Trailer
Plot summary
In a rural town in Texas, go-go dancer Cherry Darling (with a leg/machine gun), decides to quit her low-paying job and find another use for her numerous 'useless' talents. Cherry's ex-boyfriend, El Wray, at the Bone Shack, a restaurant owned by J.T. Hague, a group of military officials, led by the demented Lt. Muldoon, are making a business transaction with a scientist named Abby for a deadly biochemical agent known as DC2 codename "Project Terror", but when Muldoon learns Abby has an extra supply on hand, he attempts to take Abby hostage and Abby intentionally releases the gas into the air. As gun-legged Cherry Darling and one man wrecking crew El Wray try to save the world from a horde of flesh-eating zombies.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Planet Terror (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Harvey Weinstein did not want Rose McGowan cast, having allegedly assaulted her years earlier and then blacklisted her from Miramax-related films. Robert Rodriguez, who was dating McGowan, cast her anyway, and later said Weinstein deliberately slashed the film's advertising budget to hurt it.
- Cherry's missing leg was built in post-production: the effects teams digitally erased Rose McGowan's right leg from every shot and replaced it with a computer-generated table leg and then an assault rifle. While shooting, McGowan wore a special cast that restricted the leg so her movement would look right.
- To imitate the worn prints of 1970s grindhouse cinemas, five of the film's six 25,000-frame reels, and the fake Machete trailer with them, were deliberately battered using real film damage, digital plug-ins and stock footage.
- The "missing reel" gag came from Quentin Tarantino, who was about to screen an Italian crime picture with Oliver Reed that was missing a reel. Rodriguez seized on the idea that a film could still work with twenty minutes gone and leave the audience guessing.
SPOILER
Rodriguez shot a second version in which the boy Tony Block never accidentally shoots himself and survives the film. He made it for his own young son, and shows him that happy ending rather than the release version in which the child dies.- The idea arrived on the set of The Faculty, where Rodriguez told the young cast, among them Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett, that zombie movies had been gone so long they were bound to come back in a big way, and that they had to get there first.
- The title is a nod to "Project Terror", the late-night horror show that ran on KENS-TV in Rodriguez's home town of San Antonio, Texas, through the 1970s and early 1980s.
