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Hateful Eight, The  (DVD)

8/10

Stars: Samuel L Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum, James Parks, Zoe Bell

Director: Quentin Tarantino

This time around, Tarantino has sensibly relied on genuine good actors to bring his hyper-violent blood-drenched homage to Italian Spaghetti Western to life,

Think spaghetti super-soaked in gore and decorate with blood clots and you’ll feel the force. Few could accuse Tarantino of subtlety and if there were any traces of such sensitivity here then I must have missed them.

Tarantino kicks off with a long but effective opening sequence set in snow-covered Wyoming sometime after the end of the American Civil War. There key characters meet around the stagecoach carrying bounty hunter Kurt Russell (unrecognisable behind a massive moustache) and his seriously strange prisoner Jennifer Jason Leigh to be handed in at the nearby town of Red Rock.

By the time the stage sets off for its destination, Union soldier-tuned bounty hunter Samuel L Jackson has hitched a lift with Russell to bring some corpses to claim the rewards due him, along with new passenger Walter Goggins who claims to be the new Sheriff of Red Rock.

All in all, the entire cast is picture perfect, within the boundaries of an obviously auteur-driven bloodbath.

It's vivid, violent and often vile – which is what you should expect from Tarantino. He is determined to imprint his creative ego on every image, line of dialogue and action and he does. The Hateful Eight is overlong (especially when seen without an interval), overwrought but completely compelling from start to finish.

To sum up, if you like your movies BIG, BOLD and BLOODY, then you can’t go wrong with The Hateful Eight. Rating: eight (of course).

Alan Frank

USA 2015. UK Distributor: Entertainment. Colour.
160 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 3, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 1, Swearing 3.

Review date: 19 Jun 2016