Without a doubt one of the craziest genre movies ever made, From Dusk Till Dawn starts as a seemingly routine crime flick before degenerating into an all-night bar brawl between a rag-tag band of human survivors and a pack of bloodthirsty Mexican vampires. An unashamedly gory B-movie is enhanced by some great dialogue, inventive practical effects and a breakout big-screen role for George Clooney. As you could guess from the title, the narrative of the movie does in fact stretch from dusk until dawn shockingly enough. Just from the first scene we gather that the Gecko brothers, Quentin Tarantino's Richie in particular, have a penchant for letting things spiral out of control given that a brief stop to pick up a map ends up with two dead bodies and a burnt down liquor store. Their efforts to escape the FBI and Texas Rangers have left a trail of destruction in their wake, but things really get out of hand when they stop at the Titty Twister bar with the Fuller family as hostages. When all hell breaks loose, it descends increasingly into horror movie territory as the survivors are picked off one by one. Foreshadowing their later collaboration on Grindhouse, From Dusk Till Dawn is essentially a double-feature in itself; the first half a tale of two felons on the run, the second an OTT B-movie featuring severed heads, gallons of blood and vampire strippers. It shouldn't work, but it does. Squeezing every last drop out of the $20m budget, Rodriguez directs with his usual stylistic verve while Tarantino's script provides all the quotability you would expect. As evidenced by the recent TV series, the narrative is nowhere near as entertaining when it's stretched out longer than one night.
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