From Dusk Till Dawn

(Readers beware, Spoilers ahead)

Now that was a good vampire movie. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and featuring the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Danny Trejo, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into when I started watching From Dusk Till Dawn: a gritty, grimy, over-the-top blood-fest. Except that I didn't know what I was getting myself into at all.

You see, I actually thought I hadn't read much about the film and didn't realize there was going to be a genre-shift in the middle, so for about the first hour I was treated to a simple hostage movie. And to be honest, I'm not sure what it is about hostage movies, but I've found that they wear on my patience pretty quickly, because it seems like there can only be three results: either the kidnappers die and the hostages go free, the hostages die and the kidnappers go free, or everybody dies and nobody's happy. It's been done to death, in my opinion.

Boy, was I surprised by this flick! It took that standard hostage situation and for the first hour I was patient, because it was just a good film. Quentin Tarantino was acting surprisingly well, George Clooney's character was unsettlingly vulgar, and the action scenes were just as gory as I'd expect from Robert Rodriguez. But still, I thought it was getting old. You see, the whole point of the film was that felons-on-the-run Seth and Richard Gecko, Clooney and Tarantino, were using Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) and his family to cross the border to Mexico. But within the first hour, they'd done that. They'd crossed the border into Mexico and stumbled upon some bar called, "Titty Twister."

Well, I'll be honest, I didn't really care where the film was going for a little bit, as the club thoroughly lived up to the "Titty" part of its name. And then the vampires came.

May I say that was the coolest genre-shift I think I've ever seen from a film? Richard Gecko, the insane pervert whose personality was starting to grate my nerves, was quickly killed off. And then it was forty minutes of pulse-pounding, vampire-ass-kicking action. What made it all worth it in the end was probably Fred Williamson's monologue, where he plays a trucker named Frost, talking about his experiences in Vietnam. The monologue ends when his old friend, now turned into a vampire, bites him in the neck.

'Nuff said.