(In case you’re wondering about Gloria Hill the teller, she’s locked up securely in the trunk of the brothers’ car.) Unfortunately for everybody, Marshal McGraw is a talkative sort, and the longer he goes on jawing with Pete, the more convinced Richie becomes that the two men are passing coded signals back and forth about the robbers crouching beside the beer coolers. The Geckos are lurking out of sight with a pair of freshly taken hostages, and Pete is under orders from them to hustle McGraw along as rapidly as possible. What the marshal fails to realize is that Seth and Richie Gecko (George Clooney, from Solaris and Return to Horror High, and Quentin Tarantino, playing a much larger part than the bits he usually takes in the films he directs himself) got to Benny’s before him. At last count, the tally stood at eighteen dead cops and seven dead civilians. McGraw is on the hunt for the Gecko brothers, a pair of vicious criminals currently speeding toward Mexico with a fortune in stolen cash and a captive bank teller, leaving a lengthening trail of bodies behind them. ![]() At Benny’s World of Liquor, someplace in southern Texas, US Marshal Earl McGraw (Michael Parks, from Red State and The Savage Bees) is shooting the shit with counter-monkey Pete Bottoms (John Hawkes, of Congo and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) about his current business. We start off with a fairly artful exposition dump. The transformation is incredibly disorienting, but for the most part it’s also enjoyably so. The undead come bursting out of absolutely fucking nowhere during the second act of what up to then is a heist movie in a vein more typical of writer Quentin Tarantino and director Robert Rodriguez. Even in the mid-1990’s, it was unmistakable that this was only half of a vampire film. In the case of From Dusk Till Dawn (and before anybody gives me shit about calling From Dusk Till Dawn “old,” remember that kids who were born in 1996 will be starting their senior year of high school this September), what struck me upon watching it last night was its retrospective obviousness as an unheralded influence on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Indeed, From Dusk Till Dawn makes a more plausible prototype for that show with regard to tone, attitude, and visual style than does the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie! Or at any rate, the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn does. ![]() One of the fun things about revisiting old movies that I haven’t seen since their initial runs in theaters is the chance to spot connections to later works that had eluded me for whatever reason.
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