From Dusk till Dawn (1996)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Starring George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, and Juliette Lewis
Seth and Richie Gecko are running from the Rangers, the FBI, and many other law enforcement agencies. To help slip across the Texas/Mexico border, they take a vacationing family hostage. With everyone crammed into an RV, the group heads into Mexico and toward freedom. The Gecko brothers are thrilled, all they have to do is wait at a bar for their contact to pick them up in the morning. Together with the hostage family, they sit back and get ready for an evening of drinking and strippers. Or so they thought. Soon enough, the bar gets a little too rowdy, even for hardened criminals. The bar staff and strippers want more than money. They are vampires and every night they trap unsuspecting patrons inside to feast on them. Once again, all the Gecko’s and the family have to do is make it until the morning.
This is not a great movie, but that is not the point. The point is that From Dusk till Dawn is a lot of fun and not ashamed of it. What starts out as a 70s road movie ends in a 70s horror flick. With Rodriguez directing a script from Tarantino, this movie is everything you could want from their idea of a vampire story. It combines all the scripting wonders of Tarantino with Rodriguez’s fast paced sensibilities to become a lean, mean, beast of a horror movie. The dialogue is fantastic, with characters spouting memorable lines every minute. Seth specifically gets a lot of gems which sound even better with Clooney’s cool barely controlled anger. The characters have just enough meat on them to make their actions mean something and their deaths hurt. You feel for these people after just a few minutes of screen time and that is an impressive feat for a splatter fest.
The vampire makeup and effects do the job just fine. They are not the best in movies, but the look of them and how they die work. The action is well staged and easy to follow without being oversimplified. You can always tell where everyone is and do not lose track of the progression of the scene. The actors all do a good job of bringing these people to life in a very unlikely situation. Even better, the cast includes cult movie mainstays Fred Williamson and Tom Savini in memorable roles. Special mention should go to Cheech Marin who plays three different characters in the movie. All in all, this movie is a job well done.
There is nothing really wrong with From Dusk till Dawn; it just does not want to be anything more than what it is. You will not find social commentary, metaphors for us, or any other underlying sense of meaning in the story. It is there purely to scare, thrill, and make you laugh. Enjoy From Dusk till Dawn for what it is: fun.
8 out of 10
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