13) From Dusk Till Dawn
Though we know, going in, that the movie will present brothers Seth and Richie Gecko with ‘one hell of a night’, nothing really prepares us for the scene in which that night takes a decided turn for the worse.
The Gecko Brothers are bank robbers, and are in the midst of a job gone terribly wrong, when their paths cross with the Fuller family and their sizeable RV. Seth (George Clooney) is the relatively reasonable and dominant brother to Richie’s (Quentin Tarantino) bumbling psychopath. The Fullers are religious, though they are led by patriarch Pastor Jacob, whose faith is in crisis having lost his beloved wife. Taking the family hostage inside their RV, the Gecko Brothers demand that the Fullers smuggle them across the border into Mexico – to a bar named ‘The Titty Twister’ – where they are due to meet their criminal cohort, Carlos, at dawn.
The two leaders – Seth and Jacob – come to a begrudgingly respectful understanding, and the group settle in for the evening. They drink heavily, and enjoy the live entertainment – in particular that provided by dancer Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek). Their already challenging situation is made worse when the doorman – who the brothers had earlier brutally beaten – returns with some friends and stabs Richie Gecko in an already wounded hand.
The film, thus far, has been punctuated with acts of violence. The Gecko Brothers have left behind them a trail of corpses stretching all the way back to the bank that they robbed in the first place, and have been trading on the threat of violence throughout. The whole endeavour is threaded with the sense that things may spiral even further out of control at any moment – it just takes the wrong kind of glance in Richie Gecko’s direction. But now, their bluff has been called, and they quickly discover that they are very much out of their depth. The Gecko Brothers are dangerous, sure – but as Santanico Pandemonium stands before them, transforming into a vampire at the sight of Richie’s blood – they realise that the intimidating characters in this bar at a whole other level.
The scene not only transforms the all the regulars in the bar – including the band – but also the film itself. It changes from an excellent heist/road movie, to a brilliant horror – as the bank robbers and their hostages are suddenly forced into an unlikely alliance against the undead predators that have them surrounded. As the battle finds them being picked off one by one, it becomes a race to see who will survive til dawn – at which point, we can barely remember the fact that the movie we started watching was a different beast entirely.