Part action thriller, part horror drama, and part black comedy, the movie abruptly, unexpectedly, and irrationally changes directions from one scene to the next.
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"From Dusk Till Dawn" is an outrageously bad film. Part action thriller, part horror drama, and part black comedy, the movie abruptly, unexpectedly, and irrationally changes directions from one scene to the next.
Flushed with the success of "Pulp Fiction," screenwriter Quentin Tarantino exaggerates everything he did so well in his previous film, and he and director Robert Rodriquez give us a new product that lacks focus, depth, or logic. It is a mishmash of excessive violence, gratuitous gore, and rampant silliness. So, why do I like it, in a perverted kind of way? Maybe it's the film's sheer audacity. Call it a guilty pleasure.
The movie is so violent that the two main characters, brothers played by George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, lay waste to several people and a convenience store before the opening credits even roll. The brothers, Seth and Richard Gecko, are rampaging criminals heading for a meeting in Mexico and destroying most everything in their path.
En route they hijack a RV and its occupants--an ex-preacher and his kids played by Harvey Keitel, Ernest Liu, and Juliette Lewis--in order to get across the border. Once in Mexico they rendezvous in a sleazy night club in the middle of nowhere that turns out to be Vampire Central. The rest of the film is a slash-and-gash extravaganza with the monsters, a veritable blood bath of epic proportions. Great, silly, totally over-the-top mayhem.
Clooney is at his most personable here; so charming, in fact, that he appears to belong in an entirely different movie, which is probably the point. Most of the cast are serious to a fault as well, lending to the over-the-top humor. In fact, three of them are straight-out funny: Tarantino, who plays a witless psychopath; Cheech Marin, who pops up all over the place in various guises; and Fred Williamson, who parodies himself.
And speaking of parody, let me take a stab at what it's all about: The first half of the film is a spoof of Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" and the second half is a take-off on director Rodriquez's own "Desperado." At least, that's the way it plays out, with some clever dialogue in the first part and some top-notch costumes and special effects in the second.
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[release]477[/release]