Tweet Digg Machete (Danny Trejo) needs to check out of a hospital, quick, and alive; bad men keep trying to kill him. No exit, the nurses tell him.

“You could see the wife’s face, but you can’t see the daughter’s. In brief, the story revolves around Machete (Danny Trejo), an ex-Federale who gets caught up in an assassination plot for which he is framed and must seek vengeance. Devoid of any real character development or subtext, the film is a complete parody booby-trapped with over-the-top violence, blood and gore – racist and sexist to the extreme.

It is so exploitative, one can’t help throw up their hands, sit back and roll with the punches. The Internet rumor mill kicked into high gear, with rumblings of a direct-to-DVD release . But that’s the classic shot of the trailer that everyone knows.” From there, Rodriguez “reverse engineered” and came up with a storyline for Lohan around the character, who became a drug-using wild child that drives her father crazy with her antics. After the various disappointments and underperformances of Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, MacGruber, Prince of Persia, Killers, The A-Team, Knight & Day, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Salt, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The Expendables , audiences can be grateful for this lithe and knowing pastiche.

At SXSW , Rodriguez announced his plans to go ahead with the full-blown feature. Fast forward and Trejo is working as a lowly-paid day laborer without papers. Maybe you remember a scene from that clip, in which Cheech Marin plays a priest called to arm himself against an angry mob? The only problem is she has a camera on her the whole time. Ask and ye shall receive! I don’t,” and blasts away? Well, this Machete is that one plus about 90 more minutes of shooting, double-dealing and exploding heads ? nonstop mayhem with a corpse count in the hundreds and a merry wink in every eye that hasn’t been sliced open. (See the 100 best movies of all time.) A salsa of every macho movie trope plied over the past half-century in films from Hollywood to Hong Kong, Machete hits U.S. theaters Friday but got its world premiere as the opening day’s midnight showing at the Venice Film Festival, where Hong Kong director John Woo will also be given a lifetime achievement award. In a vendetta to avenge the murder of his wife and daughter Machete goes all out to track down the guy who set him up, and the senator and the crime boss who took down his family. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood. See photos of immigration detention in Arizona.

If you think there’s nothing new to add to the immigration debate, you have not seen “Machete.” I don’t think Robert Rodriguez’s movie advances the dialogue very much (in fact, it probably moves it back a peg or two), but it does have something to add – the naked bodies of Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan, and the virtually nude figure of Michelle Rodriguez. And it does raise some interesting questions. Danny Trejo plays the long-haired, craggy-faced titular Machete with a combination of swift ferocity and baleful kindliness. And the ladies love it.

Rodriguez has complied, maintaining a fair amount of the wicked humor and every bit of the savage bloodshed the trailer promised. How long is the gastrointestinal tract, and what are its possible uses in a gunfight? And the situation calls for it a lot in Robert Rodriguez ‘s entertaining and blood-spattered action comedy. So he dusted off an unproduced script he’d written in 1993, after he’d first cast Danny Trejo in “Desperado.” Then, recycling footage from the fake trailer, casting Trejo in the lead and adding star power with a surprisingly potent cast that includes Robert De Niro , Jessica Alba , Steven Seagal , Michelle Rodriguez , Don Johnson and Lindsay Lohan , Rodriguez gradually built a “Machete” that 20th Century Fox elected to release as a late-summer theatrical feature. The number of heads, roughly, Danny Trejo severs (and he severs them roughly) as the title character in “Machete.” He plays an ex-federale now caught up in a conspiracy involving a Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal), a border vigilante (Don Johnson) and a racist Texas politician (Robert De Niro).

They’ll most definitely be on board with “Machete,” which gives ex-prison inmate Trejo his first lead role in a long career of mostly smallish parts as taciturn tough guys who choose their words carefully. When Warner Bros. was prepping Kevin Costner ‘s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” for its 1991 theatrical release, a trailer was released months in advance to whet audiences’ appetites. The trailer featured a cutting-edge, digital arrow-cam shot that followed an arrow from the archer’s bow as it zipped through the forest and thudded into the trunk of a tree. The shot was not originally included in the film. The result is inconsistent but amusing. And Trejo is a welcome variation on the slick action hero – a cunning, ragged survivor who prefers blades but gets very creative with guns, gardening tools and kitchen utensils when other weapons are scarce.

On the other hand, there are jokes that kill, pardon the pun. And Seagal’s performance during his ultimate showdown with Machete is as almost funny as his hairpiece.  

For a man who’s so stone-faced on the screen, Danny Trejo sure has a lot to say. Standing up at a banquette inside the classic Hollywood restaurant Musso & Frank on a recent afternoon, Trejo tells an elderly man hovering uncertainly in the doorway to “come on in,” imitates director Robert Rodriguez ‘s text-happy fingers, gestures to the waiter for a refill of his cranberry and 7-Up (“Manny, another one!”) and turns to a reporter to decry the flaws in the California prison system before offering some culinary advice (“You’ve never had the eggs Benedict here? Despite a recognizable face, Danny Trejo has maintained a prolific career of smaller roles. Jessica Alba has defended Lindsay Lohan saying her Machete co-star is a ‘brilliant actress’. “Machete” is insanely violent, insanely over-the-top. She’s done the time, but Lindsay Lohan is still paying for her crime! “Machete” was originally conceived as a fake trailer in “Grindhouse,” but fan demand convinced director Robert Rodriguez to make the story into a full-length feature, which opens Friday.

Then, he follows said reporter into the restroom, where the business at hand does little to stop Trejo’s riff about the time his then-9-year-old-son greeted Robert De Niro with a “Taxi Driver” imitation. (“I said ‘ Mi hijo , how do you know that movie?’ “) Welcome to the world of Hollywood’s toughest bad guy — or possibly its biggest social butterfly? The unlikely action hero of the blood-filled film is a long-haired, tattooed and aging former Mexican cop, nicknamed Machete after his favorite weapon which he uses time and again to get revenge against the killers of his family. Set on the barren border between Texas and Mexico, Machete has an eclectic cast including Robert De Niro as an anti-immigrant U.S. senator, Jessica Alba as a law enforcement agent, veteran action film actor Steven Seagal, “Miami Vice” star Don Johnson and Lindsay Lohan. PHOTOS: Lindsay’s biggest OMG! moments “He was frantically trying to track down her manager to make sure she didn’t go,” says the source. But when he’s not starring as the requisite roughneck, Trejo cultivates a different image. Rating: R for strong, bloody violence throughout, language, sexual content and nudity. She tells me, ‘You need to have more hot chicks in this movie!’ ” Rodriguez said, playfully deferring to his co-editor and co-writer, Alvaro Rodriguez.

“I was doing radio interviews and all of them were asking me about my song,” he says, referencing a track about him from Monterrey rock band Plastilina Mosh. Machete (“Grindhouse,” “Machete”) Trejo first appeared as this ultra-violent incarnation of Machete in a fake trailer screened during “Grindhouse.” Machete was such a crowd-pleaser, he demanded the feature-length treatment. 2. How can you ever forget that? Director Robert Rodriguez has expanded his mock trailer from “Grindhouse,” with Danny Trejo starring as Machete, a wronged federale now in the U.S. working as a day laborer. A mythic, abstract force as much as full-blown character, Machete can pulverize baddies with little more than the flick of his wrist while making hotties like Michelle Rodriguez and Jessica Alba fall into bed with him with barely a head nod. Trejo (“Heat”) Playing a career criminal was only a slight stretch for the actor, who is candid about his lawbreaking past. “If you do it at the beginning of the movie, in your mind, everyone is naked the rest of the movie if they’re scantily clad — because that’s how the comics are drawn,” he said. “It’s an honor to be the first Latino superhero,” says Trejo about a character Rodriguez conceived of more than 15 years ago and who began on-screen life as a fake trailer in “Grindhouse,” the director’s 2007 love letter to exploitation movies that he helmed with Quentin Tarantino . I did play a medicine man.” He tries to remember. Was it — no, the other one.