From Dusk till Dawn
From Dusk till Dawn is famous for being a schizophrenic movie, split right down the middle into a gritty-crime drama on the one hand, and a spasmodic vampire-Western on the other. It’s one of those mid-90s movies of which few will be seen again, made in a time when movies could be transgressive and nonsensical and just plain fun.
It’s of a piece with Desperado and makes a good companion piece with it. Robert Rodriguez would never achieve these cinematic heights again. I know Grindhouse has it’s apologists, but it didn’t age well – Death Proof will always suck – but it says a lot when the best thing about both movies combined is a fake slasher trailer by Eli Roth about Thanksgiving.
But they made Machete instead.
Oh Fortuna.
From Dusk till Dawn has an all-star cast, with too many great performances to go into detail over, but it must be said at the outset that George Clooney owns this movie. I’m as big a fan of O Brother Where Art Thou as anyone, but Dusk till Dawn has Clooney’s best performance by a country mile. The developing relationship between him and Harvey Keitel – brilliantly playing against type – is the most fascinating thing in the movie. And that says a lot when this movie features stripper vampires and multiple Cheech Marins, one of whom has a kaleidoscopic vocabulary for compound “pussy” nouns. (I hope pussy doesn’t become a theme this month. I did not intend that.)
The movie initially follows the getaway of the Gecko brothers, Clooney and Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino plays Clooney’s brother Ritchie. They escape through a daring prison break, but this is never shown because the first half, despite being far more disturbing, downplays and implies violence rather than showing – say --Salma Hayek have a visible orgasm after being impaled with a chandelier. Clooney is a no-nonsense professional, focused exclusively on getting to Mexico and doing whatever he must to get there. Tarantino, however, is possessed of an unspecified mental disorder that causes him to hallucinate. For all the importance placed on the polarity of this movie, Part 1 isn’t a super-serious crime drama but has its moments of levity as well.
You don’t make wisecracks right behind an exploding gas-station in the Godfather, is all I’m saying.
There’s a few hints that the manhunt is personal – a trope that makes me miss the much beloved Tom Atkins in Drive Angry – so the brothers Gecko shack up in a seedy motel. Here they run into Keitel and his extended family minus his wife, whose death caused Keitel to apostatize and apparently commit himself to road trips. He has a weak son and Juliette Lewis for a daughter. Lewis is ok, but a bit miscast.
Keitel et. al. are abducted by the Geckos in order to afford the latter safe passage into Mexico. Once there, they proceed to a strip-club optimally named the Tittie Twister, where the Geckos promptly beat the tobacco juice out of Marin for no reason. Clooney starts drinking immediately, and is probably a hardcore alcoholic since he takes at least twenty shots of hard whiskey in this movie and doesn’t so much as slur a syllable. But given what he must put up with in his brother, that’s totally understandable.
Then Salma Hayek does the most erotic fully clothed striptease committed to celluloid, complete with a python and Tarantino drinking beer from her foot, which – if I am certain of anything on this Earth – I know he wrote in the script. Hell, I don’t blame him. Ladies, y’all got 90s Brad Pitt; we have 90s Salma Hayek. The Geckos however are soon accosted by Marin, Danny Trejo, and another actor lost to time, which causes a rumpus that results in Tarantino bleeding from his hand. His blood arouses Hayek’s bloodlust, and she attacks him. Then the cat is out of bag as far as Part 2 is concerned. Vampires transform amuck and start killing the patrons, with the exceptions of Fred Williamson and Tom Savini, both of whom are priceless but especially Savini – Sex Machine – who has a crotch-revolver you could spend all day figuring out the plausibility of, and still end the day wondering what possible purpose it could have.
Clooney kills Hayek after a debate about slavery and marriage, while Savini and Williamson take down most of the vampires in a hilarious montage. Williamson impales four vampires with the legs of a table, while Savini kills Trejo in a scene worth its weight in gold. Trejo hops on a pool table and “come-hither” gestures to Savini, who pulls out a whip that makes Trejo confused. He still has that look of befuddlement on his face after Savini whips his legs out from under him and stakes him.
There’s a certain, hard-to-define rhythm to the kills in this movie that make it funnier than a lot of other movies of similar tone. For example, Lewis forces Marin to swallow a cross, which instantly makes him convulse and melt, then turn and face the camera with a goofy look just before his head explodes. Fourth Wall – gone.
Williamson, by the way, is one bad motherfucker. He rips a vampire’s heart right out of his chest and tells a horrid Vietnam story as Savini is overcome by a vampire bite.
It’s at this point that Keitel really starts to shine. He transforms form a mild-mannered middle-aged ex-priest into a “bad, mmm, mmm, of God”, making a cross out of baseball bat and a sawed-off shotgun, going all Linda Hamilton on these vampires even though he’s bitten and doomed. He actually forces his son and Lewis to swear emphatically that they’ll kill him when he “turns”.
From that point out, Clooney and the gang make a full-on assault on the undead. Another barrage of vampires came in through a window Williamson threw Savini out of, causing questions as to what, among the mutilated and dismembered corpses strewn around, they expected to feed. The final act is pretty satisfying, with Keitel’s wussy son exploding, Clooney taking down one vampire after another with a machine-pump thing armed with a stake that is pretty much a dildo of death, and Lewis hopping around with a crossbow.
Yeah, Lewis is kind of unnecessary.
Clooney and Lewis are the sole survivors, and the movie ends with Clooney going off to El Ray, whatever that is, and Lewis going off in the RV with a wad of cash. The last shot reveals that the Tittie Twsiter is actually a large temple, although it’s never explained what God the vampires worship, and how they got away, apparently for hundreds of years, with routinely killing their customers night after night.
From Dusk till Dawn is a damn fun movie, infinitely enjoyable and always entertaining from the first to the last frame. There’s so much awesomeness in it I almost forgot to mention the band, who make a guitar out of a corpse by sticking its leg up its ass. It’s a very 90s movie, but it doesn’t fall victim to the artsy pretentions of other independent movies of the time and straight up does not give a fuck. If you’re in the mood for pure, nihilist entertainment, you could go worse.
I give it five stars.
From Dusk till Dawn is famous for being a schizophrenic movie, split right down the middle into a gritty-crime drama on the one hand, and a spasmodic vampire-Western on the other. It’s one of those mid-90s movies of which few will be seen again, made in a time when movies could be transgressive and nonsensical and just plain fun.
It’s of a piece with Desperado and makes a good companion piece with it. Robert Rodriguez would never achieve these cinematic heights again. I know Grindhouse has it’s apologists, but it didn’t age well – Death Proof will always suck – but it says a lot when the best thing about both movies combined is a fake slasher trailer by Eli Roth about Thanksgiving.
But they made Machete instead.
Oh Fortuna.
From Dusk till Dawn has an all-star cast, with too many great performances to go into detail over, but it must be said at the outset that George Clooney owns this movie. I’m as big a fan of O Brother Where Art Thou as anyone, but Dusk till Dawn has Clooney’s best performance by a country mile. The developing relationship between him and Harvey Keitel – brilliantly playing against type – is the most fascinating thing in the movie. And that says a lot when this movie features stripper vampires and multiple Cheech Marins, one of whom has a kaleidoscopic vocabulary for compound “pussy” nouns. (I hope pussy doesn’t become a theme this month. I did not intend that.)
The movie initially follows the getaway of the Gecko brothers, Clooney and Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino plays Clooney’s brother Ritchie. They escape through a daring prison break, but this is never shown because the first half, despite being far more disturbing, downplays and implies violence rather than showing – say --Salma Hayek have a visible orgasm after being impaled with a chandelier. Clooney is a no-nonsense professional, focused exclusively on getting to Mexico and doing whatever he must to get there. Tarantino, however, is possessed of an unspecified mental disorder that causes him to hallucinate. For all the importance placed on the polarity of this movie, Part 1 isn’t a super-serious crime drama but has its moments of levity as well.
You don’t make wisecracks right behind an exploding gas-station in the Godfather, is all I’m saying.
There’s a few hints that the manhunt is personal – a trope that makes me miss the much beloved Tom Atkins in Drive Angry – so the brothers Gecko shack up in a seedy motel. Here they run into Keitel and his extended family minus his wife, whose death caused Keitel to apostatize and apparently commit himself to road trips. He has a weak son and Juliette Lewis for a daughter. Lewis is ok, but a bit miscast.
Keitel et. al. are abducted by the Geckos in order to afford the latter safe passage into Mexico. Once there, they proceed to a strip-club optimally named the Tittie Twister, where the Geckos promptly beat the tobacco juice out of Marin for no reason. Clooney starts drinking immediately, and is probably a hardcore alcoholic since he takes at least twenty shots of hard whiskey in this movie and doesn’t so much as slur a syllable. But given what he must put up with in his brother, that’s totally understandable.
Then Salma Hayek does the most erotic fully clothed striptease committed to celluloid, complete with a python and Tarantino drinking beer from her foot, which – if I am certain of anything on this Earth – I know he wrote in the script. Hell, I don’t blame him. Ladies, y’all got 90s Brad Pitt; we have 90s Salma Hayek. The Geckos however are soon accosted by Marin, Danny Trejo, and another actor lost to time, which causes a rumpus that results in Tarantino bleeding from his hand. His blood arouses Hayek’s bloodlust, and she attacks him. Then the cat is out of bag as far as Part 2 is concerned. Vampires transform amuck and start killing the patrons, with the exceptions of Fred Williamson and Tom Savini, both of whom are priceless but especially Savini – Sex Machine – who has a crotch-revolver you could spend all day figuring out the plausibility of, and still end the day wondering what possible purpose it could have.
Clooney kills Hayek after a debate about slavery and marriage, while Savini and Williamson take down most of the vampires in a hilarious montage. Williamson impales four vampires with the legs of a table, while Savini kills Trejo in a scene worth its weight in gold. Trejo hops on a pool table and “come-hither” gestures to Savini, who pulls out a whip that makes Trejo confused. He still has that look of befuddlement on his face after Savini whips his legs out from under him and stakes him.
There’s a certain, hard-to-define rhythm to the kills in this movie that make it funnier than a lot of other movies of similar tone. For example, Lewis forces Marin to swallow a cross, which instantly makes him convulse and melt, then turn and face the camera with a goofy look just before his head explodes. Fourth Wall – gone.
Williamson, by the way, is one bad motherfucker. He rips a vampire’s heart right out of his chest and tells a horrid Vietnam story as Savini is overcome by a vampire bite.
It’s at this point that Keitel really starts to shine. He transforms form a mild-mannered middle-aged ex-priest into a “bad, mmm, mmm, of God”, making a cross out of baseball bat and a sawed-off shotgun, going all Linda Hamilton on these vampires even though he’s bitten and doomed. He actually forces his son and Lewis to swear emphatically that they’ll kill him when he “turns”.
From that point out, Clooney and the gang make a full-on assault on the undead. Another barrage of vampires came in through a window Williamson threw Savini out of, causing questions as to what, among the mutilated and dismembered corpses strewn around, they expected to feed. The final act is pretty satisfying, with Keitel’s wussy son exploding, Clooney taking down one vampire after another with a machine-pump thing armed with a stake that is pretty much a dildo of death, and Lewis hopping around with a crossbow.
Yeah, Lewis is kind of unnecessary.
Clooney and Lewis are the sole survivors, and the movie ends with Clooney going off to El Ray, whatever that is, and Lewis going off in the RV with a wad of cash. The last shot reveals that the Tittie Twsiter is actually a large temple, although it’s never explained what God the vampires worship, and how they got away, apparently for hundreds of years, with routinely killing their customers night after night.
From Dusk till Dawn is a damn fun movie, infinitely enjoyable and always entertaining from the first to the last frame. There’s so much awesomeness in it I almost forgot to mention the band, who make a guitar out of a corpse by sticking its leg up its ass. It’s a very 90s movie, but it doesn’t fall victim to the artsy pretentions of other independent movies of the time and straight up does not give a fuck. If you’re in the mood for pure, nihilist entertainment, you could go worse.
I give it five stars.