Photo by Joyce RudolphStake House: George Clooney (right) and Harvey Keitel go to bat in "From Dusk Till Dawn"
The vampires strike back in 'From Dusk Till Dawn'
By Richard von Busack
It was a job for Ranger Cordell Walker, with his compassion, his immobile face and his kick-boxing expertise. But unfortunately, "the eyes of the ranger" of which Chuck Norris sings were closed, for once. And Walker, Texas Ranger is a fictional character from TV, and these miserable souls in From Dusk Till Dawn were all too real: a pair of ruthless convicts lamming to Mexico, a helpless hostage family, a nightclub full of vampires. It sounds like a recipe for trouble, and it was. By the time it was over, more pain-free violence had been unleashed than in the total professional careers of all six of the Three Stooges.
Quentin Tarantino's stock is in a slump over Four Rooms, and he'll probably be further downgraded for having scripted this uproarious, mayhem-filled, gleefully bad-taste horror comedy. Maligned as an actor, Tarantino acts, anyway; beady-eyed, he evinces weird pathos as Richard, a bewildered rapist (whose one assault is performed off-camera). He's in conflict with his tattooed noble thug of a brother, Seth, played by ER's George Clooney, accustomed to blood from the operating room but perhaps not to this epic quantity.
Piling genre parody upon genre parody like a cinematic sandwich, From Dust Till Dawn takes as its source The Desperate Hours, Vamp and Night of the Living Dead, concentrating its plots with such abject gratuitousness as a triple performance by Cheech Marin, silly grisly gore effects by Tom Savini (who co-stars) and death by rotating mirrored disco ball. You'd have to be French to find a subtext here. And what words, even French, can describe the stark-raving squalor of the Titty Twister, the worst of all roadhouses, a haunt of truckers, bikers and vampires--an S. Clay Wilson-style bucket of blood at which hostage Jacob (Harvey Keitel) can only get service by demonstrating that as an RV driver he holds a class-2 license, which technically makes him a trucker.
Ex-Then Came Bronson star Michael Parks is around as a Texas Ranger with a very un-Walkerlike obscene whisper. Black actionmovie legend Fred "The Hammer" Williamson tells a tall tale of Vietnam horror that is treated like the exploitation-movie cliché it is. Juliette Lewis, in her first good movie in years, plays the Surviving Virgin (it's the sentimentality of gore movies that allows the young female lead to make it to the last reel). Even as a gently reared teenager, Lewis looks like she's been hooking ever since she was old enough to say, "Wanna date?" To some, From Dusk Until Dawn is a stupid vampire-movie parody. To others, it's the best thing since Dead Alive. Even without Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez (Desperado) on its credits, From Dusk Till Dawn would have made a name for itself.
From Dusk Till Dawn (R; 105 min.), directed by Robert Rodriguez, written by Quentin Tarantino and starring George Clooney, Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Keitel.
