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But by the 1970s, the Highway Safety Foundation had become immobilized by a lack of funding and claims of financial mismanagement. At the same time, Hollywood had discovered a new and profitable subgenre: the car-chase film. Within the same decade as HSF's collapse, studios produced some of the nation's most popular road movies, including Two-Lane Blacktop and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. One of the subgenre's devoted fans was-and still is-a film enthusiast named Quentin Tarantino, whose adrenaline-driven homage-a ninety-minute feature for Grindhouse called Death Proof-arrived alone and almost forty minutes longer at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Death Proof is, in fact, two stories in one. In the first, a group of women led by disc-jockey "Jungle" Julie (Sydney Poitier) cruise the streets of Austin, Texas; at her side are Shanna (Jordan Ladd) and Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito), who has unwillingly become the focus of a radio-to-reality lapdance contest. At a bar owned by Warren (Tarantino), they are joined by drug-dealer Lanna (Monica Staggs), and by the night's end they've left down a dark highway. In the second half, a group of women led by Kim (Tracie Thoms) and Zoe (Zoe Bell), two female stunt-doubles, makes their way through Tennessee; at their sides are Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), both of whom are unaware of Zoe's true intentions-she has found a local man selling a Dodge Challenger and wants to execute a wild and dangerous road game known as "ship's mast," in which she lies splayed against the hood with belts for support as the car speeds down a barren backwoods interstate. The two stories are held together by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a homicidal Hollywood stunt-double and lover of old cars. His 1971 Chevy Nova, its hood tattooed with a white Kung-Faux skull and interior altered to make it "death-proof," follows Julia and her friends around Austin; after introducing himself at Warren's bar and buying Arlene a drink, he receives the promised lap-dance and offers barfly Pam (Rose McGowan) a ride home. What follows is an exercise in excessive speed and carnage, as Stuntman Mike kills all five women but escapes serious injury. He then pursues Kim, Zoe, and Abernathy through the hills of Tennessee, all the while Zoe clings to the front of the Challenger. While Death Proof is easily a testament to the films of directors like John Hough and Monte Hellman and, Tarantino takes his devotion to subject, to the style and craft of his grindhouse predecessors, and makes it a central feature. (In the longer Cannes version, we are given the lap-dance scene; in the original release, it was removed under the nostalgic, atmospheric guise of "Reel Missing.") Though he's included brazen yet wholly amusing deference to other films in the past-Pam Grier and Sid Haig in Jackie Brown, the Bride's black-streaked yellow jumpsuit in Kill Bill: Volume 1-Tarantino seems determined to show and tell us exactly what he's about to do and how he'll do it. Early in Death Proof, Stuntman Mike explains the intricacies of high-speed-stunt filmmaking to Pam, offering her the metal passenger-side seat used by cameramen. It's as though Tarantino were nudging us, even using the film's villain to give us a five-foot celluloid wink. And while some may view the referential inclusion as a distraction, it adds both legitimacy and an air of nostalgia to a film that is weighed down heavily by dialogue. 
 Inglourious Basterds Kill Bill: Volume 1 Kill Bill: Volume 2
 
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