From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez)

It's hard to believe I ever actually gave From Dusk Till Dawn any sort of short shrift as a film-- watching it again, it's a fantastic piece of work, one of the most astoundingly entertaining films in any genre of the past 20 years or so. Everything fits together perfectly, the Quentin Tarantino script bristles with the rat-a-tat dialogue of the best Tarantino pictures, and the film looks and feels cool enough to have been made by QT himself. Of course, it was made by Robert Rodriguez, and that's good too, if not better-- it's like Tarantino's brand of retro-cool cross-pollinated with Rodriguez's knack for sweltering south-of-the-border locales and hot-shit action, and that's just about as awesome as it sounds.

Really, what more can you ask for in a movie like this? Anyone who's heard of it knows what it's about-- fugitive Gecko Brothers (portrayed, stupendously, by Tarantino and the film's easy MVP, George Clooney) kidnap a family and skate across the border, stowed-away in their RV. The first half of the movie is a pitch-perfect on-the-lam picture; halfway through, it shifts, wholesale, into something else entirely. It is at this point that the movie explodes and splatters the walls with awesome.

Believe me when I tell you this: this movie is AWESOME. If you're unfamiliar with the direction the script takes at the halfway point, do yourself a favor and keep yourself in the dark-- you're due for an Exorcist-style head-spin when the narrative goes from zero to WHAT??? in a matter of seconds. There's a lot of action, and it's great, but where Rodriguez and Tarantino really excel is their characters. They're incredibly memorable-- most notably Clooney's Seth Gecko (he's a certified badass here-- seriously, you'll give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out how Clooney went from this to Batman & Robin in less than a year-- and Tarantino's given him all the best lines), but Tarantino himself is nice and creepy as Seth's pervy bro, and a startingly subdued Harvey Keitel plays the imperiled family's put-upon ex-clergy patriarch pitch-perfectly. Even the minor characters all get a chance to shine-- the beauty of ensemble acting-- giving Tom Savini and Fred Williamson their moments in the sun.

I dunno, there's just a lot of awesome, iconic stuff going on here. I'm kind of keeping tight-lipped about the places it goes-- it's just so much more fun if you don't know-- but trust me when I say that this is a flick just chock-full of wonderful. The script is bursting with delicious one-liners, and more importantly, it goes everywhere you (or at least, I) could possibly hope it will. There's iconic quotes and even more iconic shots. Really, it just exudes cool, and anyone with even a fleeting interest in things that are cool-- like, REALLY cool, not force-fed community-at-large cool-- needs to recognize.

There's no way I could ever recommend this movie enough.

Rating: ***** (out of five)