Most of the complaints I’ve read about this film involve its sudden shift from a crime/ kidnapping/ escape movie to a horror/ vampire flick. If you could re write the script to continue the first half more conventionally, what would happen? Say you get to start over once Salma Hayek first appears.
Yes, that has always struck me as being strange along with the fact that, if I were the one who kidnapped a family, stopping at a road house for drinks wouldn’t be on my list of things to do. LOL
My second-half scenario involves a series of scenes in which Richie (the QT-crazy rapist brother) keeps getting left alone with the Juliette Lewis character but shit keeps happening to prevent him from raping her. There are a number of attempted escapes by the Keitel family, naturally, one of which succeeds and Clooney and QT have to chase them down while sticking close to the bar where they’re going to meet Cheech Marin.
Oddly enough, that’s a thing. I’ve got a short story collection, perhaps influenced by Pulp Fiction, that’s all criminals stumbling into sci-fi, horror or supernatural situations. The one I remember most clearly was a bunch of bank robbers fleeing across the desert stopping at an old shack outside a junkyard, bullying the old hermit running the place; it’s not a junkyard and the old man’s a cannibal with no access to refrigeration.
The idea for the stories was someone wondering why only naive college kids and wholesome suburban families stumble across the weird and creepy. Homeless squatters could choose the wrong house, swingers could answer the wrong ad, you go to rob McDonalds and the order-taker is the goddess of mischief.
Yeah, I think that is what Tarantino was going for.
I liked the movie. A nice twit on the horror genre,
David J Schow has made a career of this. “Black Leather Required” is a collection of short stories along these lines.
They didn’t stop at the road house for drinks exactly. It was their destination. They were there to meet Cheech who was getting them new identities to vanish south of the border, beyond the gaze of US authorities who were looking for them. In retrospect they would have been smarter to sit in Keitel’s RV all night, but to be fair it’s not really reasonable to expect a couple of desperate criminals to plan for the eventuality that the bar where they’re supposed to meet their contact is chock full of vampires.
“Now let’s kill that f*cking band.”
I really didn’t mind the transition. It’s weird and unexpected but that’s what makes the film unique. Without that it’s a pretty generic (if well done as Robert Rodriguez really does that genre well) horror/action comedy.
It may have been that I watched it at the cinema in the days before widespread spoilers online, so it was a complete shock when it suddenly changed genre (I knew it was a joint effort with Tarantino and Rodriguez but nothing else)
Yes, he is, isn’t he?
If I rewrote the script, there would be a lot more of Salma Hayek. (drool)
That’s a slightly different problem that I have with the film, but since it almost precisely coincides with the vampire issues, I’ll add that her striptease makes no sense from a plot perspective. She’s the star dancer in a club whose name and other dancers display toplessness as the norm, yet in her show-stopping, crowd-silencing performance she sheds not a stitch of clothing? In the real world, she’d get hooted and booed off the stage, impressive as her writhing mid-section is.
The whole point of the first half of the story is to set up the second half. If the movie isn’t about vampires, then what is it about?
A family abducted in their RV by a pair of escaped murderers.
To say that sets up a vampire horror film flies in the face of a befanged Salma Hayek.
Right, and who’s the protagonist? Who’s the bad guy?
In the original story, the whole purpose of having Clooney kidnap a family is to give him a semi-redemption arc as an unwilling antihero after they meet someone even worse than him. So how does he redeem himself? Fight some Mexican gangster?
That is precisely what I’m inviting you to speculate upon.
Set it up as a vampire hijinks movie.
The whole point (to the vampires) is that the roadhouse attracts a lot of nobodies every night, people who won’t be missed after a night of debauchery and feeding. Then along comes this pair of criminals, the target of a massive manhunt, and the family of innocent victims. When they go missing, the cops are going to keep looking for them, so the vampire can’t just kill them all. They also can’t just turn them over to the cops, because then they end up on the news as the place where the criminals were caught. Their whole system is teetering on the edge of collapse.
So we get a mad-cap caper of the vampires trying to kill and eat everyone else at the roadhouse, while trying to keep Clooney et al. both alive and ignorant about what’s really going on. Add in a few cops arriving, who also need to be distracted from both the vampires and Clooney et al.
Where is it established that the vampires have the slightest inkling who Clooney and QT are?
I don’t think it’s formally established, but recall that, when they first arrive, they’re made to feel unwelcome. “This bar is for bikers and truckers!” The reverend had to establish his credentials as a “trucker” because he needed that class of license to drive his RV. So the vampires already knew they weren’t really the type of nomadic nobodies they were looking for. Toss in a few characters talking about the manhunt, and it wouldn’t be too hard to set up this version.
I don’t see it that way - I see her as the ‘main’ vampire using her abilities (and then some) to lull the crowd into easy pickings - The brothers ruined the calm and made it a melee.