Product Description

El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor...a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake El Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case. New film transfer from original negatives supervised by Robert Rodriguez! Featurette: "Sneak Peak: Once Upon A Time in Mexico." Audio Commentary with Director Robert Rodriguez. Featurette: 10 Minute Film School. Featurette: Robert Rodriguez's Student Film "Bed Head."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9998 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2003-08-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 81 minutes

From The New Yorker
This first film by twenty-four-year-old Robert Rodriguez was made for seven thousand dollars, and part of its enormous charm is that it really looks like a seven-thousand-dollar movie. It's a grubby little thriller, set in a Mexican border town, about a wandering mariachi musician (Carlos Gallardo) who is mistaken for a killer. The picture is a virtually unbroken series of chases and shoot-outs, and the non-stop action should be tiresome, but it isn't. Rodriguez establishes a delirious pace, and keeps the bullets flying and the corpses crumpling for a brisk, and appropriately terse, eighty-two minutes. The movie has the sort of dry, bracingly unwholesome humor that relentless mayhem can produce if the characters are mean and abject enough and the storytelling is speedy and laconic. This young filmmaker is no visual wizard; he's just an energetic and imaginative manipulator of tried-and-true genre conventions. But if you enter his seedy world with expectations as low as the picture's aspirations, you'll probably have a very good time. Also with Reinol Martinez, Consuelo Gómez, and Peter Marquardt. In Spanish. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A Powerful and Memorable Debut
"El Mariachi" is one incredible debut from director Robert Rodriguez. Despite it being made on such a low budget, the impression we are given is that it was shot by a pro and not by a first-time director. Rarely do we get to bare witness to such an outstanding debut from a promising director that has all the right ingredients in it.

The story centers around a simple man with a certain passion--to be a well-established "Mariachi." He dresses in black and carries a guitar case with him everywhere he goes. A very passive individual, the Mariachi wants to be at peace without having to deal with any troubles. Well, trouble comes looking for him when there's a case of mistaken identity. Another man that dresses in black and carries a guitar case is causing major problems for a well known drug-dealer. The difference with this person is that in his guitar case is not a guitar--it is filled with numerous types of weapons, from firearms to knives. Forced into an inconceivable conflict, the simple life of the Mariachi turns into one that is filled with violence and bloodshed.

This very well-constructed independent film resembles a modern day Western. The film quality may not be at its absolute best, but the feel of the film is one that gives you an impression of a very talented director. You never know what's going to happen next in this unpredictable film. The film is not in English, so you will have to deal with subtitles if you don't know Spanish. Still, do not let that scare you away. The subtitles are very easy to follow and the movie flows nicely with them. It may feel odd for the first few minutes, but in very little time you will find yourself not even noticing that you're watching subtitles. That's how involving the movie is, and that is the kind of power that it holds.

With a cast full of "unknowns," the acting is very solid and makes the story work. Carlos Gallardo is superb in his role of the "Mariachi." He looks like a very innocent person but then can transform into a vicious fighter when pushed into a tight corner. Rodriguez does a remarkable job with this movie. You can tell that he is a man who knows what he wants in a movie. He also proves to be quite the storyteller. He was able to do a lot with such a low budget. It's ironic that big budget is almost always spent on the most horrendous movies nowadays (not all, but a fair amount).

The DVD has some cool things to offer. It's been remastered in a new film transfer that was supervised by the director. The picture looks more than decent, and I am sure that it looks much better than it did when it was first released. Extras included are commentary, a "10-Minute Film School" featurette, a sneak peak of "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," and a couple of trailers. Overall, a very nice DVD package for a film made on a budget this.

Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi" is a stunning film that's both thrilling and dramatic. It's a great film to watch if you're tired of the usual "rubbish" out there and want something new and fresh. This film has a wonderful mix of story and action and never seems to be unbalanced at any time. Don't let the low budget fool you--a great movie is hidden within. A definite classic. -Michael Crane

Rodriguez showed great promise, and has since fulfilled it.
El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992)

One of the most interesting things about El Mariachi (not to take away from the film itself) is that no one can seem to come to agreement on whether Rodriguez' next big-screen movie, Desperado, is a sequel or a remake to this, his first feature film. After finally getting around to seeing El Mariachi, I'll give you the definitive answer: who knows?

In many ways, if you've seen Desperado (and if you live in America and you're reading this, you're far more likely to have seen it than El Mariachi), you've seen this movie. Many of the sets are the same. (The bar Carlos Gallardo walks into when he first reaches town actually caused me a chuckle. I expected to see Cheech Marin behind the counter. And, in fact, the barman in this movie makes almost exactly the same moves Marin does in Desperado when the shooting starts.) Some things, like the kid, are treated differently in the two movies, but that's not uncommon in remakes. Certainly more common than it is in sequels. And yet there are enough differences in the plot to make you wonder.

In any case: El Mariachi, made famous three years later by Antonio Banderas, is played here by Carlos Gallardo, (co-producer and production manager on this film as well, and who has remained co-producer with Rodriguez on the other two Desperado films). He's traveling around the Mexican countryside looking for work as a mariachi. Unfortunately, just as he's getting to town, a jailbreak is occurring; Azul (Reinol Martinez) and his henchmen overpower three hired killers sent to rub him out by his old partner, Moco (Peter Marquardt), who's now living it up as a drug runner. Needless to say, Azul wants revenge, and Moco wants to stop him. Problem: Azul's trademark is that he always dresses in black and carries a guitar case... just like a mariachi.

It would probably be heretical to go so far as to compare El Mariachi (which Rodriguez made on a budget of seven thousand dollars) to Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, but there you have it. Moco's henchmen consistently mistake the mariachi for the assassin and vice versa, and after a while, the viewer's not quite sure who's who, either. (For a kid with a guitar, the mariachi sure does handle an Uzi well.) The movie does its job well enough in mixing laughs with the action to make it watchable, despite the fact that it has, really, no plot worth talking about, very little characterization, and was more an excuse for ninety minutes of action and fancy camerawork than anything else. Since Rodriguez added all the missing elements in Desperado (and, it should be noted, every actor mentioned above-and most of the others in El Mariachi-reprise their roles in Desperado, thus adding to the remake feel of the latter film), we're willing to cut him a little slack here. After all, when you have a budget of seven grand, you probably don't have too much spare film stock to do a lot of test takes.

What really makes El Mariachi a pleasure, though, is that it contains the raw ingredients that Rodriguez would later hone into the distinctive style that he has today. He was obviously much influenced by the Three Stooges films, but he never allows the camera trickery to go overboard the way they consistently did, playing it for laughs for a few seconds at a time at most. Time speeds up and slows down during repetitive scenes to keep the audience from getting bored, characters get out of sticky situations in the silliest of ways, and everyone has a good time unless they're getting shot. (And you sometimes wonder then, too.) Ten years later, it's a bit hard to understand how El Mariachi (with the exception of the climactic scene, which probably used up ninety percent of the movie's special effects budget) could have been considered a shockingly violent film; remember, this was released the year after Terminator 2. The body count is high, to be sure, but the violence in the film definitely contains a campy/cartoon quality to it. It seems obvious in hindsight that Rodriguez wanted to play up the comedy angle here. He got his chance to do the violence angle in Desperado.

So is it a sequel? Is it a remake? I have no idea. But it's a load of fun, and that's what counts. *** 1/2

Still The Best In The Trilogy

This movie put director Robert Rodriguez "on the map." He followed up with two sequels: "Desperado" and "Once Upon A Time In Mexico." Not surprising, the best of the three was this low-budget opening film. As Rodriquez had more and more money to spend on the sequels, the stories got more and more carried away with too many explosions and special-effects, losing the charm of this first effort.

Unlike the sequels, this Mexican-made, so it is in Spanish with English subtitles. Don't let that scare you away. There isn't a great deal of dialog so keeping up with the subtitles is very easy.

The movie has very interesting camera closeups and angles as Rodriquez showed he was going to be a stylish director. The story is simple but effective, suspenseful and even with some humor. Unnlike his subsequent films in this trilogy, the action is not overdone here.

The length is also is a plus. At 80 minutes you can be thoroughly entertained in less than an hour-and-a half. The only disappointment to me was the print quality on th DVD, but I got an early edition. There might be better editions out since. It's not fuzzy but it's not sharp, either.

Anyway: highly recommend for actions/crime buffs who like style in their photography, or saw the sequels and would like to know the history of this particular "Mariachi."