The vastly superior half of an experimental two-part disaster stands alone so much better than its follow-up

Assuming that general audiences will share the exact same sensibilities as you do is a trap that many filmmakers have fallen into when their long-gestating passion projects end up crashing and burning at the box office, something Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez discovered firsthand when the ambitious Grindhouse proved to be a colossal disaster.

While it was commendable for the lifelong cinema geeks to parlay their love of exploitation cinema and bonkers genre films into a double-feature designed to recapture the magic of the experiences they had in their formative years, it would be an understatement to say that paying customers weren’t quite as enthused.

Running at over three hours in length – complete with an intermission and fake trailers, three of which have now led to full-length spin-offs of their own – the self-indulgent splatter-fest couldn’t even recoup half of its $60 million budget from theaters, causing thee studio to release Planet Terror and Death Proof individually overseas to try and claw back some of those losses.

They didn’t, if we’re being honest, but there are no prizes for guessing which half of the two-parter secured the better legacy. Death Proof has its moments, but is widely deemed as Tarantino’s worst-ever movie by quite some distance, whereas Planet Terror‘s reputation only seems to enhance over time.

A recent Reddit thread has underlined that opinion yet again, so at least the Grindhouse failure has secured itself some sort of longevity among genre die-hards, even if only 50 percent of the entire operation has been deemed worthy of ongoing praise a decade and a half after it initially fell flat on its face.