From Dusk Till Dawn Review
Written by: jamhorner
"I'm a mean m….,m…. servant of God" – Jacob Fuller This would probably be one of the most interesting renditions of a vampire tale of have ever seen. It can be considered as being two movies in one whether it is or not. The first half of the movie is your typical Quentin Tarantino gangland movie. Its starts off with the Gecko Brothers Seth (George Clooney) and Richard (QT) who have just fled a grisly bank robbery and end up kidnapping a retired preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis) and his adopted son (Ernest Liu). This half is pure Tarantino for a number of reasons. It is filled with long and interesting dialogue, which makes for good conversation; there is a lot of violence and foul-mouth language. Those reasons would probably be the exact same reasons why I think that this movie is spectacular.
This half is almost a cliché, prior to the bank robbery the brothers try to hitch a ride to Mexico so that they could live off of the stolen money. However, Quentin steers away from the cliché by adding in a retired preacher who lost his wife. I love Harvey's performance of a father figure and servant of god rather than a gun-totin' hit man. His character is almost believable. The chemistry between Clooney's Seth and Tarantino's Richard are almost humorous but in the same sense very violent. I think that they work amazingly together. Of course when they get to Mexico the brothers have to stop at a strip club and from there on, it takes a swan dive into hell.
The strip club is populated by a sleazy bartender (Danny Trejo), a luscious vixen stripper (Salma Hayek), the raunchy doorman (Cheech Marin), an ex war vet (Fred Williamson) and of coarse the suave Sex Machine (Tom Savini). All of these characters, especially Trejo, Hayek and Marin do a great job in acting out their characters. Even Cheech Marin is scary as hell being a vampire. Tom Savini's Sex Machine is probably one of the funniest characters in a horror movie that I have seen and they all play their parts to perfection. Even the mariachi band does a great job playing there part when it comes time for their transformation.
I'll go further to say that vampire strippers are the best concept for this sort of genre. We shouldn't be surprised that QT thought this on up. There is also the cheese factor. There is a lot of corny scenes and cheesy one-liners as well as cheesy fight scenes such as a spaghetti western-style fight scene between the survivors and the vampire strippers. Another great cheesy scenes is filling squirt guns with holy water and making condom balloons with holy water. If you are not scared by now then you'll surly be laughing by now since this movie is so ridiculously well made by Quentin and Robert Rodriguez. Of course the cheese factor does sort of steer away from the story and the unnoticeable plot but I still enjoyed myself.
The set was great. Half of the movie takes place on the road and the other half takes place in a strip club that looks like a ancient pyramid decorated with Christmas lights, frill, vodka bottles and naked women. The front of the club looks like skid row gone horribly wrong, with motorcyclists and a huge tire fire, with skinned cow skulls and empty beer bottles lying all over the place.
In a hasty conclusion this movie was fun to watch, very fun to watch and although it has it's cheesy moments it's still a great vampire flick by two great writers and directors that should not be missed. I would highly recommend this film to any horror and gore nut out there. I certainly liked and I hope you do to.