Cult status could beckon for this well-made, macabre and violent western-horror from cinematographer turned director S Craig Zahler. It’s a film with a parched, sunbleached look appropriate for the drying of human bones, and it appears to be a gruesome, pulpy twist on John Ford’s The Searchers.
Kurt Russell plays a sheriff in the wild west who gathers a posse to rescue local doctor Samantha (Lili Simmons) when she is abducted by a tribe known as the Troglodytes. Four men ride out to get her back: the sheriff, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), an old-timer called Chicory (Richard Jenkins, channelling Walter Brennan) and the sinister, vengeful dandy, Brooder (Matthew Fox).
It hardly needs saying that the journey and the journey’s end are an unspeakable ordeal. The Troglodytes are mutant flesh-eaters – a version of every horror species you’ve ever seen, and with an eerily loud and screeching animal cry. It really is hide-under-the-seat stuff, but carried off with absolute seriousness, and Russell is just as good as he was in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Like many westerns, Bone Tomahawk can claim to be a commentary on settler paranoia, but it’s also an exercise in genre: more scary movie than horse opera.
