Pesce and writer Alvaro Rodriguez (who I’m sure got the job because he was the most talented person to apply and never even mentioned he was related to the producer) manage to fuck this up pretty convincingly, and they do it exactly the same way THE RAVEN did: by making the most interesting things completely unimportant. Well, that’s what I said about THE RAVEN, and we all remember how that turned out. I mean, that’s just too damn good a setup to ruin, right? So you’ve got this great character actor playing a great character (Bierce’s acerbic, misanthropic wit is the stuff of legend) whose fictional depiction dovetails nicely into a real life mystery and subtly incorporates a bunch of fun details from Bierce’s real life and literary output. Heck, it certainly would have been a fitting end for the guy. This is a stroke of brilliance because Bierce did indeed disappear mysteriously in Mexico, and for all we know it could have been cuz of vampires. In fact, the film’s subtitle comes from one of his stories. You see, the story’s central protagonist is FROM DUSK TILL DAWN veteran Michael Parks, playing one of literary history’s most interesting and enigmatic characters, Devil’s Dictionary and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge author Ambrose Bierce. What makes the story mildly worth watching is that in an effort to tell a story no one could possibly be interested in (in fact, I had forgotten the character’s name and hence missed the point of the big reveal) they actually create some filler which is kind of clever.

Hooker from dusk till dawn 2