From bad till worse

Rating: 1/10 (25 August 2011)

One wonders if Tarantino wrote this script when he was 14 and just dusted it off. Everything about this movie -which is actually two bad stories stuck together to make one turkey- has an adolescent feel to it with its stylised and sadistic violence, gratuitous nudity, cliché ridden vampires, f-laden dialogue, gunplay, biker bars, girls on the toilet etc.
Clooney and Tarantino play a couple of murderous brothers. Clooney is apparently the 'good' brother. He merely burns an innocent man alive, puts a gun to the heads of helpless women and children and shoots some bikers in cold blood. In what moral universe can such a character be considered a hero? The film makers seem to think so, since he is allowed to drive off into the sunset at the end, not just scot free by with a sexy young preacher's daughter hanging on his every word.
Tarantino is the 'bad' brother. He improves on Clooney by shooting a ranger in the head point blank and raping and murdering an innocent abducted woman.
These two then abduct Harvey Keitel and his son and daughter. Keitel is a cliché pastor who has lost his faith. Since Tarantino's gifts as a dialogue writer do not extend much beyond foul mouthed tirades (admittedly he does excel at that), this man of god and his young daughter are given the same f-bomb speech patterns as the 'heroes'.
The first half of the movie is a deeply unpleasant series of indiscriminate murders, rapes and abductions. There is a brief satirical news report which is strangely out of place here, since the general atmosphere is menacing and aggressive.
When they arrive in Mexico the film suddenly morphs into a poor vampire film. Two more formulaic characters appear out of nowhere, a cigar-chomping black man and a Mexican with a cannon codpiece. Together they fight an assortment of vampires as the film becomes campy and incoherent. The dialogue here, usually Tarantino's forte, is embarrassing. One could expect and even enjoy this sort of thing from a low budget movie, but one with Clooney and Tarantino in it? For supposedly top Hollywood talent, it is extraordinarily bad.