I resisted watching this for ages, I really did; but stuck in a London hotel with nothing else new to watch, I finally succumbed. And oh, how I wish I hadn’t.

Of course, everyone is by now familiar with the Grindhouse story; how Tarantino and best buddy, Robert Rodriguez, decided to assemble a couple of shoddy-looking ‘drive-in’ movies and put them out together in a double bill; how said double bill failed to lure in audiences; and how the films were then re-edited for individual release in a desperate attempt to claw back some of their budget. (The films may look cheap but they weren’t.) Now, I’ve already seen Planet Terror, Rodriguez’s contribution to the double bill and I have to say that though it’s no masterpiece, it looks like Citizen bloody Kane compared to Tanantino’s effort.

I’ve long known that Quentin longs to be black, but from the evidence of Deathproof, what he really longs to be is a black woman. How else are we to explain the seemingly endless succession of conversations that bookend the two car chases that are the only other element of this dismal excuse for a movie? A bunch of females sit around, drinking, smoking and talking… and talking… and talking. About nothing. Presumably we’re supposed to find what they’re saying hilarious, but it’s frankly an aging white man’s idea about what hip young women might have to say to each other and is consequently as convincing as the awkward supporting performances contributed by Mr Tarantino and his other best buddy, Eli Roth, creator of the Hostel torture-porn films, and another ‘film-maker’ currently on my shit-list.

Into this tedium wanders Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) a scarred psychopath who likes nothing better than killing young women in car wrecks. No explanation is given for this unsavoury hobby; perhaps he simply finds their endless yapping as irritating as I did. At any rate, he stalks four women then kills them in a head-on collision. A couple of good ol’ boy cops wander on to say that hot damn, they can’t do a Goddamned thing about it because there’s no proof that Mike did it on purpose and so he’s let go and then he homes in on three other young women, and they drink and smoke and talk for ages and then…

Look, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to give you any plot details, since it’s virtually non-existent and really all this pile of misogynistic crap exists for is to invite viewers to gloat as a series of attractive, partially-clothed females perform pole dances and then have their bodies torn to shreds in automobile accidents. Tarantino once possessed a smidgen of genuine talent but these days seems to revel in a pool of retarded sexuality that wouldn’t disgrace a fourteen year old. And Quentin, it may seem hilarious to you to pepper the film with smudges and scratches and awkward jump cuts, but believe me, no amount of it is going to hide the fact that this is witless, sexist crap of the lowest order. See, what would have been good is if you’d applied these techniques to a genuinely engaging story, then you’d have had something entertaining and maybe, just maybe, audiences would have come to see your original double bill. But let’s be honest, it’s a long time since Pulp Fiction, the last genuinely good thing you were associated with and from what I’ve been hearing about your next project – Inglorious Bastards – my hopes are not high for any kind of progress in the near future.