DON´T SHOOT ME, I´M ONLY THE Umm..VAMPIRE

Rating: 5/10 (22 July 2001)

WARNING** POSSIBLE SPOILERS** I had never read any reviews of this movie prior to watching it, which was today, and so I ended up watching a vampire movie when I thought I was enjoying a good old-fashioned chase/thriller movie - until we crossed the Mexican border of course. I had a feeling that something was going to change when one of the characters in the strip bar threatened another character with a knife, only to be confronted with a gun that swivelled into place from a device attached around this man´s groin area. It was an incongrous moment and just didn´t fit in with the previous tempo of the movie as a whole. And, of course, we then had an infamous vampire orgy of blood and violence that equated the bloodletting in Peckinpah´s THE WILD BUNCH. I say equated but not bettered, for Peckinpah´s epic was stylish and exhuberant. Here it was way over the top and virtually portrayed as fun. But then again, looking at the movie as a whole, perhaps being way over the top was the point, paying homage not only to Hollywood but world cinema in general along the way. The Tarantino script tips it´s hat to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa´s
Samurai flicks, Romero´s Evil Dead and countless excursions into the living dead genre produced by the house of Hammer. We have here what Francois Truffaut sought out to achieve when he made "TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE" ("Shoot the piano player"), namely "..an explosion of genres...by mixing genres". That classic flick was a mixture of gangster movie/love story/thriller/chase/musical etc.., that took the traditionally accepted notions of different film genres and fused them together into a coherent whole. FROM DUSK TILL DAWN most immediately fuses the thriller genre with the horror genre but many other genres are also in evidence, provided you are looking for them. Comedy is very much to the fore and I contend that this movie was made very tongue-in-cheek, very influenced by the tradition from whence it sprung. "Kill me Kate" says the Harvey Keitel character after he has metamorphosised into a vampire. A million miles from "Kiss me Kate" but then again, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN is a million miles from the pages of Bram Stoker. An enjoyable film that seems to enjoy itself.