FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

Edited and Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino, and Juliette Lewis.
USA, 1996


GRADE: C-
From Dusk Till Dawn, the horror collaboration between screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez, sounds like all kinds of fun on paper. But on screen, this ostensible splatter comedy is too derivative to be clever, and too mean-spirited to be homage. Here's the story: Tarantino and George Clooney play the irredeemable Gecko brothers, a pair of murderous bandits on their way to a rendezvous in Mexico. After Richard (Tarantino) has his way with the bank teller they've kept locked in the trunk, the two of them cast about for new hostages and eventually choose Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), a preacher who lost his faith when his wife was killed in a car wreck. Fuller's driving an RV toward the border with his daughter (Juliette Lewis, the usual object of lust) and adopted son (Ernest Liu) in tow.

Naturally, the Geckos hijack the RV and have Jacob drive them to their ultimate destination -- the Titty Twister biker 'n' trucker bar, open all night. If you've seen the trailers, you know that much morphing follows as the joint's undead denizens -- including a quintet of fetching, mostly naked dancers -- switch from human form into the most brutal, ugliest army of Mexican vampires you'd ever want to see. Mayhem ensues, with the Geckos and the Fullers teaming up to survive what looks to be a very long night.

Rodriguez, who edited as well as directed, pulls out all the stops, knocking himself out with jump cuts, tiny zooms, and quick edits. His technique is dazzling, but wholly unconvincing. When he reveals the aftermath of a murder in single-frame edits cut against Clooney's face, the effect is meant to be understated -- but since the movie already went over the top in its pre-credits sequence, we're underwhelmed. When Harvey Keitel, who plays this so perfectly you'd think he was in another movie, has a heart-to-heart with his daughter, the fancy editing nearly wrecks the moment.

As Seth Gecko, Clooney is more fun to watch than Tarantino, especially when the action scenes kick in -- the obvious good time he's having is infectious, and even fits well with the character. At the very least, he deserves credit for putting his faith in a genre movie to make the leap from TV to cinema stardom. Juliette Lewis looks surprisingly fresh-faced and adolescent, as though we stepped into a pre-Cape Fear time warp. And while all of the performers, including the supporting cast, dig into their roles, there's a certain detail of character that's missing. We don't understand who these people are, we don't feel too much sympathy for them, and we don't really care about where they're going to find themselves when the morning comes. Blood and guts and splatstick running at full-tilt boogie turn the movie into an entertainment automaton relying on sheer visceral thrills to deliver the goods.

Unfortunately, the horror-movie pastiche of From Dusk Till Dawn may be most impressive to folks who haven't seen that many good horror movies. The reigning mood is obviously a knock-off of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, and Peter Jackson's Braindead (aka Dead Alive) did the buckets-of-blood thing with even more style, no computer effects, and a sense of comic timing that From Dusk Till Dawn lacks completely. Other more or less obvious sources of inspiration include Dawn of the Dead, such Italian horror flicks as Lamberto Bava's Demons and Michele Soavi's The Church, Terence Malick's Badlands, and the novels of Jim Thompson. (And lets not forget the original screenplay for Natural Born Killers, brought to you by Q.T. himself.)

Mixing and matching all these reference points might be lots of fun if there was a little more to the script -- From Dusk Till Dawn makes even a tepid effort like last year's Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight look downright complicated. Once we belly up to the bar, it's only a few minutes before all hell breaks loose. We're given a brief tour of the place, meeting such colorful weirdos as Chet Pussy (Cheech Marin) and Sex Machine (makeup guru Tom Savini) before the purported erotic payoff, when Salma Hayek shows up in a bikini and undulates atop a table (it may be telling that the first woman who exists as a sexual being is also the first monster). The naked-girls-and-cartoon-characters atmosphere may be authentic exploitation fare, but it's also terribly adolescent. And when nothing comes of it but an extended barroom brawl with monsters, all this excess is revealed as neither very funny nor very disturbing. It just is, and what it is ain't that much.

Part of the problem is a lack of any kind of restraint. The movie lets us in on the joke way too early when Tarantino's character holds up his wounded hand so that we can see right through the bullet hole. That's a nice, bizarre moment, but it's one of the comic touches that defuses any tension in the movie's otherwise carefully measured first half, and lessens the impact of the go-for-broke second half, when flesh really does start ripping. Since there's absolutely no respect for human life at the beginning, middle, or end of the picture, we're hardly surprised or affected when the main characters are in dire peril. And as far as the special effects go, this connoisseur was most disappointed by the transformation scenes, which are cgi-slick, but lack any sort of physicality.

In fact, the most disturbing element in this movie may be the presence of Quentin Tarantino himself. His Richard Gecko is a deceptively harmless yakker on the outside, but we're told early on that he's a sex offender, just to make sure we get the meaning when he starts making lurid eyes at Lewis or inviting one of his hostages to sit next to him on a motel room bed. Despite the hipster facade, Tarantino still pans out on screen as the bespectacled film geek, and the geek seems progressively more embittered, indulgent, and twisted (I feel less at ease with Pulp Fiction's "dead nigger storage" every time I see the auteur wrap his mouth around the words). Up until now, his stories have been largely purveyed by hugely talented actors (we're talking about Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, and Keitel) who breathe their own life into his work in collaboration. I don't mean to dismiss his films, which I enjoy, or cast aspersions on his character, but I've got to admit -- when Tarantino plays his own sordid parts, he gives me the creeps.


DEEP FOCUS: Movie Reviews by Bryant Frazer
http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/
bryant@deep-focus.com