“From Dusk Till Dawn” was released on January 19, 1996. The premiere collaboration from screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez, the story follows the Gecko brothers (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) - two criminals on the lam after having robbed a bank. The brothers kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliet Lewis), and adopted son, forcing the family to take them across the border into Mexico, where they all wind up trapped inside the Titty Twister - a seedy Mexican bar infested with vampires. The film is regularly criticized for its genre-blending storyline, which opens as a seeming Tarantino-esque violent crime drama, then takes a sudden dive into the bloody waters of gratuitously nasty horror/action films. Think “Pulp Fiction” meets “Evil Dead”, with the latter half of the film copycatting on a big budget the sort of zanily energetic and over-the-top gore-athons that characterize the “Dead” films. Some reviewers were particularly harsh, clearly not appreciating the untraditional story structure and the film’s final 45-minute horror-fest. “Washington Post” critic Desson Howe called it ...a monument to its own lack of imagination... a triumph of vile over content; mindless nihilism posing as hipness. The ”San Francisco Chronicle”s Mick LaSalle concluded that, “If its not one of the worst films of 1996 it will have been one miserable year. But even in their disdain, many critics conceded that horror and gore fans would lap it up. They did; the estimated $19 million dollar production grossed just under $60 million worldwide, spawned two direct-to-video sequels, and last years 10-episode series, “From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series”. Tarantino fans will note the self-reflexive nods to the writer/directors canon, including Big Kahuna Burgers from “Pulp Fiction” (1994). Despite his death in “From Dusk Till Dawn”, the character of Texas Ranger, Earl McGraw. appears in “Kill Bill: Volume 1” (2003), and in both movies of the 2007 Grindhouse double-feature - Tarantinos “Death Proof” and Rodriguezs “Planet Terror”. Hes played in all three films by Michael Parks, said to be in Tarantinos opinion the worlds greatest living actor. In the series based on the movies, however, MacGraw is played by Don Johnson - the first instance of anyone other than Parks portraying the character.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:37:51 +0000
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