31 Horror Movies in 31 Days: From Dusk till Dawn

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

31 Horror Movies in 31 Days: Lifeforce

Lifeforce (1985)

Directed by Tobe Hooper

Staring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart, and Michael Gothard

            A joint space venture between America and Great Britain stumbles upon an alien vessel in the tail of Halley’s Comet.  They find that the ship is filled with the corpses of alien life forms that look like giant bats.  Three clear cases are discovered containing three naked humanoid aliens.  The astronauts take the cases aboard their ship and head back to earth.  When the ship stops its return entrance and remains drifting in space, another ship is sent to investigate.  They find the ship burnt out from an onboard fire and return the cases to earth.  Once the specimens are secured and ready for dissection, the female comes to life and sucks out a guard’s life energy with a kiss.  She escapes the British Space Center and creates a trail of destruction in her wake.  It is up to an SAS Colonel, a scientist, and the original mission’s commander to stop her from spreading space vampirism across the country. 

            Space vampires should make for an awesome cheese ball movie.  The concept is ripe with campy possibility.  There are plenty of wonderful little moments of terrible fun, but not nearly enough to cover its near two hour runtime.  Lifeforce misses a lot of that potential fun and replaces it with exposition.  The first problem is one that persists through all of the film: the movie likes to tell, not show.  There are images that should make a lasting impression on the viewer, like an alien spaceship dwarfing a shuttle in the tail of Halley’s Comet.  But that is not shown.  Instead, we see an away team of astronauts told by their shipmates through a radio that this was happening.  There is even one character whose sole purpose is to spout exposition and hypnotize the main character…into revealing more exposition.  For a movie about space vampires, it is awfully chatty.  Also, the villain of the film is a gorgeous naked lady who walks around as such for most of her screen time.  Your suspension of disbelief has to be thrown out the window to continue viewing Lifeforce.  It makes for some hilarious moments and turns the scariest part of the movie into a running gag. 

            The effects are handled well in parts, but most of the time they look very cheap.  The opening mercifully gets right into the alien vampires when a ship of astronauts finds a strange vessel.  The shots of the alien craft look fine until we see it a little closer.  The detailed surface is a good painted background, but it is unimpressive.  The whole scene is made worse when the astronauts go floating by.  It looks like four actors in space suits were told to stand very still while the camera panned, with the background added in later.  It is like watching paper cutouts being moved across a picture.  Plus, the vampire victims are some of the worst puppets and animatronics in film.  There is not even the illusion of it almost being real, they look like deranged Muppets.  The life force energy draining, the death-explosions of afflicted humans, and a space vampire ravaged London are the only special FX that look remotely good. 

            The thing to realize about Lifeforce is that it could have been fantastic if the filmmakers fully embraced the campy angle and played it up.  As is, there are far more awkward laughs created from it than there are scares.  If you skip all the exposition and just focus on the FX scenes, it is not that bad.  If you watch this movie with friends and turn it into a drinking game, it is the best movie ever made.  But as it is, Lifeforce will have you laughing at it within the first two minutes for all the wrong reasons.  Stay with it past the endless exposition, the constantly naked antagonist, and the idea of a functional British Space Program.  You will find a few hints of an interesting movie in here. 

5 out of 10