The trailer for the flagship series from Robert Rodriguez’s forthcoming cable channel, the El Rey Network, hit the Internet over the weekend. It’s an expanded, small-screen version of his 1996 cult hit From Dusk Till Dawn. Now, finally, we can see what Not-George-Clooney (apparently some fella named D.J. Cotrona) and Not-Quentin-Tarantino (Zane Holtz) look like as the infamous Gecko Brothers—the pair of bank robbers, killers, kidnappers, and hostage-takers who launch the entire adventure into the dark underbelly of Mexican vampire strippers.
And they look pretty good. At least, it appears that way from the flashes we get in the 30-second-long the trailer for the show, which premieres March 11th (and which is almost certain to have some sort of SXSW tie-in). We see glowering eyes, badassery, and a lot of the same imagery that worked in the film version: Seth Gecko’s tribal sleeve tattoo, Richie’s creepy stare, good-ol’-boy police, and a whole bunch of blood.
It remains to be seen how effectively a two-hour movie that hinged, in large part, on a second-act twist that really only makes sense in a film, will be translated to the expanded, ten-hour serialized experience of the small-screen, but the trailer suggests that the “two bank robbers on the run” part of the story might be intermingled with the “vampire strippers down in Mexico” elements in a way that’s more organic and less gimmicky than the movie. In any case, there’s a lot of Texas for the Gecko Brothers to shoot up here, no matter when the vampires show up.
