From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

Machete: Knives out, but not much cutting edge

“There’s an interesting face,” Jessica Alba says upon her first glimpse of Danny Trejo in Machete. It’s an observation that’s surely followed Trejo around his whole life. The beloved ex-con, boxer and character actor is 66 now and has been in well over 100 movies, yet, if we don’t count Champion, the documentary about Trejo’s life, Machete marks his debut as a lead. Trejo’s always been a welcome presence wherever he turns up, that distinctively weathered and initially frightening face that masks a terrifically deadpan sense of humour. He’s exactly the sort of perpetual background player film-lovers long to see promoted to the spotlight, yet thanks to largely half-assed conception, Trejo’s star moment as Machete’s eponymous ex-federale hero may just constitute the least interesting performance he’s given.

Written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro, and directed by Rodriguez and his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the fitfully entertaining extrapolation of a trailer featured in Grindhouse, the exploitation homage collaboration between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Predictably, Machete plays like a convoy of trailers, united by a plot crammed with corrupt Texan politicians and underground revolutionaries that’s more busy than it is cohesive or even coherent. The lack of narrative elegance is of course part of the movie’s ostensible charm, but what starts out as prankish plot holes and playful implausibilities increasingly feels like lazy screenwriting. What resembles button-pushing political commentary rapidly reveals itself to be flamboyantly irrelevant. Rodriquez uses pastiche as an opportunity to rest on cliché. Clichés can make marvelous tools when animated, but Rodriguez frequently seems content to simply prop them up as platforms for yet another set piece.

Bereft of anything like emotions, ambitions or conflicts, Trejo is left mostly with one-liners, some of them quite deftly delivered—I especially liked “Machete don’t text.” Converted to the side of the desperate migrant workers she used to deport, Alba’s immigration cop becomes the resident cheerleader: “There’s the law, and there’s what’s right!” The rest is one-joke stunt casting: Robert De Niro’s an ultra-right wing senator; Don Johnson, in aviator shades, cowboy hat and shark fin sideburns, is a cop who slaughters Mexicans for sport; Lindsay Lohan stretches out to play a rich girl with a drug problem and a hunger for publicity; Steven Segal’s a drug lord with an absurd toupee. Cheech Marin’s a priest with a penchant for weed.

Machete’s most inspired, or at least liveliest bits arrive through a creative attitude toward the human body—a lady retrieves a telephone from her vagina. The killing is gleefully rampant and mercifully cartoonish, with fountains of digital splatter and everything that vaguely resembles a sharp object eventually impaling somebody—kudos to whoever thought of the meat thermometer. Thing is, Machete’s funniest display of violence is decidedly non-lethal, with Trejo warding off a bodyguard by slapping his wrists with a weed whacker. I suppose he could have just chopped his arm off or unspoiled his intestines like he does in so many other confrontations, but in a movie that thrives on excess it’s amazing how far a little restraint can go to win you over. When Trejo and the bodyguard finally part ways the latter is left caged to a wall with pruning shears, no doubt happy just to be alive. He never knew what hit him.