Movie Review : Add Horror, Drama, Robbers, a Biker Bar; Blend on High

As both a veteran video store clerk and movie junkie, Quentin Tarantino knows that “The Desperate Hours” belongs in the drama section and “Night of the Living Dead” in the horror. So where, if he had his old job, would he rack Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn,” which, in the blink of an eye, shifts from the first genre to the second, all in the name of comedy?

Tarantino wrote “From Dusk Till Dawn” in 1990 for a reported fee of $1,500. It was undoubtedly one of those projects he hoped to get made for the price of a used Acura, and maybe garner a few kind words in Fangoria magazine. But something called “Pulp Fiction” happened, and a script that would--should--still be collecting dust has become a major motion picture.

“From Dusk Till Dawn” is a film nerd’s fever dream, a Frankenstein’s monster of used movie parts, deliberately mismatched styles, and deliriously implausible characters. For a full hour, it is the story of a pair of murdering, bank-robbing brothers, holding a family hostage while making their escape into Mexico. Then, after they arrive at a topless biker bar in the middle of nowhere, it becomes a chaotic, bloody, nonstop battle with ancient Aztec vampires.

Something like that.

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For “Pulp Fiction” fans, that first hour has its moments. It’s pure-blend Tarantino, comic violence and deadpan dialogue, and the brothers Gecko--played by the commanding George Clooney, from TV’s “ER,” and an uncharacteristically restrained Tarantino--are riotously evil. Clooney’s Seth is the rational one, the tough-talking boss with just the faintest hint of a conscience, and Tarantino’s Richard is a paranoid schizophrenic, detecting a conspiracy or a come-on with every twitch of a hostage.

The brothers have left a trail of bodies from Missouri to Texas when they decide to commandeer the motor home of the vacationing Fuller family--the ex-parson Jacob (Harvey Keitel, with a scruffy beard and a New York Texan twang), his daughter Kate (Juliette Lewis; the desert wouldn’t be the same without her), and son Scott (Ernest Liu). With his children’s lives on the line, Jacob agrees to drive the Geckos across the border and to the nightclub where they are to rendezvous with fellow gang member Carlos (Cheech Marin).

This club looks like a Hell’s Angels Fourth of July celebration in the Twilight Zone. There are leather-clad “hairwarts” sitting at every table, and beautiful naked women dancing all around them. No sooner have the brothers and their hostages arrived when one of the dancers morphs into a lizard-faced monster and the bar fight of the century is on.

Rodriguez, whose $7,000 “El Mariachi” made him a legend of independent film, relishes bloody cartoon violence and he had the budget here to create about 40 minutes of frantic mayhem. From Tarantino, we get a plot twist where the bad guys are suddenly the good guys. From Rodriguez, we get enough graphic carnage--decapitations, exploding bodies, flying limbs, splashed blood, staked hearts--to fill a thousand EC comics.

The fight sequence is an astonishing feat of craftsmanship, if not of taste, logic or anything else you might recommend. Rodriguez hews to a shovel-it-all-in philosophy, where anything done in a previous monster movie is worth multiplying here, and he has choreographed and edited it into a kaleidoscopic danse macabre. But as much as you may admire the effort that went into it, and its sheer energy on screen, the sequence extends a half-hour beyond the point of wretched excess.

From the moment the bar fight begins, the characters created by Clooney, Tarantino and the others cease to exist. The actors are there, but only as human faces contrasted with the monsters, and there is no further reason to wonder what will become of them.

The conceit of the movie’s tone and plot switch is likely to be appreciated only by audiences who share Tarantino’s and Rodriguez’s pack-rat aesthetic, where every character, event and line of dialogue exists as a spoof of old genre movies. It was a fresh trick in “Pulp Fiction” and “El Mariachi,” but it’s road kill now, and no matter how many genres they take on at once, it’s likely to smell old.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence and gore, language and nudity. Times guidelines: 20 times more violent than “Pulp Fiction.”

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‘From Dusk Till Dawn’

George Clooney: Seth Gecko

Quentin Tarantino: Richard Gecko

Harvey Keitel: Jacob Fuller

Juliette Lewis: Kate Fuller

Cheech Marin: Carlos

A Band Apart/Los Hooligans Production, released by Dimension Films. Director Robert Rodriguez. Producers Gianni Nunnari, Meir Teper. Screenplay Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography Guillermo Navarro. Editor Rodriguez. Costumes Graciela Mazon. Music Graeme Revell. Production design Cecilia Montiel. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.