From Dusk Till Dawn
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
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Last updated: December 4, 2009, 12:15 pm
From Dusk Till Dawn Customer reviews:
Average Rating: 4.0 Total Reviews: 246
(YJM, 2009-10-28) The movie starts off great. Instantly you hate George Clooney's character but are intrigued at the same time because he does a bad guy so well. I have always liked Harvey Keitel and Juliet Lewis as well. The acting was pretty good across the board, the music was great, the special effects were good (some really cool looking vampires in this one), and the gore was over the top, so why the low rating? Simple, this movie takes a nose dive when it turns into a vampire movie. Not because vampires aren't cool, and not because they're done poorly (they're not), but at the unbelievable reactions of the patrons. All of a sudden it's as though all of them (the ones not initially eaten) have been expert vampire killers their whole life. There is no surprise, no sense of fear, no sense of amazement, just a sort of attitude of "okay, time to kill a bunch of vampires, yawn" As another reviewer put it, if I saw a vampire, no, make that if anyone saw a vampire they would be gripped with fear. I wanted to see some of that. The completely unrealistic reactions of the patrons turned what could have been a scary, amazing vampire thriller into a cartoon. It was even more cartoon like how they went about killing the vampires. Dropping them on a table leg with a completely flat bottom. Excuse me, but how exactly is that supposed to go through a body, unless the body is made of play dough? The vampires are so easy to kill in this movie it's only their numbers that make them a nuisance. It is apparent the decision was made to turn the vampire half of the movie into a kind of tongue in cheek, comedy, but it didn't work. Robert Rodriquez is a fantastic director. Planet Terror is one of my all time favorite horror movie's ever. That film managed to expertly combine humor and horror, from Dusk Till Dawn does not. This movie deserved a much better treatment of the vampire half. Serious, not "okay, the vampires are here let's start killing em." For the male viewers the movie is worth watching right till the end of the drop gorgeous Selma Hayek's sexy dance, then it can be safely turned off.
(Eric S. Kim, 2009-10-14) If you're sick of all this Twilight phenomenon that's still occurring as of today, and are looking for different and far more bad@** vampires, then you've made the right decision by finding the movie From Dusk Till Dawn here on Amazon. In this film, we not only see vampires and blood, but also some awesome action and some very dark humor. The first half of the film is basically an action adventure with George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino. The second half is where the bigger mayhem is found: vampires, guns, gore, explosions, etc. And it all happens in a strip club: can it get any stranger than that? Everyone does an extraordinary job here: Clooney and Tarantino as the main protagonist; Keitel, Lewis, and Liu as supporting characters; Hayek as the sexy Satanico Pandemonium; Marin as comic relief; the direction, the music, the editing, the cinematography, everything is done with flair and verve. So forget Twilight and its "sparkly" vampires that only teenage girls will love; From Dusk Till Dawn is a real treat if you're into REAL awesome vampires.
(Michael Gmirkin, 2009-09-30) Wow, this is a wonderfully campy, trashy, occasionally sexy, gory grindhouse-style romp. This movie's definitely for the adults in the audience. It's got nudity. It's got vampires, it's got Cheech (a lot of Cheech, if I recall correctly; how many roles did he play?), Tarantino (both alive and un-dead!), Clooney and Hayek. It's got a guy with a gun for his... umm... Y'know. ;) It's got a Super Soaker with holy Water, it's got a crossbow, it's got an automated staking jack-hammer, it's got a priest turning to the dark side (not intentionally). It's just one giant slow-motion train wreck, and wonderfully executed (if campy; the vampire make-up is reminiscent of that from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). If you like vampire movies and/or grindhouse-style movies, you've got to like this. You've just got to. I'd give you a moneyback guarantee, but you never gave me any money. If you don't like it... Well, it's not for everyone. It's crude, it's got bad language and sexual situations. If you *do* like it, you might also like Bordello Of Blood & Demon Knight or The Lost Boys, maybe Planet Terror, for the zombie fans out there.
(Christopher E. Bivona, 2009-09-12) This movies is JUST a tad bit over the top. Not George Clooney's finest, but still a typical Rodriguez film. It has its moments and what stood out to me was that Harvey Keitel's performance was probably the best, I personally thought he did a hell of a job in a movie that doesn't quite seem to fit his genre like lets say a Taxi Driver. The script is just hideous, I understand Tarantino is known for his one-liner movies but the writing was so horrible it was practically comedic. The movie is I'd say about one hour and forty five minutes, you dont learn of the vampires until they hit the Titty Twister in Mexico, about an hour into the film so to recap, 2/3 of the movie is about escaped fugitives one a thief, the other a psychopathic serial killer who by the way are brothers go figure who go an rampage, kidnap a preacher and his two teenage children and threaten their lives in exchange for a safe ride across the border. That was the first hour of the film. Then comes the vampires... almost completely out of know where. They stop at this strip bar called the Titty Twister where only bikers and truckers are allowed in and everything is going well, people are drinking and getting horny from cheap strippers and then suddenly Tarantino and Clooney get a rude awakening from one of the bar's figureheads, they get into a huge fight and Selma Hayek gets excited over the blood gushing from Tarantino's hand and she obviously cannot control her actions at this point and morphs into this bloodsucking being. From there, all HELL (literally) breaks loose. Listen, I get it, this is suppose to represent exploitation films of the 70s, it has that kind of grimy and gritty style to it with the cheap effects and the outragious amount of violence and gore and one-liners, its ok, its what actually makes the movie work but the problem is you have a talented cast and a somewhat talented director who has had much better films in his career and all of sudden it appears that they've hit a road block. The movie has its moments, don't get me wrong but the plot and storyline suffer, the whole fugitive / Vampire hunters just doesn't seem to mesh properly. Its a fun movie to watch but not to be taken seriously. This is a Tarantino film, not a Keitel and Clooney film, they are much better actors than what is portrayed in this shoot-um up action / horror flick. Rodriguez's Sin City was much better than this and that was extremely gory and violent but Sin City was true to Noir and Pulp movies and comics whereas I'm not too convinced that From Dusk Till Dawn was true to exploitation films of the 70s. You want to see a real violent and gory mimic exploitation of the 70s? Watch the Devil's Rejections by Rob Zombie, you're in for a real treat. There are some things I liked about the movie and alot I didnt. I actually enjoyed Clooney and Tarantino and their struggles trying to get across the border but the whole vampire image in the last forty five minutes really turned me off and Cheche Maron, there's a reason he's in movies like this. The way I look at, this is a cheap drive-in movie and actually your seeing two for the price of one... not a bad deal, but wasn't that how exploitation movies of the 70s were shown, two for one or a double feature? This movie definitely will have its fanbase, but its not for everyone. Be weary of what your getting into.
(J. S. Radford, 2009-08-23) Even the Selma Hayek snake dance does not make this film worth watching much less save it from being an ultimately putrid, truly silly, mindless gore-fest of a trash heap of celluloid (or DVD plastic). My God! Tarantino is such a jumble of brilliance and baseness. Well, I guess at least he will long be remembered. But this film, I hope, will be one that is forgotten. I am dismayed that George Clooney is in this film. If he is the good actor I think, he must at times awake at night in a cold sweat to think he was part of this gutter trash film. It's embarrassing.