Two brothers flee from their bank robbery south across Texas, into Mexico and into Hell in 1996's From Dusk till Dawn. What a wonderfully fucked up movie. Screenwriter Quentin Tarantino again shows his unparalleled talent for writing bastards, so much so that the criminal world implied by the film feels at least as scary as the Satanic, supernatural world. And director Robert Rodriguez shows why he's one of the best action directors of the past thirty years.
I was really in the mood to watch this movie in October but couldn't afford to rent it at the time. But I noticed a couple weeks ago it's on HBOMax, which I temporarily subscribed to again to watch Peacemaker, so I finally had my fix. I hadn't seen From Dusk till Dawn since the '90s. Probably on VHS. It's a lot better than I remembered.
A lot of the criticism about this movie has to do with its combination of genres. The first half of the film is a fugitive/hostage film, the second half is a zombie apocalypse film--I say zombies despite the fact that they're vampires because they function more like zombies traditionally do than vampires. A lot of critics say the two parts of the movie don't really coexist harmoniously and that used to be my feeling, too. You get invested in the tension between the two criminals and the people they kidnap. Seth (George Clooney) sees himself as a professional thief while his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), is a slave to his perversion. The family they kidnap is headed by patriarch Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), a pastor who hasn't lost his belief in God but has lost his love for God. It's an interesting distinction.
The underlying tension revolves around Richie, established as a rapist and ultra-violent killer, like Jack the Ripper, potentially assaulting Jacob's daughter, Kate, played by Juliette Lewis. It's kind of interesting seeing her back in an innocent lamb role after Natural Born Killers.
There's an evident internal conflict for Seth. He doesn't like to hurt people needlessly but he also doesn't seem to feel especially bad about the people he does kill. Jacob clearly senses Seth's conflict and you can sense him trying to figure out a way to use it. In the second half of the film, when the group are fighting for their lives against the sudden appearance of vampires, the tension from he first half of the film kind of disappears, not the least because Richie gets killed. That's how I used to feel about it but I feel differently now. I find the vampires much more effective now, especially as I think about their presence in terms of the characters' self-perceptions. Seth is a guy who works completely without a net, morally speaking. He doesn't like to kill but he also has no compunctions about it. Jacob, by believing in God and rejecting Him, lives in a potent state of sin, despite being the film's moral centre. So basically, no-one has any reason to believe they're protected from damnation.
One of the main differences between Rodriguez and Tarantino is that Rodriguez tends to lean more into fantasy. Don't believe for a second Rodriguez doesn't know how absurd the crotch pistol from Desperado is--and it turns up again here, now wielded/worn by Tom Savini. From Dusk till Dawn very nicely blurs the line between the fantasy world of Rodriguez and the more realistic crime world of Tarantino.
The film begins with this gaudy "World of Liquor" shop. It's believably over-the-top, I've seen plenty of places of similar decorative flamboyance in California. But the Titty Twister bar in Mexico seems like something from another world.
Yet it's close enough to World of Liquor that I'm drawn into believing it.
I love how inconsistent the vampire designs are in the film. They're influenced, like every other vampire film since, by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. But like that film, you can never quite predict the form he vampire's going to take. And it's startling when there's some exaggerated facial feature, like a malevolent parody of the human body.
And Salma Hayek as Santanico is a worthy successor to Dracula's Brides.
If you ever wonder why Hayek is a movie star, watch this movie or Desperado. She really hasn't done anything as amazing since, usually just turning up to help fill out an all star cast. She is a demon goddess in front of Robert Rodriguez's camera, though. When you consider this scene along with Jessica Alba in Sin City and Rose McGowan in Planet Terror, it's clear Rodriguez is genius at this stuff. Three times he's presented actresses in solo dance sequences that have been the high points of their careers. I see now that he directed a a Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande video two years ago. They sure chose wisely.
I love how the film ends, too, with Seth negotiating a percentage of the loot with the local gang lord. The encounter with the supernatural just turns out to be another step in his descent into a bigger Hell, and his conflict comes back just so he can show a moment of kindness to Kate. Of course, that probably is how it would go. Usually in vampire movies, if a vampire shows up, it dominates the lives of the characters. In From Dusk till Dawn, it's just another gruesome permutation of this living perdition. What a terrific film.
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