What entirely wrecks the film is Scott Spiegel’s direction. Spiegel is a long time 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/Night Crew (1989). 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. 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. 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. 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.

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 3: Texas Blood Money is definitely a B movie. 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. 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. Despite having on board K.N.B. 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. The film is badly written – one scene that tries to mimic cod-Tarantino nonchalant monologues with the gang nattering on about porn movies flops badly. Worse, the vampirism is ill thought out – people become vampires and start attacking others in a matter of seconds of being bitten and anything even vaguely cross-shaped can be used as a weapon. There is even a bizarre bat attack parody of the Psycho (1960) shower scene. Though set in Mexico, the film was shot in South Africa.

Scott Spiegel’s other works include directing the Quentin Tarantino presented My Name is Modesty (2002), based on the popular comic-book heroine; Hostel Part III (2011). Spiegel has also written the script for Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead II (1987); written and produced Thou Shalt Not Kill ... Except/Stryker’s War (1987) about a murderous religious cult; written the non-genre The Rookie (1990); produced Hostel (2005). In Hostel, Roth pushed on-screen torture and dismemberment to a new extreme – in so doing, creating a fad that was soon nicknamed Torture Porn and copied by other horror films. Eli Roth followed Hostel and Hostel Part II (2007); and produced 2001 Maniacs (2005). Spiegel has made minor acting cameos in most of Sam Raimi’s films.