Review Detail

I hate to say it, but I too felt underwhelmed like the previous two reviewers here. It's quite a shame, because I can imagine anything revolving around Quentin Tarantino to be perfect grindhouse material. Unfortunately, this edit never really went anywhere. The narrative, as dougbl said, is not very well put together. Most of the Pulp Fiction stuff seems to revolve around The Gold Watch segment of the film, so what we have is kind of a hybrid of that storyline mixed with the storyline for Reservoir Dogs. But neither of these two stories seem to connect with each other that much. Imagine if none of the stories in the 2005 film Sin City had any connection with each other. That's kind of what watching this edit was like. Worse, there are some extra bits from Pulp Fiction that make the narrative even more confusing. For example, Jules is only in this edit for one really long scene (For clarity, it's the infamous "Say what again!" scene). The scene doesn't connect with anything else in the edit (or at least, I couldn't make the connection). It doesn't serve a purpose with anything else in the edit. It's just... There.

I suppose there was some form of effort to giving these films the grindhouse treatment, although not quite enough. The opening credits seem promising (Even though my inner nitpicker wished it had been reframed for scope instead of 16:9 for consistency), but once that's over, the bad film effects don't come across as often as I would've liked. Most of the time, I barely noticed a difference between the edit and my blu-ray copies, save for the more common specks of dirt.

The hard-R rated content is just fine, but it's pretty much at the same content level as any other Tarantino film. I'd complain, but that would be like complaining that Evil Dead II isn't as violent as Re-Animator. I still got what I wanted, so there's no point in getting mad over that aspect of the edit.

But with that said, the rest of this edit isn't very good, even by the low standards of most grindhoused edits. And that breaks my heart, because I myself actually had a hand in giving some advice to Dawnrazor over in the forums on this one. I haven't seen his other edits, but he seems like a pretty talented guy, and he's done other grindhoused edits that seem to have paid off pretty well. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that maybe this was just an unfortunate misfire in an otherwise pretty good run (Hey, even Steven Spielberg has made some bad movies in his career. It happens). But the truth is, I can't recommend this. Especially because the source material deserves so much more from the grindhouse treatment than this. I wish Dawnrazor the best of luck in whatever he works on in the future, and I hope it's an improvement over this.