Spoiler Warning: If your life is so dull that you want to waste three hours of it watching this awful movie, this article reveals some key details.
The only person to survive Quentin Tarantino’s new gorefest is the director himself. Much to the disappointment of moviegoers everywhere.
The Hateful Eight was Tarantino’s typical over-the-top “style.” It contained 49 acts of brutal violence – shootings, stabbings, a hanging, torture, forced gay oral sex, and several incidents where women were shot or beaten. There were 32 separate shootings – including especially graphic headshots. All the cast members die, though two were dying when the credits roll, and one died off screen, abused and naked, freezing in the snow. All four women in the cast were killed, two shot again as they lay bleeding on the floor.
Samuel L. Jackson’s character Major Marquis Warren made it clear that he and one other character were dying from their wounds as they hanged the central villain, Daisy Domergue. “We gonna die, white boy,” he said, as the two bled out and the film finally ended.
The movie ran red with blood. Half the set and all three remaining characters were covered in blood and gore by the film’s violent ending where Domergue was hanged. We even saw her kicking, choking and struggling as she died. One three-minute-and-29-second sequence included 18 separate acts of violence where five people (three of them women) were viciously slaughtered.
It’s Ten Little Indians for sociopaths and sadists. A snuff film with big name stars.
Tarantino who has been very public about both his anti-gun views and defense of violence in film, also wrote the movie. Including this memorable Jackson line: “The only time black folks is safe is when white folks is disarmed.”
That’s not far from real life statements the director has made. He was quick to defend his pictures soon after the Sandy Hook shooting. When asked by NPR's Terry Gross whether the massacre of 26 people made him lose “his taste" for movie violence, he got angry.
“‘Yeah, I'm really annoyed,’ Tarantino acknowledged. ‘I think it's disrespectful to … the memory of the people who died to talk about the movies. Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health,’” reported Eonline.
There are no definitive links to whether watching violence in movies leads to violent behavior, but some researchers have argued it may make things worse. “Exposure to violent imagery does not preordain violence, but it is a risk factor,” wrote forensic psychologists Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam and H. Eric Bender in the Aug. 23, 2013, New York Times.
While Hateful Eight didn’t have as many victims of violence as his last film, Django Unchained, some people lived through that monstrosity. Tarantino’s movies are always so violent that Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough called him the “pornographer of violence.”
The director has also complained his 1st Amendment rights were being encroached when police organizations criticized his attacks on them and called for a boycott of The Hateful Eight.
When Hateful Eight wasn’t outlandishly violent, it was typical Tarantino – overwritten, overacted, and grotesque. The characters who weren’t cursing were using the slur, “nigger,” to remind audiences the film was “edgy.” Viewers were constantly reminded how juvenile the director remains with gimmicks, vomit sequences, violence, obscenity and even ridiculously named characters.
Tarantino clearly aimed for shock, but settled on schlock. And the only people he seems really hateful toward, other than police and conservatives, are his viewers.
