I agree with Gene on this one. It makes a great trailer but great trailers don't necessarily make great movies. That was the thing with grindhouse films that Tarantino really got right with Death Proof - they were so low-budget that they could only afford a couple of action scenes, leaving the rest of the film as dead weight - dialogues and monologues, usually badly acted and written. The trailers are cut with the action scenes to make them seem more exciting than they actually are. But in the best cases grindhouse films were like noir, in that those dead weight scenes played to the strengths of screenwriters, hence the abundance of memorable lines that came out of noir and blaxploitation films. That's what Tarantino loved so much about grindhouse film that came out in Death Proof (and, along with the sheer length of the double feature, it helped to make Grindhouse a flop at the box office). Rodriguez seemed to just want to make a ridiculous action movie.
Which is fine by me, really. I don't share Tarantino's love for the flotsam of exploitation film. I just don't know if Machete is going to be all that enjoyable.
Eli Roth was set to make Thanksgiving into a feature film as well, until Grindhouse tanked and the Weinsteins fell on hard times. There was going to be a whole series of Grindhouse spinoffs.
