Torture Porn

Rating: 3/10 (17 December 2016)

This increasing bloodiness -- and the anticipation of it -- is getting kind of tiresome, as far as I'm concerned, yet Grand Guignol seems to be rising from its grave, rotting and dripping, even as we speak.
This is an episodic Western, chopped up into non-sequential blocks, rather like the bodies on comic display. It's the goriest Western I've ever seen. By the time it's over, not only are all the dead and the few living bodies covered with blood, but the floor of Minnie's Haberdashery, a shabby merchant store marooned in a fierce blizzard atop a snowy mountain, is an inch deep in blood.
People die in various ways. There's the hanging of a woman with the camera on her venomous bloodied face as she strangles to death, a lot of shooting deaths, a black guy gets his head blown off with a shotgun, a man is stabbed to death, two or three poisonings with gallons of gore in each vomit, a man whose head disintegrates under a couple of bullets before our eyes. Some deaths are in slow motion. All are served up with relish. It's kind of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" except everybody winds up mincemeat.
There are wince-inducing anachronisms. The MF word, a couple of expressions, and so forth. Some fine and witty acting can't save this mishmash. The score by Ennio Morricone comes close to it. The story isn't always easy to follow, and someone ought to spank Quentin Tarrantino, but if you want to see people die on screen, this is where the path will lead you.