Before I rented this film, I had heard from several fairly reliable sources
that it was not a particularly good movie. However, I fugured, how bad can
a film with Harvey Keitel and Juliette Lewis be?  After having seen it,
I can tell you that aside from the clever special effects, it is a pretty
bad story. And that is sad because it begins with such potential to be a
fairly good thriller.

A family consisting of a middle aged disillusioned preacher man and his two
teen age children are kidnapped by two nasty murderers/bank robbers, and
forced to transport them, in their mobile home, over the Texas border into
Mexico. In the small Mexican town, the two bad guys are supposed to meet up
with the Mexican fence who will buy the hot bank receipts from them. The
rendezvous place is a sleezy sex bar called the TITTY TWISTER.

The group arrives at the TWISTER near nightfall, and find themselves amidst
hardened biker and trucker type patrons where they seem oddly out of place.
Most of the patrons are depicted as bad ass hombres who only care about
drinking, fighting, and scoring with the really "bad girl" dancers. Several
of the bikers however are shown to be really decent guys underneath their
hardness. The preacher man, played by Keitel, and his clean cut son, and
daughter played by Lewis, are forced to sit thorugh a series of fights, foul
mouthed repartees, and "dirty dancing" by the local female talent.

The film's real horror aspect begins when suddenly, in the midst of the
carousing and "entertainment", the staff of the bar reveal themselves to
be "children of the night" and begin to attack the custmers, ripping their
flesh, biting them, and drinking their blood, in an orgy of gore. You have
seen this stuff before but in this film it is presented in a tongue in
cheek campy way that adds a certin charm and entertainment to the sequence.

It is during this last part of the film that the mettle of the family and
their abductors is tested. Can the bad guys stop being bad guys long enough
to fight the hordes of Satan? Can the preacher man who has lost his trust
in G-d turn around and call upon his religious faith to help save his
family as well as save their abductors? Stay in your seat and you will find
out whether or not adversity can really reform the fallen and embolden the
innocent so that they all rise to the occaision, or falter and fail.

The performances are mediocre and the characterizations predictible. Once
again we are led to ask what good actors such as Keitel and Lewis are doing
in a film like this.

George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino give ok stereotyped performances as
the nasty boy abductors.
There is a nice cameo appearence by Cheech Marin as the Mexican money fence.
The morphing special effects are no better or worse than in any other film
of this genre.
The musical soundtrack is quite good, featuring the main themes performed
by ZZ TOP.

In his own web page review of the film, entitled FROM YAWN TILL SNORE,
T. Pascal writes, "No need to see this one". Pascal can be reached at
pascal@oxy.edu.

New York
8-16-96