I usually don't do reviews of movies on video, but since Texas Blood Money: From Dusk Till Dawn II mercifully decided to forego the theatrical stage altogether, I opted to make an exception.

I hated this movie.

Pure and simple, in a nutshell, no bones about it.

I really hated this movie.

Imagine that you get up one Monday morning and you go to work, come home, and go to bed, without ever going to Disneyland. Sure, you didn't go to Disneyland, but it doesn't put a frown on your little face because you never expected to. There was no anticipation.

Now imagine that you are ten years old and it's summer vacation. Your parents have been promising to take you to Disneyland for six months. You've memorized the Birnbaum book and learned all the words to "It's a Small World." You're pumped, you're primed, you have a tattoo of Horace Horsecollar on your ass. Then on the day that you're supposed to leave, your mom tells you that you're just going to go to your Aunt Hilda's and eat ribbon candy and listen to her talk about her bingo trip to Atlantic City instead.

I can't tell you how bladder-splittingly excited I was to hear that there was a sequel to From Dusk Till Dawn, which I rank among the Best Movies of All Time. It was graphically disturbing to see my anticipation, I assure you.

Fast-forwarding through the previews was like tearing the shiny paper off of a mysterious gift on Christmas morning. Get to the good stuff already!

I love a good vampire movie. I love them. And of all the vampire movies that I love, From Dusk Till Dawn is probably my favorite. I could watch it again and again. I do watch it again and again.

Imagine, if you will, that there is MORE story that takes place after Seth and Kate leave the Titty Twister on the morning after.

Now just keep imagining it, and whatever you do, DO NOT RENT THIS MOVIE! Even if you've suffered massive head trauma from being involved in an auto wreck with a tanker truck full of LSD, the sequel that you imagined is one million times better than the sequel that was actually made.

Rather than following Seth and/or Kate's adventures, like a good screenplay might, this film pretends to be a sequel to the first in only two completely superficial ways.

1. There is about four minutes of footage that takes place in the Titty Twister bar from the first film.

2. There's a couple of vampires in it.

The story goes a little something like this:
The ringleader of a small band of extremely unendearing bank robbers hits a vampire bat with his car in the Mexican desert, and then proceeds to shoot it in the face with a standard-issue bad guy gun.

Not some kind of wooden, garlic-filled bullet, just a regular ol' bad guy bullet.

As would any of us, after doing this, he immediately needs a drink. And where do you go when you're in the Mexican desert and you need a drink? Why the reconstructed-without-a-hint-of-explanation Titty Twister of course!

Upon finding out that somehow this thick-skulled mutant has managed to kill a vampire with a Jeep instead of a wooden stake, the vampire bartender, Razor Eddie (apparently a relation to the first bartender, Razor Charlie, as they look the same, are played by the same actor, and have absolutely no differentiating qualities between them even on the most cursory level) gets super pissed and bites our ringleader on his greasy, bearded neck.

Before long, the now-vampire criminal ringleader has bitten almost all of his impossibly-hard-to-watch gang, and made them into a little clique of undead dopes.

And what do these dopes do, freed of their mortal coils and given free rein to fly through the black demon night and feast on the blood of virgins?

They go through with the bank robbery, of course. Everybody knows that there's nothing that a bunch of vampires need more than a few hundred pesos, right?

But at the last minute, the vampire bank robbers are foiled by the sunrise. Or are they?

Unfortunately for the local Sheriff's office, this is one of those days where a total eclipse of the sun occurs forty-five seconds after dawn, completely blocking out the sun and blanketing the hemisphere in darkness for about six consecutive hours.

The vampires in this movie were fortunate to get a solar eclipse on the day of their big bank heist, but at the same time, they are unfortunately extremely, horribly, almost comically sensitive to crosses. Anything with two intersecting lines sends them running. Two sticks crossed, the spokes of the wheel on a bank vault, the letter "O" in the The 13th Warrior font.

At this point you are rooting for the good guys purely because you realize that as soon as all the vampires are dead, the movie will be over.

I think the stupid good guys defeat the stupid vampires in the end, but honestly I was too busy loading my gun and trying to decide whether to go for one of my temples or just stick it in my mouth to really get the full dramatic impact of the ending.

I hated this movie, even though Bruce Campbell appears in it.

Bruce Campbell "appears" in this movie.

He "appears" in this movie in the same way that he "appeared" in Congo.
He "appears" in this movie the same way that the guy who hung himself "appears" in The Wizard of Oz.

If you are going to kill Bruce Campbell before the freakin' opening credits roll, DON'T USE HIM! Do you do this just to piss me off?

And for you Tiffani-Amber Thiessen fans out there, don't get your panties in a bunch over Texas Blood Money either. She "appears" in this movie the same way that Alfred Hitchcock "appears" in Psycho.

The new one.

But enough about what I didn't like about this movie. Let's talk about what I did like.

...

Um...

...

The direction was interesting. Whatever kind of crack that the director was smoking made for some artsy camera angles.

How many times have you been watching a Spielberg movie and said to yourself, "Sure, this angle is all fine and good, but I wonder how that oscillating fan in the corner sees this scene through its own eyes?" or "I wonder what a vampire attack looks like from inside of the vampire's mouth?" or "I wish somebody would finally shoot a scene of somebody talking on the phone straight up through the coil of the cord."

This is the only video that I've ever rented that I've disliked so much that I wrote a warning on the video box before I returned it. I really did. That's not a joke.

I hated this movie.

And I'll never forgive you for that Disneyland thing, Mom.