You Can Watch This Bone Tomahawk Trailer, Then Skip Most of the Movie

RLJ Entertainment

As a whole, the Film School Rejects staff wasn’t high on S. Craig Zohler’s Bone Tomahawk, which premiered last week at Fantastic Fest in Austin. Our reaction – which ranged from my own reaction on Twitter to Rob’s less-than-kind review to Adam Charles’ lukewarm reaction (which he left as a comment on Rob’s review) – seemed to be disproportionally opposite the reaction from the closing night crowd at Fantastic Fest (they loved it). I can assure you that we watched the same movie. At least as far as I understand it.

Whether or not Bone Tomahawk will be remembered as the “bad” movie I saw or one of the single best modern westerns, as it was described in a few tweets following the closing night premiere at Fantastic Fest, is a designation that will be left to history. Or perhaps we’ll get a better picture when a wider swath of critics and audiences see the movie, which is due in theaters on October 23, 2015. Currently it sits at 67% on Rotten Tomatoes with only 6 reviews. So I can’t tell you that you’re going to like this movie. I didn’t. Plenty of people did.

What I can tell you is that if you’re at all interested in this movie, you may not want to watch this new trailer. Well, to be honest, you have three choices:

1. Watch the trailer, then skip the first 100 minutes of the movie’s massively bloated 132 minute runtime. It’s all sort of drab, anyway. And it’s in this trailer. What you get in the last 30 minutes is the stuff that everyone who loved it is telling you about: the grizzly violence, the unique antagonists and the best of Kurt Russell’s performance.
2. Don’t watch the trailer, as it gives away the first two-thirds of the film. Then see the film for yourself and form your own opinion of what, in my mind, will be the most divisive film of the year among genre fans.
3. Don’t watch the trailer or the movie and miss out on the opportunity to come back here and join the chorus of people who love to tell me how I’m wrong and that my taste in movies is garbage. Who would want to miss out on an opportunity like that?!

Whatever you decide, here’s the Bone Tomahawk trailer:

Neil Miller is the persistently-bearded Publisher of Film School Rejects, Nonfics, and One Perfect Shot. He's also the Executive Producer of the One Perfect Shot TV show (currently streaming on HBO Max) and the co-host of Trial By Content on The Ringer Podcast Network. He can be found on Twitter here: @rejects (He/Him)