From Dusk Till Dawn
Erm... umm... very weird. The first hour or so feels very much like a Tarantino movie. The dialogue is snappy and arresting, as is the acting, and the tone is decidedly gritty and irreverently callous. A casual conversation between a sheriff and a gas station clerk turns into an explosive double homicide. A middle aged mother is raped and brutally murdered by the writer/actor himself (thankfully offscreen). A disillusioned pastor and his two children are taken hostage. His barely legal (if legal at all) daughter is threatened with sexual violence. Little touches of black humor keep it from feeling too nihilistic or dark, but it is still decidedly nihilistic and dark, and very recognizably from the same mind that produced Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.
Then, quite suddenly and with great gusto, Rodrigo (or possibly Tarantino's more playful Grindhouse side) appears, accompanied by vampire strippers and a crotch gun shaped like a penis. The movie turns into an extended action sequence with all the gravitas and emotional weight of a middle school boy's notebook doodles. Everything gets way campier.
It's kind of the same bizarre juxtaposition (oh good lord, I used the word 'juxtaposition') seen in the Kill Bill films, but without their inexplicable cohesiveness. It just feels like someone mashed two different scripts together, and by the end it felt like a mess of dangling narrative threads that was only saved by good acting and good dialogue, and the inherent entertainment of watching vampires get slaughtered in a variety of gory ways.
In the end, I guess I enjoyed it. I would have much rather seen the crime drama and the vampire action flick as two separate films, and felt that From Dusk Till Dawn as a whole was significantly less than the sum of its parts. Likewise, it had a bit of that sense of barren soullessness that Tarantino films tend to err towards.
http://videogamepotpourri.blogspot.com/2014/06/short-movie-review-from-dusk-till-dawn.html