Bone Tomahawk
Director: S. Craig Zahler
Talent: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Lili Simmons
Release Date: 19th February 2016
They’re not Native Americans, they’re (Native American) Troglodytes! That’s the somewhat cursory explanation and, after a bit of abstraction, justification, racially-speaking, for the basic narrative premise of Western-cum-horror Bone Tomahawk. That narrative being: the troubled progress of a rescue operation headed up by Sheriff Hunt (Russell) and the injured Arthur (Wilson) for the latter’s wife Samantha (Simmons) and two other white folks, kidnapped from a peaceful frontier town by a mysterious, cave-dwelling tribe of mythical strength and ferocity.
An unsettling opening sequence, featuring a disemboweling in surprisingly affecting long-shot, gives way to an unsteadily scripted Eli Roth by way of Quentin Tarantino ‘journey into hell’ that disturbs more for its uncritical reprisal of the racial politics of classic Westerns than its visceral and occasionally ultra gory visual content. This is a Fisher-Price Blood Meridian for an America that increasingly treats its black citizens as a surplus population; competent horror aside, the metaphorical lines are hard to ignore.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
