It would be interesting to note quite how much involvment the duo of Rodriguez and Tarantino had in From Dusk Til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money. They have stamped their names as Executive Producers, and been given credit in the “presented by” credits. Perhaps the agreement was made prior to the sequel being made, and left to Scott Spiegel to write and direct this poor cousin related in name only.

Robert Patrick is a down on his luck ex-con named (highly originally) Buck; hounded by the police after his old friend Luther (Duane Whitaker also wrote the screenplay) breaks out of jail. Luther contacts Buck for a big robbery worth a few million in Mexico and to round up the other country bumpkins for the job.

You have the Hispanic, the bumbling idiot, the cowboy veteran who collectively make the idiots that will attempt at bank robbery that doesn’t have a chance of happening. As soon as the characters are brought into picture, everything from start to end is completely predictable.

What made From Dusk Til Dawn interesting was the oddity of the whole thing, going from a thriller to an all out action horror. Texas Bloody Money tries to do the same, but comes off as a cheap, shoddy example of how the original might have been had no effort been put in to it. It offers no polish, no production values and could quite easily have been made in someone’s backyard.

Acting is sub-par and lacking conviction. Direction is far, far too quick for the film in that everything happens within 20-30 minutes of the start, with people dying and being turned into vampires almost immediately. The start itself seems to be completely irrelevant. On the one hand there may be a genuine reference later in the film, but as far as I could tell it was completely unrelated to the film. I found it staggering that Bruce Campbell would play victim in such a cheap way.

With no big name stars or directors and producers in teh wings, the only thing that the film has going for it is a rag tag army of z-list actors (with perhaps Robert Patrick being the exception), a script that dwindles and has no logical or paced structure to it, woeful acting and special effects anda ctin that seems more fit for a late 80s Straight to video horror. Well, at least it has the latter correct, but you would have expected a better effort since the aim seemed to be to cash in on a film that had grossed pretty reasonably. Had this been a cinema release you can be guaranteed it would have been slated and grated by the critical mass.

My laughter was more for the tragic performances and completely shoddy script than it was for any humour the characters could offer. There doesn’t even seem to be any logic to the title aside from the loose relation to there being a dusk and dawn. It offers nothing near the experience and unpredictability of which characters would make it and which wouldn’t of the first film.

There’s nothing redeeming about this disaster of a film, and in fact it pains me to say that this was worse than a Paul Anderson film, and up there with the likes of Uwe Bowell and even then, perhaps worse than the latter. It pains me as I loathe the fact that some moron in the US is willing to fund these two abominations to the film industry offering derivative thrills which people seem to lap up.

I watched this knowing that it couldn’t be good, but I didn’t expect it to be so abysmal that vampires would be rolling in their coffins in absolute shame to be associated with this mediocre cash-in. You can only assume that people were bribed to enable this to even get the green light.

Verdict: From Poor to Crap. Entertain yourself by going to the toilet in the dark instead