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Review
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2: TEXAS BLOOD MONEY
Rating: 
USA. 1999.
Director – Scott Spiegel, Screenplay – Scott Spiegel & Duane Whitaker, Story – Scott Spiegel & Boaz Yakin, Producers – Michael Murphey, Gianni Nunnari & Meir Teper, Photography – Philip Lee, Music – Joseph Stanley Williams, Visual Effects – Netter Digital Entertainment Ltd (Supervisors – Laurel Klick & Patrick Perez), Additional Visual Effects – Atomic-Cow, Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Byers, Makeup Effects – K.N.B. EFX Group Inc (Supervisors – Michael S. Deak, Howard Berger & Greg Nicotero), Production Design – Felipe Fernandez Del Paso. Production Company – A Band Apart/Los Hooligans.
Cast:
Robert Patrick (Buck Bowers), Duane Whitaker (Luther Hicks), Bo Hopkins (Sheriff Otis Lawson), Raymond Cruz (Jesus), Brett Harrelson (Ray Bob), Muse Watson (C.W.), Danny Trejo (Razor Charlie), Maria Checa (Lupe), Lara Bye (Motel Clerk), Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (Pam), Bruce Campbell (Barry)
Plot: Buck Bowers is contacted by his old friend Luther Hicks who has just escaped from jail. Luther persuades Buck to reunite his old team and head across the border to Mexico to conduct a bank robbery. But while they are holed up at the El Coyote Motel waiting, Luther collides with a bat on the road and crashes. He walk to nearest building which happens to be the Titty Twister. He returns a vampire and leads the group on to conduct the bank robbery. But as Luther bites his way through and infects the rest of the team, armed police squads arrive outside the bank. Soon Buck finds himself caught between his hungry vampire comrades on the inside and trigger-happy cops on the outside.
The Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) was a considerable success, even if it only met with a mixed reception from public and critics alike. That didn’t 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 actually the best of the three films. Both the sequels use the same basic plot setup of the first film in which a group of outlaws end up encountering the Titty Twister bar and having to fend off vampires. Certainly this 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. Texas Blood Money quite imaginatively reworks the fundamentals – now with outlaws having to conduct a bank robbery while at siege from the police outside the building and from their own vampire-infected number on the inside.
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 just downright silly, shots – a desert road wide angle with an animal skull in closeup in the foreground which 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. And there’s a very silly sequence that conducts a flashback to a narrated tale about a shootup 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 someone 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 Tarantino’s own directorial success, this one 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 then be attacked by a horde of bats inside the elevator. There’s 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 rather 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. It is badly written – there’s a scene which tries to mimic cod-Tarantino nonchalant monologues with the gang nattering on about porn movies which 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’s even a bizarre bat attack parody of the Psycho (1960) shower scene. Though set in Mexico, the film was actually shot in South Africa. Last updated: Friday, 05 September 2008
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