Availability: Rental
From Dusk Till Dawn is half Tarantino, half Rodriguez, half cool guy crime movie, half ridiculous gore action. That is a strange combination of flavors that I do not believe has ever been mixed together before or since. Certainly not in the way From Dusk Till Dawn does it, where it pulls the rug right out from under its audience and becomes a different movie altogether. Imagine if the crooks from Reservoir Dogs accidentally solved the Lament Configuration and now have to do with Cenobite hooks along with the long arm of the long. It is that random of a swerve.
If that is not for everybody, it is extremely for me. I've seen From Dusk Till Dawn about 100 times, more than any other vampire film - or crime film for that matter. At one point in my life I thought of legendary gore wizard Tom Savini as just "that guy with the penis gun". After a couple rum and cokes, I'll tell you my theory as to why this is George Clooney's greatest performance, this is Clooney at his Clooney-iest. Please stop me.
I really wish the swerve in From Dusk Till Dawn was a better-kept secret. Dimension should have advertised this as a completely straight Quentin Tarantino crime film. Do not put a single vampire in the trailer. Maybe even gloss it up, really sell the prestige of a follow up to Pulp Fiction. Then boom, smash the audience in face at Cannes or something with a full-throttle B-movie. Nobody would see the band playing a guitar made out of a dude's torso coming.
Sadly, marketing is a terrible, artless, joyless business, so the trailers gave everything away. Reminds me of how nobody was surprised this year when Fresh turned from romantic comedy to cannibalism.
While the marketing spoiled the surprise, From Dusk Till Dawn plays itself fully straight as a crime movie. You do not see a single fang until roughly an hour in. Until then, the movie is just about the Gecko Brothers, two completely human outlaws on the run, causing havoc and mayhem and killing many cops during their run for the border. Seth (George Clooney) is a handsome professional thief, imagine Danny Ocean but things have gone horribly wrong with his life, and one of those things is his awful sexual predator brother, Richie (Tarantino). While Seth hopes to keep a low profile, Richie is fully committed to the Five Star Wanted lifestyle, and murders anybody he can for any reason. Thus we open on a fantastic shoot-out in a liquor store, all completely unnecessary bloodshed.
Tarantino fans, by the way, your boy is not a very good actor. Best he can do here is be kinda slimy. However, there are a lot of call-backs to the greater Tarantino 'verse which you can add to the Wiki pages: Big Kahuna Burgers, the first appearance of recurring Texas Ranger character Earl McGraw (Michael Parks), and Seth quotes Reservoir Dogs "Okay, ramblers, let's get rambling!" You also get references to a lot of obscure B-movies, so obscure even I haven't heard of them, because Tarantino is the biggest movie nerd who has ever lived.
The Gecko Brothers kidnap a family on an RV vacation, the Fullers. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a widower pastor who has lost his faith, his daughter is Kate (Juliette Lewis), and his son is Scott (Ernest Liu). The tensions between the Geckos and the Fullers continue to simmer as they sneak into Mexico. Richie stares at Kate in a way nobody in the movie likes. Jacob and Seth take measure of each other in the front seats.
But then, none of this story matters/. The issues of faith, family, whatever, all get thrown out the window, because they check into a sleazy Mexican strip joint called the Titty Twister and get attacked by an army of vampires. The attacks happens just after Selma Hayek as a stripper named Santánico Pandemonium sticks her naked foot into Tarantino's mouth - I'm sure that was a terrible burden for him.
Pandemonium is right. The rest is this movie is nonsense trash. Just wave after wave of increasingly goopy and gross vampires coming after our heroes - now joined by badass truckers Sex Machine (Savini) and Frost (Fred Williamson). The party begins to rapidly dwindle as more and more members of the crew get bitten but keep that a secret. From Dusk Till Dawn is one those examples of a vampire movie following zombie movie tropes. This is especially ture by the end, when they're fighting hordes and hordes of shambling naked ghouls. These vampires are even said to be disgustingly soft, like their flesh is already cooked.
This all gets very silly very quickly.
But why would I ever complain? Richie is the first to go and I'm not mourning that guy. Once his serious drama is removed the movie can turn full Robert Rodriguez ridiculous. Fred Williamson is just stacking bodies, four corpses on four legs of an overturned table. Selma Hayek turns into a snake monster. Tom Savini transforms into a horrible slimy hairless rat monster and it does not matter how little sense that makes. It's 1996, we do see our first usage of CGI effects with the face morphs, but most of the monsters are practical effects and still look awesome. You gotta love all the demonic make-up prosthetics on everybody after they turn into vampires. They're using Super Soakers full of holy water. Every random character gets a hero moment, even the kids. This is a party! So much of a party that Cheech Marin is playing three different roles for some reason.
I can listen to George Clooney make big speeches about how vampires are real all day, personally. "I don't want to hear anything about 'I don't believe in vampires' because I don't believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what I saw is fucking vampires!" Dude makes a lot of speeches in this movie. He seems more than a little annoyed to have ended up in this B-movie genre where his character never belonged.
From Dusk Till Dawn is a much better mash-up for Rodriguez and Tarantino than their future collaboration, Grindhouse. The 1996 movie is at least mostly playing it straight, even managing to be 50% a completely solid crime film. Only then does it go full gonzo. Meanwhile, both Grindhouse films were winking so hard and so frequently they appeared to be having some kind of stroke. I do not care for them personally. I think these filmmakers found perfect balance between action and comedy in 1996 and lost it by 2007. Also, if you're making a Seventies pastiche, why shoot it on digital?
But, if you want more From Dusk Till Dawn, there were two straight-to-video sequels made in 1999 and 2000. They're not great, but they are better than you would expect considering what they are. In 2014 there was a surprisingly good TV adaptation of the first movie that ran for three seasons on Rodriguez's now-defunct El Ray network. It's streaming on Netflix only until November 1st, so you have your work cut out for you.
Next Time! A vampire tries to make it in that wacky business called show business. Shadow of the Vampire.
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