EFX, a top drawer Hollywood makeup effects house and whose partner Robert Kurtzman (the K in K.N.B.) came up with the story for the first film, the effects looks cheap and cheesy. There are some schlocky scenes of bats gnawing through the elevator cable (considering that elevator cables are more than an inch thick and made of solid steel the bats would have to have helluva tough teeth or be gnawing an awfully long time) and tacky closeups of them burrowing inside Thiessen’s skirt and top. There is a silly opening with Bruce Campbell and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen as two lawyers leaving the office gloating about having gotten a serial killer off only to be attacked by a horde of bats inside the elevator. Whereas the first film started life as a B movie script and ended up being mounted with an A-budget and cast after Quentin Tarantino’s directorial success, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money is definitely a B movie. This ludicrously over-the-top, affectedly style-conscious direction kills off what might have been a credible and decent film in somebody else’s hands. There is a very silly sequence that conducts a flashback to a narrated tale about a shoot-up on the set of a porn movie – the narrator says “… and then they shot the cameraman” whereupon the gunman turns and shoots the camera lens out. When the safe in the bank is being cracked, the camera takes the place of its dial and rotates around to various odd angles as it is being turned. Spiegel fills the film with self-consciously arty and entirely distracting, not to mention sometimes downright silly shots – a desert road wide angle with an animal skull in closeup in the foreground that has a snake or tarantula crawling through it every time we see it shots up from out of trash cans, tequila bottles, glasses, pools of blood, from inside the curl of a phone cord, inside the eyes of skulls, the mouths of vampires, even from inside a sliced-open neck. Bank robbers (l to r) Duane Whitaker, Muse Watson and Raymond Cruz Spiegel is a longtime associate of Sam Raimi, having made acting appearances in all of Raimi’s films as well as co-writing The Evil Dead II (1987), before making his directorial debut with the supermarket slasher film Intruder (1989). What entirely wrecks the film is Scott Spiegel’s direction. Texas Blood Money imaginatively reworks the fundamentals – with the outlaws now having to conduct a bank robbery while at siege from the police outside the building and from their own vampire-infected numbers on the inside. Certainly, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money develops the premise better as a horror film than From Dusk Till Dawn did, which, after a fine lead-in, ended up being nothing more than an extended barroom brawl. That did not stop Tarantino and Rodriguez overseeing two sequels, of which this was the first and would be followed by the prequel From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (2000), which is the best of the three films, and the tv series From Dusk Till Dawn (2014-6).īoth the sequels use the same basic plot set-up of the first film where a group of outlaws encounter the Titty Twister bar and then have to fend off vampires. The Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) was a considerable success, even if it met with a mixed reception from public and critics alike.
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