Bone Tomahawk (2016)

Bone Tomahawk is a mash-up you didn’t know you wanted. Over its first two acts, it’s the most exciting Western in years, capturing even more effectively the half-serious/half-pulpy tone Tarantino struck in Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. The plot is straight out of a ’40s B-movie, with a ragtag posse of aging gunslingers and eccentrics riding into unchartered Native American territory to rescue kidnapped villagers from the clutches of an unimaginably diabolical tribe of cave-dwellers. But from this threadbare premise, Bone Tomahawk ghoulishly mutates into a descendant of the jungle cannibal exploitations films of the ‘70s, vividly amplifying previous minor notes of graphic horror.

If you think those Italian splatter films were frightening, imagine them paired with an outrageously good script that actually invests you in each of the characters, leaving you a nervous wreck once the bloodletting starts. To be fair, Bone Tomahawk is never exactly Annie Get Your Gun: in the first half hour we see throats slit, primitive surgery, and a disembowelment. Thankfully, this graphic approach is tempered with a wry comic touch – Bone Tomahawk is often laugh-out-loud funny. Writer/director S. Craig Zahler makes the most auspicious of debuts here, with a once-in-a-generation genre script (that dialogue!) and tense, atmospheric direction to match. Each character has carefully established stakes, as well a distinct personality and a showcase scene or two – it’s the kind of character work usually associated with novels and TV series because it’s almost impossible to achieve in two hours. His uniformly excellent cast is more than game, with so many powerhouse performances that it’s hard to single out fewer than a half dozen.

Bone Tomahawk’s final act is genuinely nightmarish and Zahler’s imaginative capacity for vivid horrors – both depicted and implied – is fiendishly impressive. The film ends a bit abruptly, my only qualm, but it’s hard to complain. The monsters conjured here, much like Alien’s Xenomorph or Freddy Krueger, seem somehow instantly recognizable. Like all of horror’s most indelible creations, it as if Zahler has pulled them from the darkest corners of the collective unconscious.