From Dusk Till Dawn is my Muse

An insufferable movie post

There’s been a lot of improv action on here lately. We just launched a WE Improv Podcast (WIMPY), and I’m in the middle of writing about improv through other cultural artifacts. This however is just a fun little seasonal treat.

If you haven’t seen From Dusk Till Dawn, I’d watch it before reading. Seriously, don’t google it. Don’t watch a trailer or read a summary. Just watch it. I know that’s annoying, especially without any buy-in. It will be worth it. Or you will be upset with me like my friends and family. If you don’t want to, I did do my very best to write about it without explaining it.

I don’t remember the first time I saw From Dusk Till Dawn, but I remember the first time I pretended that I hadn’t seen it, and I remember the first time Kevin Brown saw it. The trouble with writing about From Dusk Till Dawn is that it’s better enjoyed as a forgotten artifact. The trouble with not writing about From Dusk Till Dawn is that storytelling could use the inspirational juice. The movie’s power comes from the lack of impression its footprint made on cinema. But imagine what cinema could be if FDTD’s footprint was a Selma Hayak stiletto left in the ass of movies.

Get Gassed was the name of one of two video stores in my hometown. It was either a video store that you could buy gas at, or a gas station with a video section. Looking back on it, I’m so glad some aspirational hillbilly decided to turn their gas station into a movie rental shop. We didn’t have a Blockbuster or a Hollywood Video. We didn’t even get a Wal-Mart until I was sixteen. Our only chain was a Safeway grocery store until another gas station became a Taco Bell for a couple years. This was pre-internet. I mean you could download images of naked Pamela Anderson if you had thirty minutes, but there wasn’t anything close to actual videos on the World Wide Web for most of my adolescence. Idaho Springs was thirty minutes from a proper city, so Get Gassed was quite literally a portal to another world- Hollywood, and by proxy, pop culture.

One holiday season, my sister’s dad, Mike, and I were tasked with going to Get Gassed and picking out a movie. At this point I was probably fifteen and had already seen From Dusk Till Dawn, but I didn’t own it yet (more on that later), so I grabbed the box and pretended to inspect it as if it was a new discovery. I brought it over to Mike and said, “have you seen this?”

“Oh wow, yes this movie is disgusting. It’s depraved. Let’s get it. I’ll pretend I haven’t seen it.” So in a double sin of omission, we rented FDTD and brought it home. When our anti-heroes and Christian road trip family got inside the Titty Twister to reveal a dozen topless women dancing on tables, Mike turned to me and said “this is where I met your mom.” I suppose I had that coming, subjecting everyone to what I wanted even if I knew it would be an explicit doozy. My poor mom rolling her eyes on the couch next to me. Her tolerance for indecency was hanging on by a thread at this point. I can’t remember the exact exchange following Danny Trejo getting stabbed repeatedly, but basically Mike and I finished the movie by ourselves and our license to rent movies was revoked.

Kevin Brown was my friend. I haven’t spoken to Kevin in probably close to twenty years but there was a period in high school when we were at his house constantly. We were at his house because he had Playboy magazines. In high school, if guys were friends, they would usually decide whose house to hang out at based on which friend had access to adult magazines, firearms, or alcohol. We never hung out at my house. I was a good friend, but not good enough to give up looking at naked women for. But one time we did hang out at my house because I had a pretty extensive VHS collection. What I lacked in sex, guns and booze paraphernalia, I made up with in having two VCRs. If you had two VCRs, you could rent a movie from the video store and you could record it on to a blank VHS. And like that, you went from not having seen Mallrats to owning Mallrats in the same evening. So there we were at my house and I asked Kevin if he’d seen From Dusk Till Dawn. He hadn’t. Now I had seen it so many times it didn’t even occur to me that it was a one movie posing as another movie. I was just trying to compensate for not having any adult mags. So I put it in and hit play. At about the hour mark, Kevin got so angry. He couldn’t believe the turn the movie had made. He was loving the bank robbing brothers dressed in black, and the gas station clerk getting set on fire, and Cheech Marin showing up as a border officer and a guy who says “pussy” twenty-five times, and the slow seductive dance of Selma Hayak with a giant snake. But shortly after that, Kevin’s reality was torn down and he acted as if he had learned Santa Claus wasn’t real.

“This is so fucking stupid,” he said. I was a little confused, but I was also laughing at how mad he was getting. “What’s so fucking funny? This movie sucks. You suck. What did you have me watch?” I can’t tell you how bizarre it was to see Kevin offended. This was a guy who would use all sorts of crude language, tell off-color jokes, start fights, get drunk, and like I said, keep a healthy stash of contraband around. He was basically your prototypical teenage male in a mountain town. I didn’t think the dude wore jewelry, so imagine my surprise to find him clutching his pearls. I’m not even sure we finished the movie. It’s possible we weren’t friends after that. Decades before friendships were severed because of people’s political afflictions, Kevin and I stopped talking to each other over a movie genre. That’s not true. I’m sure we were still friends, but anytime picking a movie came up or going to the movie, Kevin would bring up how I sat him down to watch one of the stupidest fucking movies of all time. I guess he just really wanted to see the Gecko brothers make it to El Ray or see the Christian family they kidnapped stop them. Whatever he wanted to see it wasn’t the last forty-five minutes of the Quentin Tarantino written, Robert Rodriguez directed 90s pulp flick.

But almost thirty years later, it’s the only kind of movie I want to see. The movie is crude, lawless, vulgar, violent, ribald, horny, explosive, and shameless. It’s very difficult to write about this movie without explaining it, but every scene is so jam packed with explicit content it’s like one of those photos police departments take of a seizure where they lay all the guns, money, drugs and illegal loot on a table. Your eyes are gasping to gulp it all down. I recently threw a tantrum over getting my partner to watch it and I was so giddy to see her reaction. Whenever I watch something I’ve seen with someone who hasn’t I watch it through their experience and notice new things. This time I noticed a detail during one dispatching of a character I’d never seen before. Basically they sink balls in the pool table pockets. The effects are practical, the blood is abundant and half the movie takes place in a biker bar called “The Titty Twister.” It stars George Clooney and Harvey Keitel. It’s Clooney’s best performance in my mind. His ability to play someone cool and also incredibly mystified is legendary. He’s basically Michael Clayton with a tribal neck tattoo and a .44. He never misses a cool beat, but he also is constantly adjusting his perception of reality on a very steep learning curve. At a seedy motel, Clooney’s character Seth gets yelled at by the desk clerk and he replies “what do you think I want you mean old bastard? I want a fucking room.” Then there’s the “I’m peachy Kate. The world is my oyster…” There’s no sex, but there’s a character named Sex Machine. Did I mention the seductive dance Selma Hayak pulls off an a live giant snake? Just kidding. I know this is the third time. Or the line “apple pie pussy” uttered by Cheech’s second character who is credited as Chet Pussy.

My favorite exchange comes at the end when Cheech Marin plays a third character and the conversation starts with “so what were they, psychos, or?”

“Did they look like psychos? Is that what they looked like?” I’ll leave the rest of the exchange for you to discover.

The movie blows the doors off your expectations at every turn. It offends, it surprises, it delights in carnage. If you were ever on the fence about Tarantino’s foot fetish, this little number clears it up like Gold Bond. In 2024, I saw Longlegs, Strange Darling, and The Substance. Three movies that entertain and do so in very specific super-charged ways with very meticulous deliveries.  They all are movies that need to be seen rather than recounted so I won’t distinguish between the three for fear of pulling their gut punches. This trio of films owes a little of their success to From Dusk Till Dawn because it is a movie that captures all three of the formers best visuals and reveals in one smorgasbord of mayhem and it does so with gloves off in shallow water. There is no doubt that Longlegs, Strange Darling and The Substance have more to say than FDTD. They are thrilling and fun, but also thought-provoking.  A feat of achievement to be sure. And I suspect we will get more movies like them. But that’s why From Dusk Till Dawn is in a caliber of its own. Its craft is high and its themes are low. Give me the provocation without the thought. I want my movies to upend my reality and to be packed with gun fights and explosions and nudity and reality distortions that make my friends mad and my parents leave the room. Not because it’s controversial or because it’s tackling a divisive issue, but because it’s stupid how much fun the filmmakers are having with burning down their world. Horror movies are making a point. FDTD is just stabbing you with one.

Admittedly it’s taken me thirty years to realize the impact FDTD has had on me. It has made me believe that anything is possible in the realm of storytelling. That might seem like hyperbole or that I have delusions of grandeur for a B movie that no one remembers, but when Strange Darling hinted at a couple believing in Big Foot, I hoped against all odds that Sasquatch might be the reason people told me to go in blind to see it. In my improv, I’m always looking for the possibility that the world we’re building is not the one we live in. I love a time portal, or ogres or robots or unhealthy clones. Unless you tell me it explicitly doesn’t exist, then I think our imaginations and by extension the stories we tell should be allowed to go wherever we want them to. I have tried to incorporate some sort of nudity gag into just about anything I’ve written or performed because there is nothing as ubiquitous and shocking as nudity and so it’s a hack way to get a reaction. Loosen up society and I’ll stop doing it, but until then, here’s some butts and bits. When I wrote a sketch show, I introduced a fantastical beast into the third act because I found it absurdly funny and a little maddening. I’ll never forget after the show, someone who was in the audience for the other show we shared the hour with, came up to the cast and I as we were leaving and said “who wrote that?” When I raised my hand she said through laughter, and I’m paraphrasing, “you’re fucking sick. That was the most batshit thing I’ve ever seen. What is wrong with you? You’re a madman.” We didn’t get a run with the show, but for me, that review was worth the hundreds of hours of writing and rehearsals.

Our imaginations seem to have been corralled to fit inside the fence posts of the reality we are living in. This is true within the world of storytelling and it is true within the society with which our stories are told. I worry that we’ll never get a movie like From Dusk Till Dawn again. We won’t get a script that vulgar and direction that gratuitous and a cast that talented to make a spectacle that demented. Even Furiosa polished its rusted hot rods, kept everyone’s skirts on, and made sure we never left the deserts and drought. Movies need to make money, and audiences are fickle, so big haymakers will always lose out to the comfortable limitations of playing within the rules of the world. But if FDTD has taught me anything, it’s that our expectations can be subverted. Here’s hoping I’m wrong. That in fact I’m only an hour in to the From Dusk Till Dawn of my life, and that just past the next border of my existential road trip is going to be a dive on the edge of town with a giant neon sign of a woman getting her titty twisted and beyond the enormous wooden doors is a filthy saloon with lowlifes and topless women, just brimming with gratuitous tendencies and vulgar debauchery, and of course Santanico Pandemonium.