Movies
Kill of the Week: Split Down the Middle in ‘Bone Tomahawk’
Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
Debut features are rarely as impressive as Brawl in Cell Block 99 director S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk, a hybrid horror-western that earned Zahler favorable comparisons to another filmmaker who became a bold force of nature in his debut outing: Quentin Tarantino.
An incredible ensemble cast including Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins, Matthew Fox and Patrick Wilson (along with brief appearances from Sid Haig and David Arquette!) star in Bone Tomahawk, the tale of a sheriff and three other men who embark on an epic rescue mission after a deputy and doctor are kidnapped by a band of vicious Troglodytes.
The film starts off as a slow burn Western, driven by writing that’s as good as the individual performances, but when it embraces the horror… oh boy does it get ugly.
One particular scene is one of the most shocking in recent years. Locked up by the cannibal clan, Russell and Jenkins’ characters are forced to watch as they brutally dismember another human being, removing his scalp with a knife and then pulling his legs apart and splitting him down the middle with the titular weapon.
It’s one of the most savage and barbaric kills in cinema history, and Zahler forces you to watch every second along with the horrified characters behind the cage.
The sound design, in particular, has probably made at least a few people vomit.
Described as “Ted meets ET,” David Mikalson’s raunchy comedy Goblin is being brought to life over at A24, and Will Forte (“The Four Seasons”) is now in talks to star.
Deadline first reported the news this afternoon.
Kenneth Branagh has been cast to voice the titular Goblin in the upcoming A24 movie, with the character said to be “green-colored” as well as “anatomically correct.”
Skyler Gisondo (Superman) is reportedly playing the Goblin’s human best friend.
The mysterious project sounds a bit like films including A Gnome Named Gnorm and more recently, Frankie Freako, though it’s important to note that it’s not billed as a horror movie.
Deadline details, “After [Mikalson] hatched the idea to make an outrageous buddy comedy about a goblin, using a practical puppet and operating outside the Hollywood system, his script quickly got him a rep team. While others might have eyed the raunchy comedy as a writing sample or planned to wait to see the micro-budget version Mikalson has been directing in Kentucky, A24 jumped all over it. The hot indie essentially has agreed to finance a full feature.”
“There was a lot of interest, but A24 came with what Mikalson really wanted, after spending all his money crafting the puppet title character: they acquired the movie and agreed to let him make it with a significantly increased budget than what he had left after creating the anatomically correct title character,” Deadline’s report goes on to explain.
What does the titular Goblin actually look like? Well, a cake that Mikalson had whipped up for his reps might give us our first look at what to expect. Deadline explains the photo you’ll see down below, “Take a look at the cake he commissioned with Marc Gravelle at Cake Art in West Hollywood, to present to his reps as thanks for making his dream come true.”
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