An early screenplay of Quentin Tarantino's, disinterred and refurbished for his friend and colleague Robert Rodriguez to direct, and for himself to act in (amateurishly, as always, but with thoroughly aroused senses of fun and enthusiasm). The pre-credits scene exhibits some genuine movie sense. An extended bit of fat-chewing between a sore-muscled Texas Ranger (Michael Parks, once the Next James Dean) and the proprietor of Benny's World of Liquor seems to be going nowhere slow. And then the screws are quite unforeseeably and uncomfortably tightened. And the crowning spectacle -- to skip ahead -- of a burning man coming up shooting is indeed spectacular. And the credits sequence itself includes a couple of visual jokes -- a peep through a bullet hole in a hand and an X-ray view of a hostage in a car trunk -- that merit at least a blink or a head-shake. Then it's down to business. Mechanics. The grind. Inspiration with Tarantino, or with Rodriguez for that matter, is a very sometime thing. A flash or two, and they're content to coast. The switch, roughly halfway through, from a killers-on-the-lam thing to a night-of-the-living-dead thing (nouveaux vampires from whom the merest puncture-wound is the kiss of death), is not so much a show of audacity as it is of shiftlessness. It releases the filmmakers from fully developing either of the mismatched halves of their work. And the second-half orgy of stop-motion transmogrifications, severed limbs (Tarantino's castration anxieties amplified to complete panic), exploding heads, flowing-like-wine pus and slime, etc., is no more than monotonous. Monotony, however, needn't wait for plot developments or lack of same. Metronomic iterations of the "f" word get there first. George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, Fred Williamson, Tom Savini. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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