From Dusk Till Dawn

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

From a match made in heaven comes a movie spawned in hell! Young hotshot director Robert Rodriquez (El Mariachi, Desperado) teamed up with Pulp Fiction auteur Quentin Tarantino (offering his services as writer and co-star) to make this outrageous, no-holds-barred hybrid of high-octane crime and gruesome horror. QT plays Richard Gecko, a borderline psychopath who breaks his career-criminal brother, Seth (George Clooney), out of prison, after which they rob a bank and leave a trail of dead and wounded in their bloody wake. Then they hijack a mobile home driven by a former Baptist minister (Harvey Keitel) who quit the church after his wife’s death and hit the road with his two children (played by Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu). Heading to Mexico with their hostages, the infamous Gecko brothers arrive at the Titty Twister bar to rendezvous for a money drop, but they don’t realize that they’ve just entered the nocturnal lair of a bloodthirsty gang of vampires! With not-so-subtle aplomb, Rodriguez and Tarantino shift into high gear with a nonstop parade of gore, gunfire, and pointy-fanged mayhem featuring Salma Hayek as a snake-charming dancer whose bite is much worse than her bark. If you’re a fan of Tarantino’s lyrical dialogue and pop-cultural wit, you’ll have fun with the road-movie half of this supernatural horror-comedy, but if your taste runs more to exploding heads and eyeballs, sloppy entrails and morphing monsters, the second half provides a connoisseur’s feast of gross-out excess. Bon appétit! —Jeff Shannon

Barnes and Noble

In 1996, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino joined forces as a directing/writing team to create one of the most gleeful and explosive vampire flicks ever. A brutal crime caper that morphs into an even more brutal horror flick, From Dusk Till Dawn is a visceral cross-genre experiment. The story follows hardened bank-robbing brothers Seth and Richard Gecko (George Clooney and Tarantino) as they head to Mexico with horrifically unexpected results. Escaping the U.S. authorities with the help of a faithless preacher (Harvey Keitel) and his children (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu), the hoods find themselves in the film’s greatest set piece, a rowdy border bar where all the doors and windows suddenly seal up and a vampire feeding frenzy breaks out. Tarantino’s trademark pop-culture-inspired script makes references both to his and Rodriguez’s previous films and provides rich fodder for the actors. Clooney’s work here proved his leading-man mettle, and Keitel’s preacher is a complicated role worthy of his acting skills. Rodriguez—with Desperado under his belt and Spy Kids in his future—makes the film a freewheeling gas right from the start, taking its abrupt genre shift in stride. With a cast that also includes everyone from Salma Hayek and ‘70s blaxploitation hero Fred Williamson to horror makeup master Tom Savini, this remains among the most flat-out entertaining gore-fests ever filmed. Jason Bergenfeld