Control Nathan Rabin #183 From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (1999)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
I’ve already written about one Gayheart movie this month in the form of Too Smooth/Hairshirt but the kindly benefactor who commissioned the series gave me the go-ahead to skip ahead in the timeline and cover 1999’s From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, since it fits the Direct-to-Video Sequels Month theme so snugly.
From Dusk Til Dawn 3 works best as a vehicle for the irascible charm and larger-than-life presence of Michael Parks, a TV star and country singer turned cult actor who enjoyed a glorious late in life renaissance courtesy of super-fans Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith.
The Old Testament wrath Parks brought to the juicy role of a deranged preacher made Smith’s politically charged grind house shocker Red State worth watching. Parks similarly made Smith’s Tusk infinitely better and more convincing than a Kevin Smith movie about a podcaster who gets turned into a nightmarish walrus-man has any right to be.
When I wrote up the Cannon box set for this site I was delighted to see that Parks was the bad guy in the grim Chuck Norris vehicle The Hitman because it ensured that even if the movie fucked sucked, as was inevitable, Parks’ work in it would nevertheless be nothing less than masterful.
Even when the movies were low-rent garbage, Parks’ work in them was almost invariably award-worthy. That’s true of Parks’ work in From Dusk Til Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2001 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards.
From Dusk Til Dawn 3 had the inspired idea of casting the cult icon as real-life author, wit, bon vivant and badass Ambrose Bierce, of The Devil’s Dictionary and “Incident at Owl’s Bridge” fame, then pitting him against sleazy, sexy Tex-Mex vampires.
The juxtaposition of a famously folksy man of letters and vampires couldn’t help but remind me of Andy Daly’s Dalton Wilcox, the self-proclaimed “Poet Laureate of the West” and also a seasoned monster-hunter.
I doubt that Daly has seen the second direct-to-video From Dusk Til Dawn sequel but the parallels are borderline uncanny. Parks leads a shockingly over-qualified cast that includes Gayheart, of course, as a bible-thumping do-gooder with an insultingly, distractingly bad Southern drawl, the great Danny Trejo as Razor Charlie, the hardass, seen it all bartender at the unholy palace of sin where much of the film takes place and Sonia Braga as the blood-drinking, undead mother of the title character. Temuera Morrison from Once Were Warriors is appropriately imposing as a vicious hangman with a beautiful daughter and a dark secret regarding her origins.
Orlando Jones rounds out the cast as a naive, lisping brush salesman who tries to exchange brushes for booze, leading Trejo’s brusque bartender to indignantly reply, “We don’t need no stinking brushes!”, a hokey dad joke that made me groan and laugh twice, first at the Treasure of the Sierra Madre reference and then at myself for finding something so stupid and hack funny.
Like From Dusk Til Dawn, Hangman’s Daughter is a gearshift exploitation movie that shifts genres and tones halfway through. But where From Dusk Til Dawn is a hardboiled action movie/Neo-Noir that turns into a vampire movie halfway through Hangman’s Daughter begins as a revisionist western set in Mexico in 1913 and morphs into a nasty nugget of a fright fable in its second half.
The film opens with Parks’ bon mot-dispensing superstar writer traveling to meet Pancho Villa so that he can offer himself to the famed revolutionary as a soldier. Bierce’s insouciant personality, flashy, heretical ways and penchant for hard liquor offend Gayheart’s Mary Newlie and her new husband John (Lennie Loftin) and makes him a target for Johnny Madrid (Marco Leonardi).
Madrid is an outlaw saved from hanging by Reece (Jordana Spiro), a tomboy teenager who looks up to Johnny Madrid as an outlaw legend who can teach her the dark art of being a Wild West criminal and pays a terrible price for her naiveté and misplaced hero worship.
There’s a deliberate echo of Unforgiven in the way the movie and Johnny Madrid punish Reece for believing in the tough guy mythologizing of the Old West instead of seeing it for what it is, an ugly, brutal, murderous lie.
Bierce and the Newlies and Johnny Madrid and his gang eventually end up in La Tetilla Del Diablo, the decadent haven of debauchery and sin that would evolve or devolve into the Titty Twister from the first film where all hell breaks loose.
Structurally and thematically From Dusk Til Dawn 3 reminded me a lot of Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight. That’s fitting, since From Dusk Til Dawn at one point was supposed to be a Tales from the Crypt movie, not unlike The Frighteners.
From Dusk Til Dawn 3 might be little more than a glorified Tales from the Crypt episode but for me at least that’s high praise. The film shares many of the homey virtues of the iconic horror anthology. Hangman’s Daughter deftly balances ghoulish dark comedy and horror, gallows humor and gleeful gore in addition to providing a terrific showcase for world-class character actors like Parks, Braga and Trejo.
Gayheart is the weak link until she is bitten and transforms instantly and dramatically into an undead vamp who is worldly and wicked rather than God-fearing and proper.
According to Wikipedia, some dude named Nathan Rabin wrote of the film around the time of its release, ”Being competent is no great achievement, but for undiscriminating gore fans, it should be enough to make Dawn 3 a passable evening's entertainment.”
I’ve gotten more generous in the ensuing decades, or maybe my standards have just slipped because I now found Hangman’s Daughter to be more than passable, but you know, not that much more than passable. It’s a nifty, overachieving fright flick but let’s not get carried away.
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