The Movie: This review will be somewhat unusual as this DVD is a double-sided disc with Robert Rodriguez' El Mariachi on one side and his follow-up film Desperado on the other, so in a way, this is two DVD reviews in one.

To put it succinctly, El Mariachi is (as it was intended to be) a bad straight-to-video action movie. In fact, this film was originally made for the Mexican video market. As such, when you watch it, it isn't all that impressive. That is until you find out that this film was made on a budget of just $7,000. And looking at it in that light, this film actually comes out to be quite impressive and an inspiration to independent filmmakers everywhere.

This film was made with virtually no crew. Director Robert Rodriguez (who later went on to make the sequels Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico, as well as create the Spy Kids series and most recently directing Sin City) pretty much did all of the work on this film himself with no crew except with help from co-producer and star of the film Carlos Gallardo (when he wasn't on screen himself). If you go into watching this film armed with this knowledge, I think you will be rather impressed.

The story centers around a wandering guitar player (El Mariachi) who falls victim to a case of mistaken identity. Shortly before he arrived in town, a gangster hitman who was known to carry guns inside a guitar case wiped out a bunch of the local drug lord's men. Soon people start believing that El Mariachi is actually the hitman and start coming after him. At some point in the film he basically loses everything he had to live for and assumes the role of guitar case carrying hitman himself.

After the film El Mariachi was completed, it created quite a stir around the film festival circuit and was eventually picked up for mass distribution... though reportedly over $1,000,000 worth of post production work was done on the version of the film that most people have seen. Rodriguez also won himself a contract to create the sequel to the film, Desperado, this time in English and with a substantially larger (but still small by feature film standards) budget of $7,000,000.

Thanks to the larger budget, the followup film is quite a bit more polished, though it was still made under what would still be considered a rather small budget, particularly considering just how great Desperado really looks. We pick up on the character "El Mariachi" again as he enters into a different town, looking to get revenge on yet another drug lord. This time the character of "El Mariachi" is played by Antonio Banderas, who thanks in large part to this film, was able to launch a successful American film career, although Carlos Gallardo, the original Mariachi did stay on as co-producer, and appears briefly at the end of the film as a fellow guitar case carrying action hero.

Desperado also served to help Salma Hayek (who plays the main love interest) break into the American film industry as well. Other notable actors include Cheech Marin, Steve Buscemi, Quentin Tarantino, and of course the always menacing-looking Danny Trejo (who also happens to be a cousin or uncle or something of Robert Rodriguez').

Desperado in many ways is what El Mariachi would have been if Rodriguez had more money and more people and more technology to work with. The result is more action scenes with bigger action and bigger explosions and bigger stunts, and it really is a much better film overall, though it is still is really nothing more than a cheesy action flick (but then again, it never really was meant to be any more than that). And although the budget was quite a bit larger than the original $7,000 budget for El Mariachi, the $7,000,000 budget of Desperado was stretched out as far as possible and the results are quite impressive, especially when you consider that these days there are actors that pull in three times as much money just to appear in a film.

Overall, these films are quite entertaining (Desperado more so than El Mariachi) and both serve as a testament to what can be done on a tight budget with a little bit of independent filmmaking ingenuity, particularly when you start digging around into some of the special features, which I'll get into below.

The DVD: As I mentioned before, this is a dual sided disc with one movie on each side. On the El Mariachi side, the video quality reflects the fact that the film was shot on cheap 16mm film stock as evidenced by the poor resolution and rather large grain, but it's in the original film so we can't really fault the DVD for looking bad on that count. What we can fault the DVD for is the fact that I'm not entirely sure that this film was meant to be cropped down to a 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio, particularly because it was made for the straight-to-video market. The result is that a lot of the shots seem to have significant portions of the top and the bottom of the frame cropped out. In fact, according to IMDB, the intended aspect ratio of the film was 1.66:1, which is considerably taller than 1.85:1. The audio also represented the low budget of the film, though I'm sure the version we are seeing here with all the post production work done to it is still much better than the original plain $7,000 version screened at the filmed festivals.

The special features however, truly are special. The no-budget nature of this film forced the director to use a lot of neat little tricks and scams to make the film work which usually makes for an entertaining director's commentary track, and as an aspiring filmmaker, I found the commentary on El Mariachi to be quite enlightening, and inspiring. You also get a little featurette called "10 Minute Film School" in which Robert Rodriguez demonstrates the film-saving (and budget-saving) techniques he used by basically editing the film in the camera by planning the shots carefully, doing almost everything in one take in the effort to save film.

On the Desperado side of things, we have much cleaner video (thanks in large part to this film being shot on 35mm film instead of 16mm), though the transfer did still exhibit some softness. The audio (thanks to the much larger budget) was also quite a bit cleaner, making for a pretty solid translation of the film to DVD format.

This film also has a commentary track that is also pretty interesting, again, because this was a fairly low budget film by Hollywood standards, and many more little tricks were used in this film to make the film look a lot more expensive than it really was. There is also another featurette called "10 More Minutes... Anatomy of a Shootout" which gives some insight into the planning and execution of the filming of the bar shootout scene that takes place near the beginning of the film.

There are other versions of each of these films on DVD by themselves. which may or may not have improved video transfers (since they wouldn't be trying to cram two films on one DVD), but I can't say for sure since I haven't seen them. But if you like cheesy action flicks or you are at all interested in the world of filmmaking, I think this DVD will make a good addition to your collection, particularly for the insights revealed in the commentary and featurettes. I mean it's pretty hard not to be impressed by just how far Robert Rodriguez can stretch a dollar. So... check it out!