For the most part I’d have to say From Dusk Till Dawn bites. Seth and his brother Richie Gecko are very violent, very dangerous career criminals. Seth, who at least has a small sense of honor, regards himself as a professional, albeit a professional bank robber. Richie, a vicious sexual predator, is just plain nuts. In the process of escaping from jail and robbing a bank they kill roughly three dozen people, including a large number of police officers, in addition to taking a hostage that Richie eventually rapes and brutally kills. And these are the good guys. Of course, having people such as this as the heroes of any film would be ridiculous if it were not for the fact that the real bad guys are not even human. Escaping into Mexico the Geckos take hostages, a minister and his two teenage children, before finding refuge in what they believe is an all night strip joint where they plan to meet a confederate. Instead they discover the strip joint is actually a cover for a horde of vampires who lure truckers and bikers in with the promise of sex, alcohol and drugs in order to feast upon them. Surrounded by the undead the Gecko brothers, the minister Jacob and his children and the surviving bikers must try to stay alive from dusk until dawn when the vampires must seek shelter from the day.
From Dusk Till Dawn is wildly uneven in terms of quality and as a result I honestly don’t know how I feel about this particular film. There were moments that were very well done, especially some of the character interactions between the Gecko brothers or between the minister Jacob and Seth Gecko. George Clooney does his usual excellent work as Seth, a man who, though violent himself, recognizes that his brother is completely insane, but loves him too much to do anything about it. Quentin Tarintino, who wrote the script for From Dusk Till Dawn, does an almost equally good job as Richie Gecko layering his violent madness under an almost childlike innocence. Cheech Marin also does well playing not one; not two, but three different roles in From Dusk Till Dawn playing his second role with an especially crude, but effusive glee. In fact, the only performer in this film that didn’t impress me was Harvey Kietel, an actor of great talent, but one who seemed to be almost sleep walking through most of his performance as the minister Jacob. There were other nice moments as well, such as when the survivors of the first vampire attack huddle together to compare notes on what they know about vampires, but are unable to come up with anything other then horror movie cliches. And the last scene in From Dusk Till Dawn is frankly almost breathtaking in its implication of how deep the vampire menace truly was. That scene was really good work and went a long way by itself in helping to redeem the quality of From Dusk Till Dawn.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the bulk of this movie was just plain **stupid**. Not to mention being filled with gobs of gratuitous gore, violence and nudity along with language that would make a sailor blush. Almost all of the character reactions to what was occurring were so unreal as to be ludicrous. For example, everybody one character loves and esteems is killed in a horribly grotesque fashion, but this has no apparent effect; not even tears let alone hysterics or shock, on that character’s mental state. It’s all just kind of shrugged off like a bad date. The vampires, which appear at one point to number in the dozens if not in the hundreds, often tend to just stumble around their victims waiting to be staked, splashed with holy water or shot with wooden arrows so they can die in the most grotesque fashion possible. And some of the secondary characters are completely ridiculous, especially the biker character called Sex Machine who gives a whole new meaning to the idea of guns as a symbol of phallic power.
So, in short, From Dusk Till Dawn has a few really nice moments that are interspersed in a film that sinks to depths so wretchedly bad as to defy description. But given this extreme dichotomy I have no idea how to rate it so, for the first time, I’m just going to pass on giving a film a grade. I guess I would say that if you enjoy films such as Night of the Living Dead or The Evil Dead then you would probably enjoy this film. And if you enjoy Quentin Tarentino’s writing, as seen in other films such as Resevoir Dogs, then you might enjoy From Dusk Till Dawn. For everyone else the stupidity that regularly pops up in this film, the unrelenting gore, the violence and foul language will cause you to find From Dusk Till Dawn very unappealing and you should avoid it the way a vampire avoids a cross.
Average Grade: ?
