Twisting Titties From Dusk Till Dawn

Some films are more entertaining than others when watched in a movie theatre with a collective audience. With something like Aliens, you can enjoy the sight of your fellow viewers jumping a mile out of their seats in a scary bit or cheering at their heroes when they emerge to save the day. With something like The Naked Gun you can revel in a huge room full of people falling out of their seats, roaring with laughter. And with From Dusk Till Dawn you can witness the confusion and discontent of a paying audience as a mid-movie shift in tone and genre occurs.

Dusk gives you two brilliant genre movies for the price of one...like the later Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse, except skillfully merged into a single narrative. The first hour is a dark, edgy, suspense filled crime drama as Seth and Richie Gecko flee for the Mexican border after a bloody bank robbery. Tarantino's script is littered with interesting characters, black humour and his trademark conversations that are bursting with tension, without the need to have a gunfight or a punch up. He's matched by Robert Rodriquez's career best direction and some unorthodox editing which makes you feel on-edge and fully engaged.

The second half twist reveals Dusk is actually a latent horror film, with a Carpenter-esque anti-hero Seth Gecko (a career defining/A-list movie star debuting George Clooney) and pals under siege from Mexican Vampires). Rodriquez switches the tone to a much more silly, more inventive Evil Dead 2-style with blood, gore and snappy one liners being the order of the day. Enter Fred Williamson and Tom Savini for some amusing, hard boiled comic relief while Tarantino's script manages to double the spectrum of Vampire mythology finding a dozen new ways to dispatch the bloodsucking undead.

The icing on the cake is a bad ass Mexican flavored rock soundtrack highlighting the work of ZZ Top and Tito and Tarantula, the amusing multi-character playing abilities of Cheech Marin, while elsewhere, Salma Hayek hypnotises in perhaps the sexiest scene ever to be captured on film. A crazy little monster/crime mash up that's a celebration of family and a rediscovery of faith story. It's still my favorite Rodriguez movie and something I never get bored of rewatching, again and again and again.