ORBzine - 2001.11 Video Review

ORBzine Video Review November 2001 Special

From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter
The movie starts with a piece of information that implies this story is based somewhat loosely on true events. Apparently Ambrose Bierce [author of Incident at Owl Creek Bridge] went to Mexico to join up with Pancho Villa, and was never heard of again.
The action starts with Bierce [Michael Parks, who is more than a little reminiscent of Stephen J. Cannell from Renegade] in front of a Mexican firing squad. However, this is either a dream, premonition or flashback.
Bierce is in a small town in Mexico. A square-jawed bandito is led out of the cells to be lynched by the sadistic hangman [Temuera Morrison - Barb Wire ]. He manages to escape, and on his way out he takes the Hangman's Daughter. They meet up with his old gang, and are joined by a Gringo kid named Reese. This leads on to numerous cliches from Spagetti Westerns. Oddly, Joachim, one of the robbers, is listed as Kevin Smith - who doesn't look like either the American one or the Kiwi one.
Bierce gets the stagecoach out of town, along with a bible teacher [ Rebecca Gayheart ] and her husband. Things take a turn for the worse, and they end up wandering through the desert. They stumble across a remote tavern run by Danny Trejo [ Spy Kids ] and Sonia Braga , where they rent rooms for the night. Hmm, what could go wrong?
As night draws closer the tavern fills up. One customer is the token African-American [Orlando Jones - Evolution ], a brush salesman. As you can guess, the banditos and the Hangman's posse also turn up.
The climax of the film is pretty much a predictable rehash of the original, albeit with a pinch of surrealism thrown in for good measure. The toughest [and most interesting] characters survive the initial attack, but the survivors all want to kill each other just as much as they want to kill the vampires. Another notable thing about the film is the OTT gore that would not have been permitted by the UK censors just five years ago.

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This is certainly not a Hollywood film by any standards. If anything it is reminiscent of the Polish black&white masterpiece Kanal. The film opens with some OTT gore, but develops into a tense psychological thriller that focuses on character development and interaction.
A group of people wake up in a strange room. They are in a maze of interlocking rooms, with no food or water and no sign of an exit. Worse, some of the rooms contain deadly boobytraps.
For some reason, each person trapped there has some of the skills necessary to escape. They include a cop, an escape artist, a doctor and a mathematician [ Nicole DeBoer ]. As time drags on and their efforts to escape come to naught, the group starts to tear itself apart.