From Dust till Dawn

Had the writer and director credits on From Dust till Dawn not read Hollywood's new wonder boy Quentin Tarantino and Tarantino protégé Robert Rodriguez, the film would surely only have had a video premiere.

The film contains two films in one. The first half is a road movie about two criminal brothers, Seth and Richard Gecko, who are on the run to Mexico with the loot from a lucrative robbery. The brothers leave a bloody trail behind them, not least because Richard is totally unpredictable. They kidnap Jacob Fuller, a widower and preacher, along with his son and daughter, and force Jacob to transport them safely across the border into Mexico in the family's camper van.

Seth and Richard are to meet a buyer for the goods early the next morning at a remote truckers' bar, The Titty Twister, which is about as sleazy as the name suggests. Here the film turns 180 degrees. Suddenly we are in the middle of an apocalypse in which the bar staff and the strippers turn out to be ravenous vampires. The bar's patrons must fight for their lives, but only two survive the bloody battle, which, one must assume, is two more than usual.

The shift from road movie to splatter film may well carry a certain surprise effect, but such a mishmash of a film can hardly be called coherent. The dialogue is left-handed Tarantino, but it nevertheless lifts the road movie section.

George Clooney, a newcomer to the firmament of stars, has a good role as the intelligent and least psychopathic half of the Gecko brothers. You almost end up liking him by the end, even though earlier in the film he has shown himself to be a stupid swine.