It's still the fast talking, slickly delivered, blackly comic and severely entertaining flick it always was.

Rating: 8/10 (21 March 2009)

From Dusk Till Dawn is the original 'Grindhouse' Tarantino/ Rodriguez featurette, a film that feels like one person has created one half before the second guy just takes over and finishes things off in their own style. It is the perfect balance; Tarantino, who was best known for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction at the time, begins the film with his crime fuelled tale of two lowlifes getting up to crime-driven no good before Rodriguez takes over to create an explosive finale which brings about an element of the guilty pleasure as violence, entertainment and convention round things off.
Like most films penned by Tarantino, From Dusk Till Dawn begins in a road side location-come-diner (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers) and sees a perfect balance of terror, suspense, dry humour and that wonderful dialogue Tarantino is able to come up with when a local trooper delivers a story to a store owner about how he had a recent case of food poisoning. The immediacy of the two would-be lead characters is a jolt to the audience, foreshadowing the 'jolt' Tarantino will give us later on when he introduces elements of the uncanny at the strip club. But the terror of the hostage situation, the dry exchange between the store worker and one of the leads and the consequent exiting of the store as it goes up in flames is a one sequence example of the sort of cocktail Tarantino can fabricate in his screenplays, all demonstrated in the opening scene.
The two leads are the Gecko brothers, Seth and Ritchie played by George Clooney and Tarantino himself, respectively whom are both on the run from American law enforcers following a bank robbery and a blood bath of an escape. This is something the trooper establishes happened, thus implanting a dangerous image of the brothers whilst they're off screen. What transpires is a brief journey through the desert, an incident with a hostage and then an acquiring of a motor-home thus enabling the brothers to get across the border camouflaged. When they do cross the border, it is the signal for the film to change gears and begin to mutate into something else but not without wonderful touches as applied by both writer and director.
Initially, my eye is drawn to the casting and the twisting of the rules that entails, echoing the twisting of the genre the film will undergo at the strip club. Prior to From Dusk Till Dawn, Julliette Lewis and Harvey Keitel had played characters in Tarantino penned scripts; only they played Mallory Knox, the psychotic and deeply disturbed serial killer in Natural Born Killers while Kietel played Mr White and Winston Wolf in two separate Tarantino films. Their characters in this project are far more muted than in those films, with Kietel not even dropping an f-bomb despite being teed up to do so. On the contrary, Clooney is cast as Seth Gecko, a loose and rather aggressively criminal who will kill and maim without much second-thought and this goes against the role he was best known for at the time, that being as a character in the rather reserved TV series 'ER'.
The scenes involving Gloria (Hillhouse), a hostage the Gecko's have taken, act as scenes prolonging both Tarantino's style as a writer and an establishing of character traits. The exchange between Gloria and Seth is brilliantly slick in its delivery and pacing whilst maintaining a distinct tone of menace that the film wants the brothers to continue to have. It also goes a long way to prolonging the trait Ritchie carries to do with sexually driven desires of malice towards women when he does what he does to Gloria and this in turn plants a seed in the audience's mind. So by the time the brothers have apprehended the Fuller family and Juliette Lewis' character has entered a room in a swimming costume, the audience is fearing the worst. Additionally, the actress that plays Gloria was Tarantino's acting coach and he's quite clearly, perhaps disturbingly so, cast her as the hapless female who has what happens to her, happen to her as a direct result of Tarantino's character.
The Fuller family are indeed made up of Kate, Jacob (Kietel) and Scott (Liu); the latter of which wears a visual clue on his shirt in 'Assault On Presinct 13' as to the 'last stand' scenario the film will adopt later on. When everyone arrives at the Titty Twister club, Jacob says a prayer in the form of 'out of the pond and into the fire', again foreshadowing that entering this establishment is a big deal to the film and doesn't just act as a waiting spot. But the uncanniest of incidences follows Chet's (Marin) 'pussy' monologue at the end of which he leans over into the camera and, rather eerily so, utters an obscenity directly at us as we look up at him from ground level. It's a bizarre occurrence and for the film to suddenly break the fourth wall creates an uncanny sensation that all is perhaps not quite right with this place. Unfortunately, the tactic might be lost on most viewers due to the absurdity, and possible hilarity, of the preceding monologue.
Once in the strip club, the film cools off for a while and becomes something entirely different, but something still thoroughly entertaining. There is a rather random five minute or so dance from Selma Hayek's 'Santanico Pandemonium', during which Tarantino gets to indulge in his 'fondness' for feet, a scene that he wrote for himself to partake in. Regardless, From Dusk Till Dawn remains a favourite of mine; on a film-making level and certainly on a guilty, more entertainment driven level.