Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse experiment was a noble failure, with the best buds and filmmaking duo severely overestimating how much casual audiences share their love for classic exploitation cinema and a double-feature broken up by an intermission.
The movie wound up bombing hard at the box office, so much so that the studio opted to individually release Death Proof and Planet Terror overseas in an effort to recoup the losses, but the one silver lining was that it managed to give Danny Trejo an action franchise to call his own.
Having spent almost his entire career as cinema’s premiere hangdog grizzled badass, the veteran star clearly had a blast shooting Machete, which was itself spun off from a fake trailer that aired during the lull in Grindhouse. A $44 million box office haul on a $10 million budget was good enough to green light a sequel, but we’re still waiting on Machete Kills Again… In Space!
A 72% Rotten Tomatoes score was well-deserved, and only a demented B-movie could assemble such a random assortment of talent as Trejo, Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez and Steven Seagal together in the same place. As per FlixPatrol, Machete has jumped almost a dozen places on the HBO Max watched-list to begin closing in on the Top 20 as we head into the weekend.