This movie starts out as a western and then turns into a horror flick by the end. It takes two exploitation genres and blends them together really well with the gritty bloody western and, strangely enough, the Italian cannibal film. I don't know if anyone ever attempted this blend before. Even in Italy where downbeat gruesome westerns were churned out by the hundreds throughout the 60s and 70s. This is probably due to the fact that the cannibal film hadn't become popular until the Euro-western had all but died out.
For a modern film starring big Hollywood actors like Kurt Russell and David Arquette this doesn't skimp on the blood and guts with a scalping, people ripped apart by hungry savages, arrows piercing skin(including cult fav Sid Haig's looking old and grizzled and mean), necks sliced, titular bone-tomahawks chopping off fingers, toes and hands and enough other gritty realism to fill it's over 2 hour runtime without ever getting boring. It's too bad this barely played in theaters near me or I woulda loved to have seen it with a bigger audience.
I'm not sure whether this is actually a better movie than THE HATEFUL EIGHT, which I did enjoy quite a bit and also showed Kurt Russell acting his ass off in a similar fashion, but this does feel more epic and there's no annoying Tarantino voice-over to take you right out of the film.
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