The picture here is from Kill Bill, because a couple of cursory two-page searches on google for pics of Michael Parks as Sherriff Earl McGraw in Grindhouse/Planet Terror yielded nothing! Dumb! But then, I think the balance of the entire US of A was too dumb to get Grindhouse. Actually lucked into seeing a preview showing, packed to the rafters full of film geeks who mostly ate it up. But I believe, as gory as it is/was, people missed the nuanced subtlety of the whole thing (subtlety hidden behind lots of gore, but, yes, subtlety). Obviously a labor of much love for the directors, the too-tricky-for-the-rubes premise and the daunting three hour run time ended up as just a bit too much in a world where time is of the essence and one has to get little Kaylie to her hip-hop cheer class AND get the grass cut.
So, just saying, if you haven't seen this whole schmeer, you are missing out on one of my top five film moments ever, which comes in the Planet Terror portion, where the fearsome hoards of US-military-misadventure-induced zombies are swooping down on the last vestiges of humanity, and Marley Shelton's doctor character, departing with a caravan of so-far survivors, bids adieu to her dad, the good sheriff Earl, who, if memory serves, is standing in a blood-spattered room with a shotgun...
"Bye, Pa!"
Earl gives a sort of brush-off half wave and says "Yokay!" and moves casually out of frame, cos, you know, even with flesheating corpses coming at him, he's a Texas sheriff and has seen, y'know, worse.
Add to this Parks's performance in Kill Bill as both the sheriff and the creepy Esteban Vihaio, and can a Nobel Prize be that far off?
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