From Dusk Till Dawn

Robert Rodriguez, USA, 1996, 108 minutes

Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Quentin Tarantino) Gecko are on the run, they’ve just escaped from jail. When they arrive at a bar in a hijacked camper van, expecting their boss to be there with a couple of tickets to El Ray, things are a little amiss. The “Titty Twister” is run by vampires.

From Dusk Till Dawn is probably one of the strangest crime movies every made. Starting off like a subplot from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the brothers Gecko kidnap a family, forcing them to take Seth and Richie across the border. After arriving at the bar the film quickly spirals off into a totally tangential horror plot. The bar staff sprout bony faces that wouldn’t look out of place at a Klingon disco and start eating the clientele. Stuck in the middle are Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), an ex-preacher who’s lost his faith, and his children Kate (Juliette Lewis) and Scott (Ernest Lui), just a couple of regular American teenagers. Our heroes quickly band together and fight the hordes of evil bloodsuckers in an array of entertaining ways. Pay close attention to the other bar patrons, including the blaxploitation flick hero Fred Williamson and cult horror special effects guy, Tom Savini, as “Sex Machine”.

It’s odd to see Robert Rodriguez directing a vampire movie, but it doesn’t take any effort to see Tarantino’s script, dotted with black humour and punctuated with the word fuck. The violence is orchestrated almost entirely for comic effect, and yet manages to be just as visceral as El Mariachi or Desperado. It’s a seriously tongue in cheek affair, with no concessions to plausibility or taste; a hilariously gory film in a similar vein to Peter Jackson’s Braindead and Bad Taste, but with the trademark Tarantino style that makes it ooze cool.

Review by George Williamson
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2002