From Dusk till Dawn

From Dusk till Dawn is a 1996 American vampire crime thriller film directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Quentin Tarantino. It stars George Clooney, Tarantino, Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis. After enjoying modest success at the box office, it has since become a cult film.

Plot
Fugitive bank robbers Seth and Richie Gecko hold up a liquor store, killing the clerk and a Texas ranger, in the process inadvertently destroying the building. At the motel room where they are hiding out, Seth returns to find Richie has raped and murdered a bank clerk they had taken hostage.

Jacob Fuller, a pastor experiencing a crisis of faith, is on vacation with his teenage children Scott and Kate in their RV. They stop at the motel and are kidnapped by the Geckos, who force the Fullers to smuggle them over the Mexican border. In Mexico, they arrive at the Titty Twister, a strip club in the desert, where the Geckos will be met by their contact, Carlos, at dawn. Carlos will escort them to sanctuary at "El Rey," a place of safety for fugitives from justice whose admission fee is 30 percent of everything they have.

The bar employees reveal themselves as vampires and kill most of the patrons. Richie is bitten by a stripper and dies; only Seth, Jacob, Kate, Scott, a biker named Sex Machine, and Frost, a Vietnam veteran, survive. The others are reborn as vampires, including Richie, forcing the survivors to kill them all. When an army of vampires, in bat form, assembles outside, the survivors lock themselves in, but Sex Machine is bitten, becomes a vampire, and bites Frost and Jacob. Frost throws Sex Machine through the door, allowing the vampires to enter.

Seth, Kate and Scott escape to a storeroom, followed shortly by an injured but still alive Jacob, brandishing a shotgun. In the storeroom, they fashion weapons from truck cargo the vampires have looted from past victims, including a stake mounted on a pneumatic drill, a crossbow, and holy water, which requires Jacob to recover his faith to bless. Jacob, knowing he will soon become a vampire, makes Scott and Kate promise to kill him when he changes.

The group make their final assault on the undead. Jacob becomes a vampire, but Scott hesitates to kill him, allowing Jacob to bite him. Scott hits Jacob with holy water and shoots him. Scott is overwhelmed by vampires, who begin to devour him; he begs for death, and Kate shoots him. As vampires surround Kate and Seth, streams of morning light enter through bullet holes in the building, making the vampires back away. Carlos's arrives and his bodyguards blast the door open, letting in the sunlight and killing the vampires.

Seth chastises Carlos for his poor choice of meeting place and negotiates a smaller tribute for his admission to El Rey. Kate asks Seth if she can go with him to El Rey, but he refuses, leaving her with some cash. Kate drives away in the RV, leaving the Titty Twister — revealed to be the top of a partially buried Aztec temple — behind.

Cast

 * George Clooney as Seth Gecko
 * Quentin Tarantino as Richard "Richie" Gecko
 * Harvey Keitel as Jacob Fuller
 * Juliette Lewis as Katherine Fuller
 * Ernest Liu as Scott Fuller
 * Salma Hayek as Santanico Pandemonium
 * Cheech Marin as Border Guard / Chet Pussy / Carlos
 * Danny Trejo as Razor Charlie
 * Tom Savini as Sex Machine
 * Fred Williamson as Frost
 * Michael Parks as Texas Ranger Earl McGraw
 * Brenda Hillhouse as Hostage Gloria Hill
 * John Saxon as FBI Agent Stanley Chase
 * Marc Lawrence as Old Timer Motel Owner
 * Kelly Preston as Newscaster Kelly Houge
 * John Hawkes as Pete Bottoms (liquor store cashier)
 * Tito & Tarantula as The Titty Twister House Band

Development
From Dusk till Dawn was conceived by Robert Kurtzman who hired Tarantino to write the script as his first paid writing assignment.

Universal Pictures originally considered Tarantino's screenplay for From Dusk till Dawn as the follow-up to Demon Knight and the second in a proposed Tales from the Crypt film trilogy, but ultimately produced another vampire film, Bordello of Blood, instead.

References to other titles
Earl McGraw became a recurring character in Rodriguez and Tarantino's works, later appearing in Kill Bill, Planet Terror and Death Proof. Chango Beer and Sex Machine's codpiece gun are references to Rodriguez's 1995 film Desperado. Seth also returns to the hotel with Big Kahuna Burgers, which were used in Pulp Fiction and mentioned in Death Proof. Seth Gecko also says the line "All right, Ramblers. Let's get ramblin'!", a quote from Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Scott's T-shirt decoration reads "Precinct 13", a reference to John Carpenter's 1976 film, Assault on Precinct 13.

Labor issues
From Dusk till Dawn employed a non-union production crew, which is unusual for a production with a budget above $15 million.

Release
From Dusk till Dawn had its world premiere on January 17, 1996. On its first week, the film grossed $10,240,805 in the United States making it the highest-grossing film of the week. The next week, the film fell to third highest in the box office where it grossed $4,851,921 being beaten by Mr. Holland's Opus and Bed of Roses. From Dusk till Dawn earned a total of $25,836,616 on its theatrical release.

Reception
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 63% of 48 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating was 6/10. The site's consensus reads: "A pulpy crime drama/vampire film hybrid, From Dusk Till Dawn is an uneven but often deliriously enjoyable B-movie." Metacritic rated it 52/100 based on 14 reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and described it as "a skillful meat-and-potatoes action extravaganza with some added neat touches". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "The latter part of From Dusk till Dawn is so relentless that it's as if a spigot has been turned on and then broken. Though some of the tricks are entertainingly staged, the film loses its clever edge when its action heats up so gruesomely and exploitatively that there's no time for talk". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Rodriguez and Tarantino have taken the let-'em-eat-trash cynicism of modern corporate moviemaking and repackaged it as junk-conscious 'attitude.' In From Dusk till Dawn, they put on such a show of cooking up popcorn that they make pandering to the audience seem hip". However, in his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "The movie, which treats you with contempt for even watching it, is a monument to its own lack of imagination. It's a triumph of vile over content; mindless nihilism posing as hipness". Cinefantastique magazine's Steve Biodrowski wrote, "Whereas one might reasonably have expected that the combo of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez would yield a critical mass of nuclear proportions, instead of an atomic fireball's worth of entertainment, we get a long fuse, quite a bit of fizzle, and a rather minor blast". In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle called the film, "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". In Marc Savlov's review for the Austin Chronicle, he wrote, "Fans of Merchant-Ivory will do well to steer clear of Rodriguez's newest opus, but both action and horror film fans have cause for celebration after what seems like a particularly long splatter-drought. This is horror with a wink and a nod to drive-in theatres and sweaty back seats. This is how it's done".

Soundtrack
The soundtrack features mainly Texas blues by such artists as ZZ Top and brothers Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan on separate tracks. The Chicano rock band Tito & Tarantula, who portrayed the band in the Titty Twister, appears on the soundtrack as well. The film's score is by Graeme Revell. "Dark Night" by The Blasters plays over the film's opening and closing credits.

Video game
A video game of the same name was released in 2001. It is based on events that transpire directly after the end of the film.

Sequels
From Dusk till Dawn was followed by two direct-to-video prequels, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money and From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter. They were both received poorly by critics. Danny Trejo is the only actor to appear in all three, although Michael Parks appears in both From Dusk till Dawn and The Hangman's Daughter. Rodriguez, Tarantino and Lawrence Bender served as producers on all three movies.

In late 2010, it was reported that a possible fourth film in the series may be produced.

Television
On March 17, 2014, a television series inspired by the films premiered on the El Rey network, produced and directed by Rodriguez. The show will explore and expand on the characters and story from the film, providing a wider scope and richer Aztec mythology.

The series ended production in 2016 with Deadline Hollywood reporting that the actors have been released from their contracts as of October 31, 2016.