I’ve been following the critical response to The Hateful Eight very closely, and I’ve managed to bite my tongue about my thoughts on the film until after the movie played in its roadhouse edition and then opened wide to the general theater audience. I also kept my review from this blog until after it had run through the holidays in a special two-week edition of The Contributor. I saw the movie about a week before it opened in Nashville. Here’s how I saw it…

The saga of the stranded murderers, marauders, bounty hunters and soldiers in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight is only slightly more blood-soaked than the saga of the film’s announcement and sudden cancellation in 2014: In November, 2013 Tarantino revealed that he was writing a new Western that would not be a sequel to Django Unchained. In January of 2014 the The Hateful Eight title was announced along with plans to begin filming in the summer, but by the end of that month Tarantino’s outrage over a script leak had him shelving the project and threatening to turn it into a novel. However, by late winter of 2014 rumors that the film was back on track began to spread, and by that spring Tarantino was hosting public script readings with a live cast.

Now that the film has finally arrived one can still imagine a world where The Hateful Eight never got made: It would be a shame for audiences to miss the gorgeous light captured by my favorite contemporary cinematographer, Robert Richardson or the excellent ensemble acting or the laugh-out-loud dialog that fills this most talkative of the director’s talkative films. That said, The Hateful Eight, like Django Unchained, won’t stand with Tarantino’s best, and audiences reminded about the ruckus over the leaked script will scratch their heads wondering why the director was so precious with what amounts to a gory, Western comedy that also plays with the tropes of a parlor mystery.

Like some of the director’s other films, Hateful’ is told in separate chapters that split the film into two distinct sections. In the first half a bounty hunter and his prisoner are in a stagecoach racing a blizzard to shelter – they rescue another bounty hunter and a sheriff along the way. The group arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery to find the spaced already hosting an English hangman, a cowboy, a Confederate General and a Mexican caretaker left in charge while the proprietors – Minnie and Sweet Dave – are visiting Minnie’s mom. After tempers flare in close confines and the first body falls, it’s revealed that the coffee’s been poisoned. The second half of the film takes on the feel of an Agatha Christie whodunit with more beards and blood and blue language than Christie ever conceived of.

Hateful’s structure mostly recalls Tarantino’s first feature, Reservoir Dogs. That film also used a non-linear script which found a cast of bad guys meeting in a warehouse after a diamond heist gone wrong. Hateful relies on the same one-setting formula, substituting Minnie’s catch-all frontier outpost for the warehouse. The movie also recalls Jackie Brown with its near-constant dialog, and even From Dusk Till Dawn with its halfway-point genre-shifting.

A Tarantino dream cast brings his cantankerous characters to livid life: Kurt Russell’s bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth is full of movie star swagger with just a hint of a John Wayne accent – he’s the closest thing Hateful has to a protagonist. Samuel L. Jackson is predictably outstanding as Major Marquis Warren – a Union soldier who’s also become a bounty hunter in the years just after the Civil War. Bruce Dern brings gray-haired gravitas to his portrayal of Confederate General Sanford Smithers, but Walton Goggins steals the show as Chris Mannix, a Southern renegade and the new Sheriff of Red Rock – the travelers’ elusive destination. The costumes and the detailed sets equal the performances, and the movie is already creeping onto year-end best-of polls and awards nominations lists.

But, The Hateful Eight is ultimately a disappointment. At his best, Tarantino can raise schlocky genre fare to the level of visceral high art: Seeing Tim Roth soaked in blood in Reservoir Dogs was sad and sickening. When Michael Madsen carved-off a cop’s ear in that same film it was genuinely shocking. When the long conversation in the basement bar in Inglourious Basterds finally erupts in a blood bath, the tension is wound-up to a virtuosic crescendo of breathtaking violence. But here, as in Django’, blood mostly sprays for laughs. Tarantino’s given us some of the strongest heroines in contemporary cinema, but he reduces Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue character to a punching bag. Jackson’s hyperbolic monolog about a vengeful sexual assault is simply ridiculous, and by the time the barrels start to blaze in the movie’s second half I wanted to care more than I did or at least feel a little surprised. But, I didn’t care and I wasn’t surprised, and most audiences won’t be either.

Now that we’re beginning the last week before Halloween I want to get back to the spooky postings. Here’s a piece that first appeared in my Moving Pictures column in The Contributor. This is my breakdown on the must-see horror movies that are currently streaming on Netflix…

Now that we’re into the month of October, my movie cravings have taken a turn for the worse – it’s all goblins, gore, slashers, and scares lately. Scary movies are central to my celebration of the spookiest season of the year, and streaming services like Netflix make it easy to custom queue just the right frights for you.

A quick scroll through the site’s cinematic chillers finds classics mixed with cult films alongside Sharknado, offering everything from invaders from space to babies from hell to zombies, vampires and werewolves. To make your search less scary, here are some of my top picks for Halloween viewing. These flicks range from spooky fun to totally terrifying so be sure to read the descriptions and check the ratings before watching.

You’ve been warned.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) The classic from director Roman Polanski tells the tale of a young couple beginning their life together: Rosemary and Guy have just moved into their new apartment, Guy’s acting career is taking off, and Rosemary discovers she’s pregnant. What could possibly go wrong? Polanski is slow to spook here, but by the film’s over-the-top crescendo viewers feel just as disoriented and distraught as poor Mia Farrow who’s dynamite as Rosemary. The lullaby theme song here is unforgettable, and Ruth Gordon’s turn as Rosemary’s busybody neighbor won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010) Whether you saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street in the theater or you’re a newbie who’s wondering “Just what’s so scary about Freddy Krueger?” this documentary is for you. Clocking in at four hours in length and covering all eight of the Elm Street feature films, this doc manages to plumb the deepest depths of even the most obscure – sometimes terrible – entries in the Krueger canon while remaining thoroughly entertaining throughout. For fans of these flicks it’s a great reminder of why Freddy scared us so much in the first place. If you’ve never visited Elm Street before, this flick will definitely help you stay awake.

Sleepy Hollow (1999) – In Tim Burton’s take on one of my favorite Halloween tales, Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane, a detective attempting to use budding forensic science against local superstition in the tiny village of Sleepy Hollow after a series of grisly beheadings attributed to the titular horseman. Burton does a great job of capturing the lurid look of old Hammer horror films and Depp’s balancing between inquisitive investigator and inept outsider is totally charming. Look for a cameo by Martin Landau who had an Academy Award-winning turn playing horror film star Bela Lugosi in the Burton/Depp classic Ed Wood.

The Omen (1976) – The Omen regularly appears on lists of the best horror films ever made and who can forget a movie that features a woman hanging herself at a child’s birthday party? Starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, this tale about a tragic child swap unfolds into something like “A Portrait of the Antichrist as a Little Boy,” and that’s really why it’s so scary: There is something uniquely terrifying about evil children, and the Omen sits at the top of the heap of killer kids flicks.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) – In movies like Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino remakes tried-and-true genre films into high art, celebrating the tropes of crime and war flicks while simultaneously defying other conventions and upsetting audience expectations. With From Dusk Till Dawn, Tarantino wrote an unexpected mash-up of a criminals-on-the-run tale and a vampire flick. It confused its original audience, but went on to inspire sequels and a television show on director Robert Rodriguez’s own El Rey cable network. The first half of this one is as clever as the second half is gory, and the whiplash-inducing shift in the action still catches me by surprise. Watch for cameos by Cheech Marin who plays three different characters here.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) – Long before Michael Rooker infuriated audiences as the violent, racist Merle Dixon in The Walking Dead, he played a serial killer named Henry in one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen. The film was shot on 16mm in less than a month for a budget of just $110,000. It toured film festivals throughout the late 1980′s but was deemed so controversial that it struggled to find a distributor. The MPAA gave it an “X” rating. Of course all of this just added to the film’s reputation as a cult classic which reads like a day-in-the-life character study of a deeply disturbed maniac.

To get you started, here’s