In the comments of my Kurt Russell post on Facebook yesterday I saw a fair few of you mention a movie that I hadn’t seen so I watched it last night.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
I’ve said before that the western genre isn’t necessarily a favourite of mine, yet oddly there are a lot of westerns I really like.
The thing that sold me on this one was a comment saying it’s “like a western version of The Hills Have Eyes”, and since that’s a movie I really like, I was suddenly interested.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s written and directed by S. Craig Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99) and stars Kurt Russell (Escape From New York), Patrick Wilson (Watchmen), Matthew Fox (Lost), Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water) and Lili Simmons (Gotham) among others.
This is what it’s about according to IMDb:
“In the dying days of the old west, an elderly sheriff and his posse set out to rescue their town's doctor from cannibalistic cave dwellers.”
The pace of the film is quite slow but it works really well in building each of the characters and their relationships with each other. That’s not a criticism either by the way, it kept me interested from start to finish and it was nice to watch a film that relies more on the drama than on action sequences and explosions (although this has some of that too).
If you’ve seen Brawl in Cell Block 99 you’ll know how brutal it is and since this movie was written and directed by the same guy, you can expect it to pack the same kind of punch as far as the violence and graphic content is concerned.
It has some decent performances (from Kurt Russell and Matthew Fox in particular) and it’s an interesting and fresh take on the western genre. I really enjoyed it.
What we need now is a good zombie-themed western. I know there have been a couple of B-movie attempts in recent years but I’m talking something like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. I love that game and in my opinion it’s a film or TV series just waiting to happen!
Anyone else agree?