D: P.J. Pesce.  Ara Celi, Orlando Jones, Marco Leonardi,  Michael Parks, Rebecca Gayheart, Danny Trejo, Temuera Morrison, Jordana Spiro, Lennie Loftin, Sonia Braga. (Dimension)

    You’ve got to love direct-to-video horror franchises.  The first film in a series is usually watchable, but not actually good enough to add more, or even equal, money into a sequel. The second usually comes off as a safe retread of the first.  The third, however, is the killer.  The third is when either new ideas are born, usually ideas so out-of-whack they’re fun to watch even if they don’t work (Leprechaun, Children of the Corn, Howling), or they stick to the formula, which has now been watered down to the point of total pointlessness (Candyman, Warlock, Critters).  The fourth, inevitably, takes place in space.  (The exception to this rule is Witchcraft, which started at barely tolerable and worked its way to the bottom by the second film, stopping at No. 9 before cranking out something you could actually sit through.)
From Dusk til Dawn 3, from the director of Body Waves,  marks at least a vague improvement over the lame first sequel to a film that wasn’t all that well-liked in the first place (for my money, an energetic, if slightly clumsy, mixture of vampire flick and southwestern road movie).  For one, it’s a historical piece, centering around the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, who vanished in order to join Pancho Villa’s army.  The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-inspired opening has Birece (well played by “Then Came Bronson” vet Parks) watching a condemned prisoner’s  (Like Water for Chocolate hunk Leonardi) hanging get interrupted by his escape and kidnapping of Ezmerelda, the title babe.  The Hangman (Once Were Warriors’ intense Morrison) swears revenge and takes after him.  Bierce takes his leave on a stagecoach run by a man with no eyes and another with no tongue (perhaps a wink to El Topo) with two bible-thumpers (Loftin and Gayheart) who chide him for his athiesm.
    The fugitive and daughter quickly fall for each other in faux Hollywood rebel fashion.  Ana Celi looks blankly at Leonardi, quickly going between two emotions, vacant and vaguely worried.  Nods to other flicks, from Taxi Driver to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, show up to carefully destroy and atmosphere they may have built up.  Eventually, natch, all the characters end up at a certain strip bar in the desert, and, natch, vampires emerge.
Figuring out which characters in a particular horror film are going to live is usually one of the easiest tasks a viewer has.  The two romantic leads are typically so obvious that you quickly lose any hope that the supporting cast will make it.  Smarter, well-written flicks get around this problem by making the rest of the characters interesting to watch so their deaths have some emotional impact.  The makers of From Dusk til Dawn 3, on the other hand, chose to fill their film with irritating, unsympathetic characters that end up fighting amongst themselves so much that you don’t give a crap who lives or dies.  Leornardi’s character should have been a proper Django/Man With No Name tough-guy, but he’s too sadistic to folks that don’t really deserve it to come off as a likable anti-hero.  Ezmerelda is a blank slate, Morrison is an obvious villain, and Gayheart and Loftin look like they’d rather be at the nearest coffee shop.  Only Bierce, who goes out of way to be unlikeable, comes off as someone you’d want to see live.
    The final slaughter sequences, which take up the last third of the film, are relatively energetic and worth watching.  After a character is stabbed through the mouth (a great moment), hell begins to break loose and you don’t mind the lack of logic as much.  Those hoping for some sort of reasoning behind the origin of the place will be disappointed, in fact, the movie just brings up more questions, with a decapitated vampire sprouting a snake head(!) and an odd tango number in the middle of it all.  Danny Trejo gets a few moments to shine as the bartender again as well and "MAD tv"'s Orlando Jones gets some screen time as a salesman/victim.
    Still, why the hell don’t these characters make any sense?  When Leonardi’s character catches an obvious vampire gnawing on his horse’s neck, why is his response no more excited then if he caught a kid touching the tail?  Why does Ezmerelda freak out when a vampire knows her name even after the same vamp has told her part of her history?  Why can’t we hear the band playing (like the first movie) during the slaughter even though we see them?  The soundtrack was one of the first film's finer points, and one of the few things the second did well, but this time it leaves something to be desired.
    It’s pretty dumb stuff if you think about it, so the best idea is to not bother thinking.  As a dumb, drive-in vampire western, FDtD3 is a fairly frenetic mix of Django and the first film, though not as good as either and, amazingly, more uneven the From Dusk til Dawn.  I look forward to seeing the next in the series, in which a bunch of stripper vampires face off against alien miners.
 

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