TRACK #72:

Dark Night by The Blasters

Before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez gave the world Grindhouse, they first collaborated on the 1996 mash-up horror flick From Dusk Till Dawn.

Opening the movie most appropriately is this toe-tapper from The Blasters. It not only sets the tone for what is to follow but captures the atmosphere of their western-crime-horror perfectly.

This whole soundtrack is pretty great, for anyone who likes their tunes a little on the tex-mex side, featuring tracks from Tito & Tarantula, ZZ-Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn amongst others.

I won’t assume everyone’s seen this flick, as I don’t catch too much about it on tumblr, it’s almost 20 years old by now and Tarantino and Rodriguez aren’t quite the pop culture icons they were at the time of it’s release.

If you haven’t seen From Dusk Till Dawn, I recommend it to both horror fans and crime fans alike, as the picture starts out as one and becomes the other. Which, while working at several video stores back then, was a complaint I heard a lot from some renters. Renters that apparently didn’t expect the movie to explode into an all out blood-bathed gore-fest in the 3rd act.

Honestly, I think that’s the movie’s greatest strength and I kinda wish more films engaged in this type of genre bending. Characters that finds themselves in horrific situations were leading perfectly non-horrific lives until that point. Why should that lead up always feel like a set-up?

The fact that these characters are allowed to live and breath in a world outside the trappings of a horror film, until they are decidedly in one, is refreshing. It makes them real, believable characters and gives more weight to their reactions to the horrific turn of events.

Add to that a solid script from Tarantino, some first rate action staging from Rodriguez, a great big screen leap from George Clooney, some awesome gore and creature FX from the KNB crew, fun cameos from Tom Savini and Fred Williamson, multiple performances from Cheech Marin, one sexy as all hell Selma Hayek, a bevy of naked vampire strippers and a great soundtrack and you’ve got yourself one hell of a movie. So fun a movie, in fact, that we can forgive Tarantino and Harvey Keitel for their somewhat labored performances.

So grab a bottle of whiskey, some condoms filled with holy water, and maybe a jackhammer tricked out to be the most bad-ass vampire death machine ever, cause its gonna be a dark night.

And remember, psycho’s do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don’t give a fuck how crazy they are.