By: Brandon Wolfe
Needing a flagship series for his new El Rey network, director Robert Rodriguez turned to his own filmography for content to adapt, an understandable impulse and one not without merit. There are plenty of Rodriguez films that could easily make the transition to television. ‘Spy Kids’ could become a family-geared action show. ‘The Faculty’ is so ready-made for a teen sci-fi drama that I almost half remember it as a late-‘90s WB show rather than a film. A show about the “El Mariachi” character going from town to town, getting into adventures, would be viable. And, hell, a ‘Sin City’ TV series would be a flat-out brilliant idea. But Rodriguez landed on ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, and while I’m at least grateful that he didn’t opt instead to try to get some more blood out of that ‘Machete’ stone, this was not his best play.
‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ the film was a blast when it was released in 1996. Directed by Rodriguez from a script by Quentin Tarantino (who also co-starred) and starring George Clooney, it represented a confluence of many talents that had just begun to explode in the mid-‘90s. Chronicling the exploits of the Gecko Brothers, a pair of outlaws making a desperate bid to flee to Mexico with a pile of stolen cash and the entire state of Texas in hot pursuit, the film blended comedy, violence, and huge pulpy thrills. It was also the stealthiest vampire movie ever made, sucking us into a tense hostage conflict between the brothers and the family they capture and then waiting over an hour before turning on a dime into a delirious horror freakshow.
It’s easy to see why Rodriguez was tempted to rework ‘Dusk’ into a series. Vampires are perennially popular, and marrying that concept with violent criminals (one of cable television’s scripted cornerstone) probably seemed like a can’t-lose proposal. And maybe it could have been, but not like this. This version of ‘Dusk’ operates as a slavish remake slowed down to about a tenth of the pace of the original film. It’s telling us the exact same story the same way, but drawing it out to make it last longer. The sequence that opens the film, with the Geckos causing and escaping mayhem at roadside stop Benny’s World of Liquor, lasted five minutes. Here, it takes up a full hour. The film had it about right.
Once again, the brothers are on the run, on their way to Mexico, cash in hand, with a bank teller in their trunk and blood on their hands. Once again, they take a pair of women captive in the liquor store and force a clerk named Pete to dissuade Sheriff Earl McGraw from sticking around when he pops in to use the john. Once again, Richie goes nuts and it all gets bloody. It’s frankly easier to talk about the scant ways the series differs from the movie. The big difference observed in this episode is that Earl McGraw now has a partner, Ranger Freddie Gonzalez, and the conflict at Benny’s devolves into a brief hostage situation, with Gonzalez trying to overtake the Geckos before taking some bullets as they escape. But thanks to a bulletproof vest, he survives and is now on their trail for future episodes.
Apart from the addition of Ranger Gonzalez, the series doesn’t have much else new to show us. Richie is still a crazy person who invents exchanges with women in his head and creates mayhem where it doesn’t need to be. The only new wrinkle to him is that he might now be psychic, since he has vampire visions during the standoff. For all of Tarantino’s talents, acting was never his strongest one, but the actor now playing Richie, Zane Holtz, is an even less impressive actor. D.J. Cotrona fares better as Seth, but he seems to have studied Clooney’s performance a bit too intently, as he adopts the same cadence, head gestures and even haircut that Clooney used in the film. Don Johnson is on hand as McGraw, which is a pretty inspired choice for a Michael Parks counterpart, but he doesn’t get to make the same impression that Parks did with a fraction of the screentime, mainly because Parks was given wonderful dialogue, and wonderful dialogue doesn’t exist in this episode.
I’m convinced there was a way to do ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ better than this. Perhaps a sequel series with Seth in Mexico would have been better, or some reinterpretation of the material from a different angle. But telling us an inflated version of the same story, a story that didn’t invite any additional meat grafted onto its bones, just makes it feel tired in the same way that remakes too beholden to their source material always feel. One can only hope the series deviates more in the weeks to come to lessen the stink of pointlessness.
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