From Dusk Till Dawn

365 Films

Entry #81

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Directed by Robert Rodriguez

I remember becoming first aware of From Dusk Till Dawn through one of those electronic press kit thingies they used to air on Entertainment Tonight.  It may shock some of you to know this but there was a time when the idea of George Clooney starring in his own film was laughable at best.  And in this one, he had some sort of crazy neck-down-his-shoulder-and-on-to-his-forearm tattoo, wacky shit, right?  I was also well aware that this film marked the team up of indie genre gods Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, which in and of itself had all sorts of unfathomable potential (at the time anyway).  I knew it had something to do with bank robbers who flee to Mexico and hole up in a bar filled an astonishing variety of terrifying, blood-thirty vampires.  As you may have deduced, I was a little more than tantalized by this prospect.  Yet, this is another one that for reasons I can’t quite remember; I missed in its initial theatrical run.  I was also incredibly confused by the fact that From Dusk Till Dawn didn’t set the world on fire the way I had anticipated it to.  Its release was largely ignored and subsequently forgotten.  A few months pass by and I get the chance to rent the tape when it is finally released on video and I believe the only two words that could have possibly summarized my reaction were: fucking amazing.  Now I understand from a critical standpoint and a more mature perspective, From Dusk Till Dawn is not what anybody would call masterpiece theater (I’m not actually sure what kind of movie that is either).  It’s trashy, the characters are pretty standard in their horror movie trope representation, and it is really two very different films pressing up against one another.  It’s interesting to note that From Dusk Till Dawn could be considered Rodriguez and Tarantino’s first experiment in the modern day Grindhouse genre.  An experiment that would come to fruition with their much more ambitious actual Grindhouse homage some eleven years later as a great success to some and a tremendous failure to others (I happen to be in the former camp but that’s for another entry).  This is corroborated by an unsubstantiated piece of internet gossip I read once (so it isn’t really) that Tarantino, supposedly only wrote the script up until his character dies (*spoiler alert) and then Rodriguez essentially wrote the rest of the film as a series of splatter movie and violent gross out gags.  That doesn’t really hold much water to me because the Fred Williamson Vietnam monologue seems purely Tarantinian, but then again, it could have easily been Rodriguez trying to copy Tarantino’s voice.  Who the hell knows, it doesn’t really matter other than it’s an interesting prism through which to view this film.  The set up of bank robbing brothers on the run is the Tarantino movie and the Dawn of the Dead but with Vampires second half is the Rodriguez movie.  There had to have been some division of duties between the two of them, right?  In any event, as much as this is often used as faint praise, I couldn’t be more genuine when I say From Dusk Till Dawn is a fuck-load of fun.  As someone who has never gotten quite the same adrenaline kick out of horror movies as others, I completely understood the plentiful bounty of thrills to be had by the sheer inventiveness that the genre inspires.  It’s like watching Rodriguez and his team continually pull off one grotesque magic trick after the other while never losing the sense of humor that Tarantino carefully applies in the set-up portion.  What I actually remember most about From Dusk Till Dawn is the fact that I used to think this movie was hatred-proof.  I thought you had to have a heart of stone and a funny bone of steel not to be blown back in your seat by how awesome this movie is.  Cut to, literally, my first week of college and in an attempt to bond with my new roommates I thought it would be nice to show them something that meant a lot to me but also had (I thought) enormous universal appeal in terms of its potential to entertain.   So I pop it in and we begin our group watch and everything seems to be going fine as the movie progresses.  I am getting my post-viewing, self-congratulatory pat on the back ready for bonding us all together in harmony when one of my roommates utters this as the credits roll.  “That was really great, until the fucking vampires showed up.”  That was followed by another roommate making this proclamation, “I can’t think of another movie that went so horribly downhill that fast.”  I had failed in that regard but in another I had succeeded because they all bonded with each other out of their common loathing for the film I just shown them.  They were also entirely united against me because of that.  The lesson in all this is that they were and continue to be so incredibly wrong in every single facet of their interpretation of From Dusk Till Dawn.  That is the only lesson that could possibly be salvaged from such an unfortunate debacle.  Whatever meaning is to be taken away from this, I can’t stress enough how much I love this movie.  It’s for real.