A Life Through Film #010: From Dusk Till Dawn
Why must things be good? Isn't it enough for them to kick ass?
Release Date: 1/19/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.I alluded to it a bit last week in my review of 12 Monkeys, but let’s talk some more about January and the box office.
I alluded to it a bit last week in my review of 12 Monkeys, but let’s talk about January and the box office.
Historically, the first three months of any year are considered “Dump Months” at your local movie theater. The lingering presence of big blockbusters from the tail end of the previous year, plus wider releases for award show darlings, means fewer open theaters to fill with new movies. This combined with potential ticket buyers spending less money after the expenses of the holidays and bad winter weather keeping them at home means that the overall earning potential for a new movie released between January and March of a given year is much lower than one released even just before the New Year.
As a result, film studios often use this time to release movies they don’t expect to make much money anyway. This could be because the studio thinks the flick’s a stinker or because it’s a genre film, which will usually have a more limited audience. Often, it’s a combination of the two.
There are, of course, exceptions (highly acclaimed horror films The Silence of the Lambs [4/5] and Get Out [5/5] were both released in the early months of the year), but the movies that get released between January and March are, on average, not very good. In 2010, Metacritic’s feature editor Jason Dietz crunched his website’s numbers for the 2000s and confirmed that of all the movies released in January in that decade, few of them were any good (meaning their aggregate review score on Metacritic was a 61 out of 100 or higher), and fewer still were big hits (in that they made over $100 million at the domestic box office).
The numbers are legitimately dire. Over the 10 Januaries of the 2000s, 88 total movies were released, and only two of those, Taken and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, ended up being big hits. While Dietz’s study only considered the 2000s, the trend continues today; remember those first few months of 2024, when trash like Madame Web and Argylle [2/5] were filling up the theaters until Dune: Part 2 [4.5/5] emerged gloriously to save us all?
This historical trend of January releases being worse and making less money poses an interesting question regarding the thesis of this column. Can movies that top the box office during these dump months be considered reflective of American culture at large? After all, these movies didn’t capture the imagination of the public so much as win a contest that barely anyone entered.
I believer there’s still value in examining these dump month movies, especially the horror movies that are often shuffled off to theaters in this part of the year. What better way is there to learn about what people are like than to examine what scares them?
So what was so frightening to the average movie goer in 1996 that they had to visit their local cinemas to see their nightmares come to life? Oh the horror: a leading performance by Quentin Tarantino.
From Dusk Till Dawn is an action/horror flick directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Tarantino that pulls a neat trick. At first, the movie is a crime thriller that follows the criminal Gecko brothers, Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Tarantino) as they kidnap a family of tourists (Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and Ernest Liu) and use their RV as cover to sneak into Mexico after a violent crime spree in the States.
Pretty normal setup for a mid ‘90s crime movie I’d say. That’s not close to being it, though. At exactly one hour into the movie, the dive bar that the characters are spending the night at reveals it’s true form: a trap set by an ancient group of vampires, seeking to feast on bikers and truckers. From there, the characters must survive until the salvation of the morning sun.
What an extremely fun concept, and one that works to the strength of the two creative forces behind From Dusk Till Dawn.
As filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are cut from a similar cloth. Both men have a love of slick style and over the top, almost cartoonish violence. Each writer/director found success in the early ‘90s with critically acclaimed independent features that ended up as surprise box office hits after finding wide distribution; for Tarantino it was Reservoir Dogs [4/5], while for Rodriguez it was El Mariachi. At around the time of their dual ascension in the film business, the two men met at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival and became fast friends.
The two men continued their upward trajectories in parallel. In 1994, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction [5/5] made the writer/director/actor a major star, and while Rodriguez’s stylish Desperado [3.5/5] wasn’t quite as successful commercially or critically, the movie ended up making a huge profit due to the director’s incredible ability to cut corners during a shoot. I watched a bit of El Mariachi with Rodriguez’s commentary and was impressed by how much the filmmaker was able to squeeze out of a small budget thanks to clever camerawork and editing.
Desperado also marked the first professional collaboration between Rodriguez and Tarantino, with the latter making a cameo as a criminal gringo getting mixed up with the movie’s villainous cartel. Later in ‘95, the two men would work together again, with each writing and directing a section of the anthology comedy Four Rooms. Their sections of the movie are decent, but the Tim Roth “comedy” makes you sit through some truly abysmal garbage to get to them [1.5/5].
Four Rooms was a total bomb at the box office, despite the casting of stars like Madonna and Bruce Willis. But it didn’t matter. By the time Four Rooms had come out, Rodriguez and Tarantino had already made their next collaborative work. You see, before Pulp Fiction, before True Romance, before even Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s first payday from writing a script had come as a commission from another Hollywood creative who had an awesome idea about gangsters trying to survive a vampire swarm.
Robert Kurtzman has been a part of the movie business since he was a teenager, with decades of work spent on crafting grisly special effects, props, and makeup, mostly for horror movies. The man’s practical effects have appeared in some real favorites of mine, like Evil Dead II [4/5], Boogie Nights [4/5], and more recently, Netflix’s miniseries adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. The dude already had years of experience making super gnarly effects by the time he had met Tarantino in the late ‘80s.
At the Fangoria ‘95 panel where Tarantino and Rodriguez announced From Dusk Till Dawn, the Pulp Fiction director said that Kurtzman had approached him before Tarantino had ever made any money from one of his scripts, and asked him to write a screenplay based on Kurtzman’s original idea of a vampire movie that didn’t reveal itself as a vampire movie until an hour had already passed. Tarantino loved the idea and wrote this initial version of From Dusk Till Dawn for the effects wizard. Even though the pay wasn’t much, he used it as justification to quit his final day job before jumping fully into the movie business.
Though nothing happened right away with the script, Tarantino and Kurtzman stayed close through the early ‘90s, working together on Reservoir Dogs. At some point, the director must have told his friend Rodriguez about the script, because suddenly, two of the hottest young directors in Hollywood were making it a reality. Kurtzman, of course, was brought on to craft the many effects for the movie and retained a “Story By” credit.
Regular Tarantino collaborator Harvey Keitel joined the cast early, as did Juliette Lewis. Though only 22 at the time of the movie’s release, Lewis was one of the hottest young stars of the early ‘90s. After earning an Oscar nomination for her part in the very good 1991 version of Cape Fear [3.5/5], she racked up further roles in acclaimed dramas of the time like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, and the Tarantino-penned Natural Born Killers.
Tarantino stepped up to play one half of the Gecko brothers at the center of the story, but he needed an onscreen brother. But who could be cast that could bring a cool, dangerous, handsome energy to the role?
One night, Tarantino and Rodriguez were watching TV when the popular medical drama ER came on. Tarantino recognized one of the good looking doctors on the show from a previous audition and, bafflingly, thought the two of them could be related. Personally, I don’t think Quentin Tarantino looks a lick like George Clooney, but I’m not an ultra successful filmmaker, so what do I know?
It’s so funny to think that there was a time when George Clooney wasn’t one of the biggest stars in the world. Though he had lifelong connections to show business through his dad and aunt, the younger Clooney had worked almost exclusively on television for the twelve years before From Dusk Till Dawn in an era when the transition from TV success to movie stardom was a much more difficult task than it is nowadays.
Though Clooney had been able to make a good living for over a decade through his TV acting and was now part of the one of the most popular shows in America, there were still doubts over his ability to lead a movie. Clooney, though, was far more confident than his detractors. When Tarantino and Rodriguez approached him about starring in From Dusk Till Dawn, he accepted without even reading the script.
In interviews and in the behind the scenes documentary Full Tilt Boogie [2.5/5], Tarantino especially seems really into the idea of the movie’s big trick: getting the viewers invested in the crime drama of the first half before suddenly introducing sinister vampires and gross out violence in the second. According to him, the twist was something more akin to the horror novels of Stephen King, a way to get the viewer invested in the characters long before any supernatural terror appears.
I’d long heard of the twist of From Dusk Till Dawn, but not because it’s one of those great dramatic surprises a la Psycho [4.5/5] or something. Does it even count as a twist? The marketing for the movie didn’t treat it as a secret, with clips of the vampiric back half all over the trailers. If it’s a surprise to the characters but not to the viewer, I don’t buy that as a plot twist.
Before I had watched the movie, I always thought it would have been cool if there had been no warning at all in the marketing or press of the film that vampires were going to be a factor in the story. I still think it would be cool for a movie to do that properly: build itself up as a grounded drama before a sudden surprise pivot to the supernatural.1 But after watching From Dusk Till Dawn, I now fully understand revealing everything in the marketing. I can’t imagine having to sit through the first half of the movie without the promise of fun, bloody action to look forward to.
After a sweet cold open that showcases both the gritty, verbose dialogue of a Tarantino script and the exciting, dynamic action of a Rodriguez film, From Dusk Till Dawn settles into an opening half that really drags. A lack of further action doesn’t help this, but I think the bigger reason why is the characters. Contrary to Tarantino’s goal of getting me invested in our motley crew by the times things get supernatural, the opening hour of the movie does little to engender me to most of the cast thanks to thinly sketched out personas for everyone on the screen.
Clooney and Keitel are great actors, but the latter doesn’t get to have any fun with his character, a preacher who’s already lost the faith by the time the movie starts. George Clooney has the majority of the speaking lines in the movie and delivers them well, but his character isn’t given much more personality than “Cool Criminal.” Juliette Lewis is wasted here. This is an Oscar nominated actress whose role in From Dusk Till Dawn never evolves past “slightly upset teenage girl,” even as she faces terror after terror.
Time to talk about Tarantino as an actor. Namely, how he’s a famously bad one. I think the badness of his performance here is a tiny bit overblown (he was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Performance at the end of ‘96), but it’s definitely not good at all. He lacks any kind of on-screen charisma, and can only deliver his lines in the same meandering whine no matter the story circumstance. He’s better here than he is in Four Rooms (where he was basically playing a parody of himself) and at least he isn’t constantly dropping racial slurs like in Pulp Fiction, but people must have been totally turned off by Tarantino as an actor after this, since he’s only appeared in cameo roles for the rest of his career.
Maybe some of it has to do with the character. Tarantino wrote one of the primary antiheroes of his movie as a violent, sadistic rapist and decided he would be the perfect fit for the role. I’m not saying that’s a red flag for Tarantino as a person, but it certainly speaks to a bewildering overconfidence in his abilities as an actor (his insistence on a resemblance between he and Clooney also speaks to this overconfidence). Tarantino’s performance as Richie Gecko ends up being creepy and annoying in all the wrong ways, especially as he leers and menaces every woman and girl the character encounters. This kind of annoying, unlikeable creep getting to have clever back-and-forth dialogue with suave, badass George Clooney just feels a bit wrong.
While doing press for From Dusk Till Dawn, Clooney would defend Tarantino’s acting in the movie, saying he was really gonna surprise people with his performance. But nowadays, it seems the two have a wee bit of beef, so when two-time column subject Brad Pitt complimented Tarantino’s performance in the film in a recent GQ interview with both he and Clooney, the From Dusk Till Dawn star corrected him.
Once the characters cross into Mexico, the cast and story expand in fun ways, with charismatic performances from Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, and Salma Hayek. The Titty Twister, the topless bar where the back half of the movie takes place, is an extremely fun and over the top setting. The crassness and debauchery emanate from it before the characters even step inside. Within, topless dancers gyrate to music from a live Chicano band amid what look like ancient ruins as random fistfights break out between extras. The Gecko brothers and their hostages are in for a fun night.
We’re only in Mexico for a little bit before all Hell breaks loose. It’s at this point, with the vampire menace revealed and the kegs of blood untapped, that From Dusk Till Dawn reveals its true strength. As a crime thriller, this movie is pretty boring. As a horror action flick, this movie is certifiably sweet. Maybe I should be mad that all the story and character setup of the first half is thrown out the window as soon as the killer vampires show up, but these blood suckers are such fun villains that I hardly noticed.
These are not your typical Hollywood vampires. They aren’t just attractive looking humans with sharp teeth. They’re far more savage and animalistic than your Edward Cullens or Draculas. Through a combination of prosthetics and makeup, each vampire totally eschews any echo of humanity, making their threat far more menacing and their destruction far more rewarding. These are not creatures to be reasoned with, they are beasts on the hunt.
What do vampires represent in From Dusk Till Dawn? Culturally, they can mean a lot of things, but Sarah Fisher from Trinitonian explains it best when she discusses vampires as the ultimate outsiders:
…Vampires [have become] representative of fears of deviance from society — sexually, culturally and religiously.
The Gecko Brothers live on the criminal fringes of society and drag a regular family into those fringes against their will. They watch as the pastor and his children squirm in terror and fear at criminal underworld the Geckos thrive in. It’s a fun piece of parallel storytelling, then, when Seth and Richie are pulled even fully outside the mainstream by the vampiric deviants of the Titty Twister. The reveal of the world’s further darkness puts our characters, once at mortal odds, on the same team, allied against the new nightmarish other.
The ultimate outsider nature of vampires also explains the strong sex appeal that many vampire characters have had in our culture, dating all the way back to Bela Lugosi as Dracula. The dark draw of the taboo is hard to ignore when dangerous yet beautiful monsters are luring you towards the fringes of humanity. Though her appearance as a human in From Dusk Till Dawn is brief, Salma Hayek’s serpentine seduction still may be the film’s most well known scene. Before I knew anything about this movie, I had watched Hayek’s big moment, shared and reshared across decades of the Internet.
Vampires are, conceptually, equal parts sex and violence, so it makes sense that the movie’s descent into bloodshed takes place right after Hayak brings the house down.
The way Rodriguez shoots action scenes is so fun. Quick cuts and crazy zooms one second, clear wide shots of exciting stunts and practical effects the next. Both he and Tarantino owe a lot of their panache to the style of John Woo, the legendary Hong Kong director whose work will appear in this column pretty soon. The action scenes in this part of the movie are bloody and prolonged, but I found the pacing of them a violent delight. Every moment promised a different innovative piece of bloodshed, like when the tough trucker Frost (played by long time B-movie actor Fred Williamson) impales four different vampires on the legs of an upturned table.
Robert Kurtzman and his team went all out for this movie. Models, puppetry, prosthetics, and an unbelievable amount of visceral gore. I wouldn’t recommend this one viewers with a weak stomach, but if you can appreciate quality practical horror effects, then you may truly find your jaw on the floor as you watch certain moments here. One character, freshly turned into a vampire, loses half their head to a water balloon full of Holy Water, leading to an insane visual of their monstrous head bisected before it explodes via a blessed bullet fired from a snub nose revolver.
As a viewer, reader, and gamer, I am a firm believer in the Rule of Cool. Obviously I’d love it if every movie had a compelling narrative with dynamic characters. If I can’t have that, I at least want to see some extremely dope shit that makes me hoot and holler as my most base neurons fire in excitement. From Dusk Till Dawn has about 3.25 good performances in it when you add up the entire cast, and most of its plot beats and character moments don’t add up to anything resembling a good story. I’d argue that the first half of this movie is bordering on being a little bad, actually. But the second half is exactly what I look to Robert Rodriguez for: stylish action shot well and bolstered by incredible practical effects.
This is without a doubt the most macho movie I’ve reviewed so far for the column. Tarantino and Rodriguez have been making dorm room poster fodder for their entire careers, so it should be no surprise that the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn has breasts and bullets in it in about equal measure. Between that and the excessive gore, I totally understand if this is firmly not in your wheelhouse. I recognize that I’m the target demographic for this movie, and even though not all of it works for me, I think I enjoy the overall product quite a bit.
Critical response at the time of the movie’s release was mixed. Some really enjoyed the genre-twisting, over-the-top fun of the film, others thought it was quite bad. The most scathing quote I found came from Mick LaSalle writing for SF Gate:
"From Dusk Till Dawn," which opens today, is an ugly, unpleasant criminals-on-the-lam film that midway turns into a boring and completely repellent vampire "comedy." If it's not one of the worst films of 1996 it will have been one miserable year.
David Hunter from The Hollywood Reporter also wasn’t a fan of From Dusk Till Dawn, but he did accurately predict its success at the box office.
With no competition to speak of, the Dimension Films release should enjoy a dynamite opening weekend and keep the momentum going for a few more rounds.
Releasing an exciting genre fusion from a pair of popular auteur filmmakers and some star power in the cast during an extremely dead time at the theater was a guarantee for this movie to debut atop the weekend box office. The movie slipped out of the top spot a week later and out of the top ten entirely two weeks after that, but it lingered around in theaters until May, eventually pulling in over $25 million at the US box office when all was said and done. Just like 12 Monkeys, From Dusk Till Dawn would end up having an even more successful run in overseas markets, pulling in over $33 million outside the US. Though the $19 million budget was huge by Rodriguez’s standards at the time, he was still able to turn the movie into a financial success and, eventually, a cult classic.
Also like with 12 Monkeys, a documentary crew filmed the behind the scenes action of From Dusk Till Dawn and was able to release Full Tilt Boogie, a feature length documentary about its making. Most of it is about how fun the set was, without much in the way of concerns over the movie’s eventual success at the box office.
The closest thing to a throughline in the documentary is the conflict between the filmmakers and the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees), since the production was non-union. An interesting topic, but the movie only spends a few scenes on it before getting back to the fun and showing Juliette Lewis singing Four Non-Blondes’s “What’s Up” at karaoke.
It isn’t an amazing movie, and it’s certainly uneven, but From Dusk Till Dawn should be considered a big success. The bloody vampiric twist is executed so well that it totally flipped my opinion on the whole film, and ended up making me a fan despite that first half. The fanbase for From Dusk Till Dawn has carried its legacy in the decades since. The film has lived on in direct-to-DVD sequels and a TV adaptation on Rodriguez’s now-defunct El Rey network.
On top of making a profit and remaining a cult classic, the movie delivered unto America the beginnings of a new movie star and continued the rise of two of the decade’s hottest young directors. Tarantino, Rodriguez, and Clooney will all be recurring characters in the column for years to come, thanks in no small part to the success of From Dusk Till Dawn. Not bad for a movie released in January.
Rating: 3.5/5
Next Week: Alright alright, that was a little too kick ass and fun. Let’s get sentimental and reflect on the teachers in our lives that have really made a difference as we watch Mr. Holland’s Opus.
See you then!
-Will
I’m certain that movies like this exist, but if I research them ahead of time I’ll ruin the surprise for myself! If you like any film that does this though, let me know!