What does all of this add up to? That depends on where you are coming from. There are those who will receive the opus with glee, and others will be as put off as they would have been with the originals. That said, there is no question that the paired filmmakers have succeeded royally with what they intended.

Take the opener, Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror.” It includes the gamut of horror imagery, humans with faces bubbling with malformations, people who lunch on fingers and arms, an endless stream of violence, slashing, maiming etc., all built around a plot as stupid as it is incomprehensible. But out of this morass emerges a particularly memorable image that will stand, at least in my mind, as the ultimate (so far) example of the empowered female action figure, actress Rose McGowan playing Cherry, a dancer who has lost her leg but is outfitted with a machine-gun as her prosthesis and goes about spraying gunfire at opponents with a smug look of satisfaction on her pretty face.

Rodriguez piles on the gore ad infinitum until it gets to be overkill. Yet he makes the point with demented brilliance.

With “Death Proof” Tarantino applies his filmmaking savvy as an ode to pictures dealing with cars, and also delighting in excess, includes a chase to top them all. What’s more, he couples it with a revenge theme that elicited cheers at the performance I attended as women brutally give a crazed guy payback. The man, Stuntman Mike, is played by Kurt Russell, who glories in what he calls his “death proof” car, death proof only for himself.

We first meet a group of gals out for a good time, and after meeting Stuntman Mike, the evening ends in disaster for them. Mike, of course, survives. The next setup involves another contingent of women, including one nutty lady who cons a man selling in vintage car in letting her and her pals take it out for a test drive with her riding on the hood at faster and faster speed. Turned on by the spectacle he happens to see, Mike gives chase to bump the car viciously and repeatedly with the object of knocking off the daredevil on the hood. But soon the tables are turned and Mike becomes the prey.

Tarantino weaves all of this with the amusing banter of the ladies—a show in itself—and the underlying humor of what happens to the pristine car the seller lends. The angry feminist retribution is the icing on the cake.

As for the coming attractions, there is one promoting a horror film set on Thanksgiving Day with the come-on warning that this Thanksgiving “there will be no leftovers.”