[Movies] From Dusk Till Dawn

Like most other fanboys, I have a healthy appreciation for the works of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. They have certainly developed a flair with rather violent movies that act as an homage to a very specific cult-favored sub-genre of film making.

From Dusk Till Dawn was one of their earlier collaborations and pretty much a precursor to their most recent, double-feature project, Grindhouse. It had all the usual stuff - very wordy dialog, excessive blood and fairly big ticket actors here and there but in comparison to their other works, I can't quite call this one of my favorites.

From Dusk Till Dawn follows the story of the Gecko Brothers, sibling assassins for hire who are on the run after a bank robbery and trying to escape into Mexico. There they are scheduled to meet up with a local kingpin and need to make it through the night at a local strip joint. Things become more interesting when it turns out the strip club is actually home to a group of vampires.

The movie leads with George Clooney playing Seth Gecko with Quentin Tarantino himself playing Richard Gecko, which was a bit odd but then I guess I can work with it. Tarantino does have a propensity for starring in his own movies much like how Stephen King tends to cameo in films based on his books. Still, it's a bit off-key for me and his characters seem to be cut from a single pattern, really, involving a lot of swearing, rapid-fire talking and the like.

I wasn't very overwhelmed with the writing behind this piece. Perhaps the goal was to sort of pay tribute to grindhouse-style films much like their later piece was but in terms of execution, it wasn't as good. It felt way too much like a b-move in many respects and while I know they must have been aiming for campiness, it just came off as somewhat cheap and rather lame at certain parts.

The movie just sort of ends eventually and it doesn't necessarily go anywhere or leave you all that fulfilled. Still, it's a decent effort and I can sort of appreciate what their goal was but it just didn't come across all that well. It's worth seeing at least once, probably on TV or HBO if you get that but I wouldn't go out of my way to purchase or even just rent it.