Bone Tomahawk

This is kind of a weird movie, a Western that's sort of a horror movie, but at times almost feels darkly comic. On the one hand, you have a four-man party, led by the town sheriff (played by Kurt Russell), going out to try and rescue his deputy and the town's effective doctor (Lili Simmons) from a band on inbred, cannibal, cave-dwelling Native Americans. Said cave dwellers came to town after a couple of murdering drifters wandered into their territory and stupidly disturbed a burial ground, as dumbasses frequently do.

And this can be a brutally violent movie. People lose limbs. People are getting shot in limbs with bullets and arrows. The doctor's husband (played by Patrick Wilson) is one of the sheriff's posse, and he's got a broken tibia from trying to repair his roof during a storm. So there's a part where the bone gets reset with a hammer. One guy gets scalped, then has to eat his own scalp, and things get worse for him from there. Someone gets a metal flask that fell in a fire jammed into an open torso wound.

On the other hand, as a lot of the movie is the posse slowly making their way to the general area they think the cave dwellers inhabit, there's a lot of time for talk. And the backup deputy (played by Richard Jenkins as a possibly dotty old man) likes to talk about all sorts of things. One minute Kurt Russell is explaining that he lied to his other deputy because he figures it would be a comforting thing to know you're going to be avenged, and then Chicory is talking about the time the flea circus came to town, and do you think his late wife was right, and it was all just a mechanical trick? Or Patrick Wilson apologizes for calling him a stupid imbecile, and Chicory responds that it's fine, his wife used to call him that, felt rather nostalgic.

I think he's meant to be doing it on purpose, because he knows this is going to be bad, and left to fixate on it in silence, he'd probably lose his nerve, along with most of the others. But man it can feel abrupt and out of place at times. There's a lot of enjoyable parts to it, even if they do fit together a little strangely.