From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999)

Sequels to modest genre successes often arrive with a shrug. From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money arrives with a full-body slump. Released direct to video in 1999, shot in South Africa for reasons of economy, and awarded a Saturn for Best Home Video Release, it exists chiefly as a market test. Miramax wanted to know whether franchise sequels could be manufactured cheaply and sold to the living room. The answer, per the eleven critics aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes, was a nine percent approval rating. Robert Patrick inherits the weary-lead duties, Danny Trejo tends bar at the Titty Twister, and a bank heist in Mexico collides with a vampire outbreak. It is a film about logistics. Who drives, who cracks the vault, who turns into a bat and murders the night guard.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film seems untroubled by that. Raymond Cruz, Danny Trejo, and Maria Checa appear as Latino characters in a story set along the Texas-Mexico border, which is to say they appear because the setting calls for them. Nothing in the script pauses to congratulate itself on this arrangement. Ethnicity is texture, not thesis. The same holds for everything else. Women exist to be killed in showers or to populate a bar whose name announces its purpose. No character wrestles with identity, no relationship gestures toward queer possibility, and no line of dialogue suggests the filmmakers had a message burning to get out.

What remains is pulp, and pulp has its own integrity. The gang robs a bank for cash, not as an indictment of late capitalism. Nobody mentions the climate. Nobody celebrates a body, diagnoses a neurotype, or revises a historical record. The vampires are vampires, the crosses are improvised from whatever is at hand, and the eclipse arrives on schedule to keep the slaughter going. Scott Spiegel directs with the enthusiasm of a man who has seen many horror movies and would like to show us a few. There is no sermon at the end, no moral, no invitation to examine our complicity. Buck simply takes the money and runs, and Otis lets him. A film can be hollow and still be honest about it.