I try to make an effort to give things the benefit of the doubt, but I recognize that making an effort shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. I don’t think of myself as a particularly open-minded person. That’s especially true when it comes to the People’s art; as I get older, I find myself making the snappiest snap judgements that ever snapped when it comes to movies or TV. Even the me of a few short years ago would be easily outsnapped in a snapping contest with me now.

One symptom of that tendency is that lately I’ve been reviewing the movie Grindhouse at the drop of a hat, despite the fact that I have never seen the movie Grindhouse. Nobody has asked me what I thought of it, or if I saw it, or if I wanted to see it. I just hear the word, and off I go. It has touched something deep inside me; it’s like when a ham sandwich makes you throw up, and then for two years you can’t even look at a ham sandwich again.

I have seen every movie Quentin Tarantino ever made (I saw Four Rooms) and have more-or-less accidentally seen almost all of Robert Rodriguez’s ouevre. We put Kill Bill on our wedding gift registry. But I took one look at this thing and on an immediate, primal level, something in my brain instantly went, “Ugh, no. No! Absolutely not.”

Maybe that midwestern conservatism I’ve always been warned about is starting to kick in, but after Kill Bill and Carla Gugino in Sin City, maybe I’ve just officially reached my quota for how many women I can watch these two men graphically mutilate. You had me at “machine gun leg,” by which I mean you had me buying tickets for that Ninja Turtle movie.

I’ve recently been told it’s not that bad within the context of the movie. “The machine gun leg makes sense in the context of the bubbling genitalia” is not what they should put on the poster to draw in the skeptics.

Plus… how long is it going to be before these guys make a second film? A retro pastiche of style-over-substance moments that pay tribute to bad movies I never saw in theaters that closed before I was born 1,000 miles away, featuring appalling scenes of violence (usually against women) punctuating long, apropos-of-nothing stretches of pop culture-referencing dialogue and featuring one of the director’s favorite faded stars from a bygone era. I understand the working title was Every Quentin Tarantino Movie Ever.

You know what was interesting about grindhouse movies?: they didn’t cost $70 million. There are film students right now with grand epics in their heads, fresh, unique visions, forced to slum it on hand-me-down DV because it’s all they have access to, and then they turn on their televisions just in time to hear Quentin on a talk show going, “Yeah, it’s great! We added scratches to the film; reels are missing; we really spared no expense to make it look like shit.” Magnificent. You’re the next Orson Welles.