Two full-length feature films and four fake trailers comprise the three hours and eleven minutes of "Grindhouse," so it's meant to be more of an experience than a single piece of cinema. It's meant to recall a grungy yesteryear of cinema -- trashy theaters and even trashier movies. To some, that seems like pleasant nostalgia. To me, it's the cinematic equivalent of spending three hours locked in some nasty gas station bathroom where the urine smell gets into your clothes so deeply that after several repeated washings you're simply forced to burn them.

This grindhouse revival is the brainchild of directors Robert ("Sin City") Rodriguez and Quentin ("Kill Bill") Tarantino who are not only directors, but friends! If you ever wondered what would happen if you gave a couple of movie nerds millions of dollars and let them do whatever the hell they wanted without any boundaries whatsoever, this is pretty much what you'd expect. It's about as self-indulgent as a movie experience can get.

Students of cinema who flock to "Grindhouse" are likely to be joined by a few students of physics, attending to witness the phenomenon of Quentin Tarantino's ego as it continues to expand faster than the known universe. Never was there a director so in love with himself. He directs the second of the two films, a slow, excruciating non-thriller called "Death Proof" that's supposed to be about a car-driving maniac (Kurt Russell) but is primarily just a lot of talking amongst the female characters. There's no story at all. It's basically a more offensive episode of "The View."

Tarantino also has cameos in both films, which is a total distraction. In his own, he plays a bartender. In the first film, Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," he plays a rapist. "Planet Terror" is a zombie movie, more or less, and if you ever wanted to see Quentin Tarantino's genitalia fall off into a pool of bloody ooze, this film is for you. It follows different characters as they battle mutated humans rendered that way by a deal between Abby (Naveen Andrews) and Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis). The two principal zombie-stompers are Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and a stripper, Cherry (Rose McGowan), who loses a leg at the mouths of the zombies and eventually has it replaced with a machine gun.

Keep in mind that "Grindhouse" is largely (and intentionally) critic-proof. I'm fully aware that my hatred for this film is meaningless on any aesthetic level. "Grindhouse" is meant to fetishize trash. Tarantino and Rodriguez have even gone so far as to include bad edits, bad sound and bad film stock. Essentially, they're celebrating the B-movie. They're trying to make great crap. That they even fail at that lowly goal is perhaps the greatest horror of all.