Fugly.

There were so many things to dislike, hate, and/or projectile-vomit from this ghastly horror that I am a little embarrassed about how I couldn't wait to grab some alone time to watch Bone Tomahawk. This is a gorge-suppressingly awful movie that is too long, more tedious than suspenseful, and features a man getting scalped, strangled, and split in two, crotch to chops. I thought the water buffalo in Apocalypse Now had it easier.

The movie vaguely reminded me of John McTiernan's The Thirteenth Warrior (with a dash of Quest for Fire). In TTW, an Arab diplomat hooks a ride with Beowulf and his posse. The blood flows like spaghetti sauce as the "Geats" fight it out with a tribe of spider-worshipping Neandernasties.

Here, a mini-posse of 1890s Southwesterners go on a rescue mission into desert badlands held by a pack of "Trogladytes." Where McTiernan drives the narrative at a bone-crushing pace, Bone Tomahawk crushes bones, slices scalps and genetalia, and makes the characters almost impossible to like. Kurt Russell, a man who has a voice as gritty as his stare is cold, is so restrained that the fire he brought to Tombstone is almost snuffed out.

I suspect the movie tried to present the good guys as flawed and believable, but we get tired of endless trudging through the outback of the Southwest while the characters use arcane language.

As I'm writing this, I'm slowly changing my mind about the blandness of the characters. Maybe they are, in their own way, working-class anti-heroes, but I just wanted a bit more savagery on the part of the "good guys."

I'm going to hit "submit" now and hope my wife has not prepared spaghetti for dinner.