I like most of this fun horror/comedy/thriller

Rating: 7/10 (5 August 2006)

I got From Dusk Till Dawn at a used DVD store for two bucks, and it was a good deal. This is really a mesh between a Quentin Tarantino crime picture and a Robert Rodriguez horror film.
The first half involves Tarantino and George Clooney as Richard and Seth Gecko trying to get into Mexico and away from the FBI and the Texas Rangers since Richard broke Seth out of jail, helped him rob a bank and spilled a considerable amount of blood doing so. They kidnap Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) and his two kids Kate and Scott (Juliette Lewis and first-timer Ernest Liu) and use their RV to get across the border. When over the border they go to the Titty Twister, a rowdy bar for bikers and truckers, where Richard and Seth plan on meeting their friend Carlos, sometime between dusk and dawn, so they can give him a cut of their loot. Little do they know, the Titty Twister is a front for a group of vampires who prey on unsuspecting truckers and bikers.
From Dusk Till Dawn is a violent, campy, and mostly entertaining movie. Tarantino wrote the screenplay and does a stellar job as Richard Gecko, and Rodriguez directed it which makes it feel a bit like Desperado and Pulp Fiction thrown together with some campy horror.
The main things I liked about this movie were the actors. George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino are really convincing as two criminal brothers. When Seth finds the dead, raped body of a woman who was supposed to be their hostage, he asks Seth if it's his fault and if he (Richard) thinks that's what he (Seth) is like. I also liked Harvey Kietel as a minister who seems to have lost his faith and Juliette Lewis, who I usually find annoying, as his daughter. Plus, Salma Hayek is ultra-sexy as an exotic dancer.
I preferred the first half of the movie to the semi-campy gore-invested second half. The vampires look like a cross between zombies and vampires, which I don't think works very well, and the special effects are obviously fairly low budget, plus I'm not a huge gory-horror movie fan. While the effects are fairly cheesy, I got the feeling they weren't supposed to look very real anyway since their are a lot of jokes and visual gags. A group talk about ways to kill vampires is amusing and pokes fun at vampire movie clichés and Juliette Lewis has a funny scene where she is unsure about stabbing a possibly bitten trucker.
Overall I'd give From Dusk Till Dawn seven stars of of ten, it's a entertaining movie with some fun performances and an original story, but the effects are awkward since it's hard to tell whether they are purposely cheesy or just low budget. Check it out if you get the chance.