"Grindhouse:" 'Amped-up and crazed'

The National Association of Theatre Owners would beg to differ, but it's still possible in a few multiplexes across the land to "enjoy" the grindhouse experience.

You know, a theater with floors glazed in Coke and rotten Raisinets, upholstered seats you don't want to see with the lights up, a couple of drunks down in front providing running commentary, and maybe a guy in military camouflage with a bulging duffel bag, grunting to himself one aisle over.

"Admittedly, that was never the best part of it," says director Quentin Tarantino, waxing nostalgic about the days decades back when he'd venture into some grungy one-screen in downtown L.A. to see a cheapo vigilante flick or a babes-behind-bars thriller.

"There were definitely times I knew I was taking my life in my hands by going into that theater," he says, chuckling. "It just showed my intense commitment to cinema."

Still, for most folks going to Grindhouse - the double-feature package of Tarantino's Death Proof and his buddy Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, opening Friday - the venues will be tidy and tiered, with state-of-the-art cupholders for those $6 cappuccinos.

It's the stuff up on the screen - Tarantino's and Rodriguez's lesbian car-chase carnage and zombie-lust bloodfests - that will pay homage to the '60s and '70s exploitation indies. Not the theaters themselves.

"I think of it almost like a grindhouse ride," says Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs), on the phone last week from Los Angeles. "I like the fact that we're turning the multiplex into the grindhouse. It's just a little safer. But if any gang violence breaks out during the course of the movie, or anything gets screwed up in the projection booth, a reel goes missing, that's all good. It just adds to the experience . . . it makes it all the more organic."

It was Sin City and Spy Kids director Rodriguez - looking at a poster he owned for a '50s hot-rod double bill (Drag Strip Girl and Rock All Night) - who came up with the idea of releasing two pics together. "Then, when I went to Quentin's house after making Sin City, he had the same poster," the director says, in a separate call last week. "I thought, 'Hey, you do one, and I do the other.' "