After coming back from seeing 300 a couple of weeks ago, and sitting through the preview for Grindhouse, I described one of the more vile scenes that actually made it into that trailer:

the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

In his latest op-ed (on the excesses of the NC-17 rating), Brent Bozell lists some more:

The New York Post reports that the forthcoming movie “Grindhouse” is also expected to draw an NC-17, at least at first, for its raw content. The Post had the inside scoop: “In one scene, a cute topless girl is roughly tied down on a table by evil female Nazi experimenters who begin draining her blood and as she screams in agony, they brand her like livestock with a coal-hot steel swastika,” the source said. “And every girl in the Nazi concentration camp is topless.” [Thus ensuring boffo business in Hong Kong--Ed] Another scene features “a grossly obese man chewing on a baby.”

This potential NC-17 film has two big-name directors Hollywood loves at the helm, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Would they put their prestige on the line to promote the spread of the NC-17 rating? Is this “artistic” sludge the kind of film-making that Dan Glickman is trying to suggest would make the NC-17 “respectable”?

Much like these bipolar reviews from 2004, watch the same critics (on both sides of the Atlantic) who attacked 300 as Leni Riefenstahl incarnate and built-up its stylized CGI gore to abattoir-like levels, to give the bloody, nihilistic Grindhouse a huge pass for "artistic" reasons, especially given the superstar directors attached to it.

As Thomas Hibbs wrote in his exceptional book on Hollywood nihilism, even prior to 9/11, Hollywood and its critics have become so enamored of Shows About Nothing that when a film "gets out" with a positive message, it's to be attacked like a mutant virus escaping its lab. And no wonder Hollywood has turned to gross-out horror lately as one of its main products. When positive stories are passé, when you've buried your head in the sand regarding terrorism and political correctness severely limits all of the stories you can tell, there aren't that many options left.