Bruce Willis, both in extended cameos.”

McCarthy thinks Planet Terror will be remembered for one “indelible iconographic sight, that of the scantily attired [Rose] McGowan, her character having lost her right leg in the mayhem, striding back into action with her missing appendage replaced by machine gun.”

As Mark Bell, writing on the FilmThreat website, says: “If you’ve ever wondered what type of damage an ex-stripper with a grenade launcher-equipped machine-gun leg can do, well, this is you film. Those who were fans of the old school end-of-the-world, zombies and monsters films will find comfort in knowing that someone who may be as big a fan of them as you are, and a much better filmmaker, has delivered”.

Then follows the second film in the Grindhouse experience, Death Proof, by Tarantino, which is “somewhat pokier” than Planet Terror, according to Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com, “but it's also, in the end, more exhilarating, and in its perverse, twisted way, more elegiac.”

Stephen Hunter from the Washington Post preferred the “far livier” Planet Terror, arguing that Death Proof, “is so narratively simplistic that to describe it is to ruin it. Let's just say it's a car chase movie fused with a women's acting workshop and leave it at that.”

Still, he can’t resist telling us that “for the longest, longest, longest time the movie simply indulges two sets of four actresses as they appear to improvise their way through long build-ups”, and “all this, really, sets up the film's final few minutes of car-crazy, Viking-berserker to-the-death demo derby along Tennessee's rural byways”. Hunter isn’t impressed, despite a “surprisingly high-end” performance from Kurt Russell as “Stuntman Mike”. “You have about an hour and half of yappy chatter”, he concluded, “in exchange for four minutes of high-octane road rage. Is that a deal or are you a sucker?”

Dana Stevens, writing on Slate.com, thought Death Proof worked well – “fabulously”, in fact, even for a “Tarantina-weary” critic. “We’ve all experienced some degree of Tarantino fatigue...but Death Proof is a reminder of what there was to like about Tarantino in the first place: his uncanny ear for dialogue that’s at once naturalistic and deliriously wordy, his kinetic action sequences, and his vorocious love for cinema in all its incarnations, especially the sleazy ones”.

The second half of Tarantino’s Grindhouse pitch focuses on a group of young stuntwoman, culminating in “an extended and spectacular car chase - spectacular not because of the number and variety of stunts but because all of them are really happening, on a real speeding car, with the real Zoë Bell clinging to the hood” says Stevens. “Tarantino’s choice to use a stunt person in a major role, make us care about her character, and then place her in physical peril is a simple but brilliant coup that may spark a new casting trend in Hollywood (in Asia, they've been doing it for a while).”

Lim in the Los Angeles Times simply describes it as “one of Tarantino’s most peculiar films: at once controlled and indulgent, derivative and unique”, and “his most original movie since Pulp Fiction”.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010