Year: 2014

In the US: Tuesdays, 9pm, El Rey
In the UK: Available on Netflix. New episode released each week

Robert Rodriguez is best known as being a pal of Quentin Tarantino. His first big success was a Tarantino-scripted flick, From Dusk Till Dawn, which saw Tarantino and George Clooney play two brothers who rob a bank then head off to a strip joint that just happens to be run by sexy Latina vampire Salma Hayek. As a piece of grindhouse, it was fine and clearly benefited from Tarantino’s ear for dialogue. But it wasn’t exactly a classic.

Rodriguez went on to greater success with the Spy Kids movies, but he’s produced more grindhouse over the years. Bizarrely, he’s just launched his own TV network, El Rey, which is an English-language channel targeted at Latinos. The flagship drama he’s using to launch the network? A TV-length adaptation of From Dusk Till Dawn, starring almost no one you’ve heard of and written by Rodriguez rather than Tarantino.

Hmm.

Okay, not strictly true. Don Johnson appears in the first episode and although this isn’t a spoiler if you’ve seen the movie, gets killed before the end of it (although, you know, vampires). And Robert Patrick (Terminator 2, The Unit, The X-Files, The Last Resort) takes over Harvey Keitel’s role as a vicar vampire-hunter in later episodes. 

However, largely, this is just a slower, duller, much, much cheaper version of the movie, played out over an entire series. It’s not terrible and there are attempts to emulate Tarantino’s style; the two leads (DJ Cotrona from Windfall and Zane Holtz from nothing much at all) do just fine as more generic versions of Clooney and Tarantino, the cool one and the psycho-crazy one respectively; the action is okay, if not especially thrilling; it’s not got a great attitude towards women, but it’s no that much worse than many other shows I could name on that score; and there are promises to flesh out the vampires’ Mayan backstory. 

But, you know, they killed Don Johnson. Why bother watching after that?

Here’s a trailer: