Nose to the Grindhouse? No thanks...

Tarantino might be the celluloid Pied Pier par excellence, but his latest tune finds me fearful of the scuffing my shoes might suffer should I fall in line this time around.

As gladly as I've stepped to Q's pin-sharp beat in the past — along a rewardingly circuitous, genre-hopping path — traipsing after him into C-movie-homage territory just doesn't appeal.

Sin City was captivatingly grotesque, granted, but the iconic sheen of Frank Miller's noiresque fetishism somehow held the reins a little; with Grindhouse, I fear a Tarantino in rampant pig-in-shit mode.

I'm sure it'll be high-quality excrement, mind, but you'll forgive me if I continue to gaze hesitantly down at my nice white trainers. Now is definitely not the time for unwilling heels to drag...

The wheels of my circumspection were greased by Guardian movie buff John Patterson's lead-feature confessional, "I was a teenage Grindhouse freak", which splattered the cover of this week's Guide.

The normally sturdy Patterson — a critical paragon by any standards — had been elevated from his usual perch in the film column recesses to this issue's opening gambit. For some reason, it all proved to be a little too much for him.

Obviously Q had hit a nerve in the wise old scribe with this one (frequenting the fleapit cinemas of a festering 1970s US had been the opium of the young Patterson's movie-going youth), but three pages of uninterrupted cooing over a muddied, unleavened corner of film history was just, well, a bit icky.

Perhaps finding a generous yet misplaced helping of the artful Patterson gloss just seemed like a terrible waste.

Grindhouse will be yet another benchmarking visual assault, of course. But were Tarantino to resurrect Lazarus, 2000 years on, he'd make him smell fresh.

Truth is, I'm just not sure I'm bothered about polished turds — even if the new veneer is so high-fibre it's the directorial equivalent of a DJ Yoda cut 'n' pasted retro-fizzed mixtape meisterwork.

I'm not foolish enough to entirely dismiss the film out of hand, of course; as far as grindhousers go I'm as squeaky-clean as my Nikes, and if there's a safer pair of hands for a baptism of fire than Q's, I haven't found them.

But Patterson's smearcrusted valentine was simply a litany of granite-solid reasons as to why these sub-pulp flicks never left the squalid rathouses from which they spawned...

Tarantino and Rodriguez will doubtless conspire to alchemise putrid, debased murk into hyperrealised, bells-and-whistles murk, but a shit by any other director would still smell, broadly speaking, of shit — if you whiff what I mean.

In any case, those sticky floors — soused with secular discharges aplenty — would have been a deathtrap to my pristine sneaks, pure and simple. And while all I'll have to navigate in a sterile-fresh UGC is popcorn spores, I'm still loath to invite the metaphysical staining that Tarantino's beefed-up gorgasm would visit upon innocent soles.