Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1994 Neil Jordan film, Interview with the Vampire. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 1996 Robert Rodriguez film From Dusk Till Dawn. This article will contain spoilers.
I would have deeply loved this movie when I was a fourteen-year-old boy.
I didn’t see From Dusk till Dawn then because I confused it with Bordello of Blood, released the same year and starring Dennis Miller. As a teen in the early 2000s, I thought it was just the R-rated version of that film, which by the turn of the century had been relegated to channels like Comedy Central in a modestly cut-down version to make it acceptable for cable. Dennis Miller was a comedian, you see. Yes, I know. Even at that age I had decided that I didn’t need to see any more of his work, and certainly didn’t need to see any of the work I’d already watched again. Home internet and burnable CDs were taking off; there were other places I could go for half-naked women. Swordfish had just come out, for instance.
By the time I realized my mistake, I was well into the “I respect Quentin Tarantino’s work, but I find his whole deal exhausting” zone that many others have slipped into over the years, and I never bothered going back to correct this oversight in my personal viewing catalogue until now. And yeah, that’s more or less how I feel about this film as a thirty-eight year old: I would have loved this shit when I was fourteen.
Well, not all of it. This picture takes a minute to get going. A full sixty, in fact; there’s almost an hour between when the film opens on a liquor store in Texas and when Salma Hayek comes out from the back of the Satanic sex club wearing a big snake and a small outfit, and there’s another six minutes after that before the film finally lets you in on the secret that it’s a vampire flick. For the fullness of that time we’re concerned with a grimy bank robbery and criminal psychosis thriller plot that doesn’t matter very much; two hardened killer criminal brothers, Seth and Rick Gecko (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, Actor), have busted out of a courthouse in Kansas, lit off south through Texas, robbed a bank there, and are hightailing to the Mexican border to buy sanctuary from a Mexican cartel. They have a bank teller they’re holding hostage, but Rick rapes and murders her in short order, so they need new victims; they find lapsed preacher Jacob (Harvey Keitel) and his two kids Scott and Kate (Ernest Liu and Juliette Lewis), who are on an RV trip across the state to get over the death of his wife and their mother, which has caused Jacob to lose his faith in God’s love. They kidnap them, steal the RV, and we spend fifteen pretty dead minutes on the border crossing south into Mexico while Rick now starts fantasizing about raping and murdering Kate. Cheech Marin is fun here in his first cameo of the film as Mexican border police, which is the best thing I can say for it.
This would have been much better when I was fourteen, mainly because I wouldn’t have seen the other Quentin Tarantino-written films that did this schtick better, like Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction (didn’t get around to those until like freshman year of college) or the other Robert Rodriguez-directed films that did this schtick better, like El Mariachi, Desperado, and…well, this is a cut above Once Upon a Time in Mexico, come to think of it. The high point of the first hour and change of the film is the opening scene, where we get basically both creative minds’ whole deal distilled down real pure: A shithead Texas cop walks into a liquor store, takes a beer from the fridge, orders a bottle of whiskey from the backstop, and shoots the shit with the clerk about a mentally-disabled man who cooked his breakfast in terms that make you think actually both of them are kinda shitheads, even when adjusting for era with the nineties. That’s so you don’t feel bad when our two slick bank robbers, both in suits and holding guns to the heads of two young women wearing tank tops without bras, shoot one of ‘em in the head and set the other one on fire in the ensuing shootout. This is all because one of the two cool guys in suits is a dangerously deranged, pathetic moral void (not the one played by George Clooney). It’s grimy, fun, effective, has the sort of real kick-it-to-eleven cartoon quality you expect from a Robert Rodriguez fight scene; they empty like 30 bullets into this liquor store clerk who was genuinely trying to keep it so everyone got to walk out alive, and then on the news in the motel room later, the attractive blonde anchor smiles as she reports on the liquor store’s explosion and the graphic displaying the two brothers’ body count dings and goes up like a gameshow.
At thirty-eight, I’m going, where are the fucking vampires, Quentin? How much longer am I gonna be dealing with your Acting instead? And like, fine, he’s appropriate for what the role demands. He’s clearly only put himself in this role so he can do foot stuff later with Salma Hayek, and he’s clearly only in the movie so much beforehand to give him plausible deniability before her and the rest of the cast and crew (but not before God). Keitel is fantastic as the quiet, broken father and padre you know is going to hulk up later in the film. This is famously one of Clooney’s more against-type leading man roles, and it does make you wish he did more stuff like this when he was younger, but he’s not the best choice for Tarantino’s particular style of dialogue — or rather he is, but only for half the script. Clooney’s real good when the order of the day is sociopathic charisma over barely-contained menace; once the vampires show up, he’s asked to hit a higher, pulpier gear and he never really gets up to it.
But once the vampires show up in minute fucking 62, my God, what a picture. It’s hard to show stills from too much of the preceding ten minutes or following ten minutes of the film because there are simply too many topless women constantly in shot, whether dancing for the bar patrons or ripping them apart, but once we get moving, we get moving. Great looks on the vampires themselves, from the disfigurement the dancers go to all the way to the grungy punk band whose instruments all turn into ludicrous corpse-based versions thereof. Fantastic practical effects that take most of their cues from the Hammer Horror Dracula when it comes to depicting vampire death, with the dying monsters going from withering prosthetics on the actor into gross-out skeletons and organ piles, some getting two or three different grody melting skulls as they go. (Salma Hayek as Santanico Pandemonium is of such rare beauty they just have her melt away once she gets staked rather than ruin the moment by shriveling her up.) It feels like a completely different production, in a good way, once the taut crime thriller exterior sloughs off and we see the blood-soaked gonzo monster flick beneath.
The plot isn’t really important from here on out; it’s no longer that kind of movie. We’re introduced to Frost (Fred Williamson) and Sex Machine (Tom Savini) mainly so they can kill a bunch of vampires in cool ways with their gimmicks — Vietnam Vet martial arts for Frost, a bullwhip and a chastity belt repurposed into a dick-mounted derringer-type machine gun for Sex Machine, hence the name — and then become vampires themselves so Seth, Jacob, and the kids can put them down too. As soon as the film crossed the Mexican border, it crossed over into genre pulp magic land, so vampire bites act kind of like zombie bites when they need to turn you quick, and how long until you’re one of the undead is entirely up to the needs and conveniences of the next action set piece. Frost and Sex Machine turn immediately; our heroic father instead gets it as a ticking dramatic timebomb, because he’s holy or whatever. There’s a gearing up scene in the bar’s storeroom here that’s the basis for a bunch of improvised weapon spots in future vampire and zombie media; “super soaker with holy water” in particular is one of the most nineties things you can imagine. And when we get the final showdown on the floor of the dive bar, Sex Machine and Frost turn into suitably grody super monsters, and as promised we get vampire Jacob, and more importantly the props of vampire Jacob with half his head blown off. Scott dies, Kate lives, she and Seth escape, there’s some thin plot resolution which absolutely doesn’t matter. The final gag where the sunlight catches the disco ball and blows all the remaining vampires up as the surviving humans run for the exit is all the coda this film really needs.
It’s funny but pretty fitting that when this came out, it was the crime story most critics were into and the vampire stuff they thought was an unnecessary hat on a hat. And that makes some sense when in 1996, Tarantino and Rodriguez were still super-fresh voices and Tarantino’s maximalist, self-indulgent dialogue was given full run and rope. The twin super-indulgences of Kill Bill and Sin City hadn’t happened yet; both men would very shortly be known as much more than crime thriller filmmakers. Spending a full hour on setting up the thriller story is also much more effective if you don’t see vampires coming as a third act surprise, which one presumes was entirely possible at the time that the film released and incredibly not so even five years after its release, let alone almost thirty. All in all, I was not prepared for just how much Quentin Tarantino in a suit with a gun this movie had to offer, and that does hurt it somewhat, but once you’re to the part where the fourteen-year-old boys started paying attention — it’s when Cheech, now a vampire bouncer, says the word “pussy” three dozen times in ninety seconds and then there’s five topless women on screen for the next twenty minutes — this thing still really cooks.
Next week, the Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan project Sinners is out in theaters, and I’ll have a review of it on Friday.
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