The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

bone tomahawk

There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Thing (1982)

the thing movie poster

When I was first thinking about this month’s theme – Frozen in January – it was John Carpenter’s The Thing that came to mind. It is the perfect encapsulation of what I was going for. Its characters are trapped in an isolated place covered in snow and ice. An external force causes an already tense situation into turmoil. The weather and the cold, frozen setting aren’t just window dressing, they help inform the story. I actually didn’t love the movie the first time I watched it, but with each subsequent viewing, I like it more and more. Now I think it is just about perfect.

The Thing is based upon a novella by John W. Campbell entitled Who Goes There?. It was previously adapted into the pretty great film in 1951, The Thing From Another World.

Set in an American research station in Antarctica The Thing stars Kurt Russell (and Wilford Brimley, and Keith David, and T.K. Carter and others, it really is a great cast) as a group of men who are already pushed beyond their limits. The isolation and the freezing weather are getting to them.

This is why, when a helicopter from the Norwegian station flies in shooting at some dog, and then at our heroes, they don’t initially think something is really wrong. They just chalk it up to those guys going stir-crazy.

I’ve seen this movie several times and I always forget how long it takes to get to the scenes I remember. The scenes in which the shape-shifting alien starts wiping everybody out. But before that, there are long, tension-building scenes, in which they try to figure out what’s going on at the Norwegian base. You’d think I’d remember them finding an alien spacecraft but I never do.

I think that is a testament to just how incredible the back half of this movie is. One of the many things I love about The Thing is that, unlike most of the films I’ve watched in this series, it really uses the freezing, isolated setting to help build the tension. As things ratchet up with the alien, we fully understand how there is no escape. Nowhere to go. No one will come to their rescue.

The alien is a shape-shifter so it can look like any one of them. No one knows who is human or something else. Carpenter makes us feel every moment of that horror.

The practical effects do look a bit unreal. I think that’s a big part of what I didn’t like about it on my first watch. They aren’t natural or realistic looking and that can take you out of the moment. Now I find that part of the film’s charm. The alien isn’t supposed to look real, not when it’s shifting into a chest cavity that can chop your hands off. It is supposed to look, well, alien. And cool. They look so cool. I’d love to see a behind-the-scenes look at how they made them.

John Carpenter really was a master of horror for so many years. The more I watch his classic films (and I’ve seen most of them several times) the more I think he’s one of the best who ever did it.

Backdraft (1991)

backdraft blu

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I had seen years ago, when I was a teenager or in college, or whatever. Sometimes it is a movie that I didn’t like that much but I want to revisit to see if my feelings have changed. Sometimes they do, and I’m glad I watched it again. Sometimes they don’t and I realize my feelings were right all along.

Backdraft falls into the latter category. I didn’t like it when it came out, and I don’t like it now. It does, however, have some spectacular effects, and ones that are not CGI which makes it even better.

You can read my full review here.

Silkwood (1983)

silkwood movie poster

Meryl Streep is one of the world’s greatest actresses. She’s been nominated for a record 21 Academy Awards and won three. She is beloved by critics and fans alike. But the thing is, up until recently I’d not actually seen all that many of her movies. Oh sure I’d seen The Deer Hunter and Manhattan, Death Becomes Her and The Manchurian Candidate remake, but most of her big classic films had passed me by.

One of the things I’m realizing as I’m working my way through these early 1980s films is that a lot of these films seem to exist in my cultural memory but at the same time I haven’t actually watched many of them. This actually makes sense as I think about it. I was seven or eight years old when Silkwood came out. Of course, I wasn’t interested in a grand drama about a nuclear whistle-blower. But it was also one of the biggest movies of the year, making lots of money and being nominated for numerous awards. I’m sure I wasn’t following the Oscars at that young age but I mostly likely would have heard buzz about the film while my parents were watching television or seen Meryl Streep and Cher appearing in various magazines. No doubt the film was talked about often in the following years to come.

All I knew about the film up until watching it the other day was that Streep played some sort of whistle-blower and that she was killed for it. I assumed she worked at a nuclear power plant and that the film was going to be some sort of tense, nail-biting action film.

I was wrong on both accounts. Based on a true story Silkwood is the story of Karen Silkwood (Streep) who worked at a plant in Oklahoma that made Uranium fuel. She did become a whistle-blower and probably was killed for it, but the film is not at all a thriller. It is much more a character piece than anything else.

One of the things I found really fascinating about the film is that Karen is not a brilliant scientist or an expert on nuclear energy. She’s a fairly uneducated blue-collar worker. She’s basically working on an assembly line. Albeit a radioactive assembly line. One that can kill her. She’s not even that good at her job. The film shows her slacking off on numerous occasions. She often leaves the line to go chase down a friend to chat about something, or do some other task she could easily do on her break. She constantly stops working to converse with her fellow line workers. At one point she brings in a birthday cake, something likely not allowed on the uranium line. To leave her workstation she must waive her hands over a radioactive tester machine and she constantly has to be reminded to do this.

Her ex-husband and three small children live in Texas, but she rarely seems interested in them. Early in the film, she takes a couple of days off to go see them. She actually forgets to ask for the time off and has to beg her coworkers the day before to switch shifts with her. Once she arrives she learns that her ex has planned to take the kids to see his father. So she only gets a few hours with them so she takes them to a diner and spends more time talking to the friends she’s taken with her than her own kids. Later, we’ll see her call, but late at night when they are in bed.

She really just falls into activism. One day one of her friends comes up hot – the radiation monitor goes off and she must be thoroughly scrubbed down. Karen goes with her and comforts her. When she learns that they didn’t do a throat swab – testing for radiation inside her body she becomes furious. This leads to her raising concerns with her union rep. He takes her to see the national union people and from there, she becomes very engaged in union activities, much to the annoyance of her boyfriend and roommate.

She lives in a small house with her boyfriend Drew (Kurt Russell) and Dolly (Cher). Much of the film is spent with them just hanging out at the house. These are fun lovin’ people. Drew likes to drink beer and make love to Karen. Dolly is in love with Karen and wishes she could be hers. Later she gets a girlfriend and that causes more household tension.

The film doesn’t make much, if anything at all, about what the company thinks of her activism. It annoys her coworkers but only because they worry they will lose their jobs. It angers Drew and Dolly because it is interfering with the time they get to spend with her. If the company is planning on killing her we sure don’t see it. There aren’t any tense scenes showing mysterious men stalking her or leaving bullets in her mailbox. Even her death is left up in the air. We see her driving down the road, headed to a meeting. There is a car with its headlights shining brightly behind her. And then nothing. That’s more factual, I suppose because her death was ruled an accident and there are no documents indicating the company killed or even harassed her. There were some documents missing from her crashed car – documents she was taking to a meeting with the press that she was seen with not long before the accident. But that’s not proof of anything.

That’s not a ding on the film either. It isn’t really interested in the mystery of her death. Like I said it is a character piece. And a good one at that. Streep is just wonderful. She’s a very physical actor and a subtle one at that. She creates little ticks for her characters, she lets us understand her mood by a small facial expression or simple gesture. Cher is likewise fantastic. She’s much more natural in her performance, existing in it.

I definitely went down a rabbit hole after watching this film, looking up the real history of Karen Silkwood and the company she worked for. It is pretty fascinating.