Twin Vampires, a Scorching Madras, and Two Very Convenient Comparisons

Deadline's Sitges review of Samjad's *Half* describes a lean, mean action-horror in which twin vampires stalk a scorching-hot Madras dystopia set in the none-too-distant future — a premise that reads like a genre dare. The critic reaches for the obvious ancestor, saying the 1996 Rodriguez/Tarantino collaboration *From Dusk Till Dawn* springs immediately to mind, before arguing Samjad gets further into the meat of his material than that comparison would suggest. The instinct to benchmark a new vampire film against the American canon is worth noticing on its own: the shorthand is doing half the reviewing before a single fang appears.