Review (no spoiler)

After the first few minutes of the film, with all that snow, that Christ in the foreground taken while the 70mm movie camera gets up to make us see the arrival of the direct coach at Red Rock and the incredible music of Ennio Morricone There goes very well in the ears to make us understand that it is indeed a western, but also a horror, maybe that's the Quentin Tarantino version westerns of Howard Hawks' the Thing and the Thing John Carpenter, we already knew this the Hateful Eight won. He won.

And when we see the figure of Major Marquis Warren, even as the director Charles Marquis Warren, played by Samuel L. Jackson who feels Lee Van Cleef, which stops the carriage where they travel bounty killer John Ruth Kurt Russell and his very bad Daisy prey Domergue (even as Faith Domergue) Jennifer Jason Leigh, who then would be the daughter of Vic Morrow, do not forget to Sledge director, old spaghetti westerns that I love, and the three began to talk, because even the largest is a bounty killer, we are already fed up with a film that has just begun.

The western fans, of course, immediately begins to build its web of references. Of course there is John Ford's Stagecoach-Stagecoach, that Quentin does not love, but Ringo John Wayne stops the carriage just like Samuel L. Jackson, then there is the coach of A Fistful of Sergio Leone, and that of hundreds and hundreds of small western. Not to mention the American TV series 60. But above all, there is the carriage in the snow of the convicts transported from Robert Hundar with his daughter Emma Cohen in the great western horror Spanish Condenados a vivir (or Cut-Throats Nine) Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, perhaps the most similar movies thematic and violence at what she has in mind Quentin. But that movie or many movies in his head Quentin simultaneously? Meanwhile, there is a fourth passenger for the carriage, the neo-Sheriff Chris Mannix, ie Walter Goggins, the most talkative, last scion of a family of Southerners rebels, ready to confrontation with Major, who is black and has a letter Lincoln's personal with him.

Mannix brings to the film a key from the show, as the name indicates, but also brings the timeliness of an America not pacified six or seven years after the end of the Civil War, which will be the whole of the film policy key, the a clash never finished within American society, that only fiction can quench. But when the action moves and will remain there for all the film, in Minnie's Habedashery, the cursed inn where the sheriff Mannix, the two bounty killers with their prey, Daisy Domergue, who should be brought to Red Rock to be hanged, and the four come together with four other very strange characters, an English dandy, Oswaldo Mobray, Tim Roth, a general old Southerner, Sanford Smithers, that is, the heroic old Bruce Dern, a strange cowboy who tells him to go to his mother, Joe Gage, that is, Michael Madsen and Bob the Mexican Demian Bichir, also able to play the piano, but none of these has anything to do with the old owners of the inn, the Indian Minnie Mink and her husband Dave Sweet, it is clear that the film takes another turn. That is, we are in the realm of stageY westerns, usually very rare, more suited to the western TV series, because he is poor, that the true western, although Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead by Giuseppe Vari, written by Fernando Di Leo, with Klaus Kinski as bad, but all are fake and bad there, it's what you have in your head Quentin.

He has in his head, of course, also the great silence of Sergio Corbucci, another western with snow with Klaus Kinski bad, Jean-Louis Trintignant dumb and Vonetta McGee black presence. And let's also great movies of the '30s and' 40s, such as The Petrified Forest Archie Mayo or as John Huston's Key Largo, which are the basis of every great black comedy whole set in one set apart from the world. Yes, because you will have to destroy these four characters in search of some kind of truth in the night they will spend together. And, of course, no one is what it claims to be. The only truth that is given us to know is that there is a red candy hidden in the floor. Sign that something unpleasant has happened recently in the inn, and that the door was broken. Everything else I do not say.

But I tell you that it is a film in which Tarantino plays with itself and with its cinema, not only with the one he loves. Use the spaghetti western to give greater strength to his characters, but he thinks deeply about the American cinema, by Howard Hawks in Delmer Daves, and American society today, to his violence. Not at all a peaceful film, but a film where you do not make concessions to anyone. Even in the violence, as usual, you will save not irony and found almost classic cartoon, Tex Avery. It is an ensemble film, where no actor is really more important than the other. It is also a very free movie, to the point that at the end of one of the six chapters, do not tell you who, the same goes Tarantino with his voice on the field, he tells how things are and says with a flash back sosa really happened. And to make matters worse at this point the film becomes a real yellow. But not at all. It is always and only an American disguised as spaghetti westerns westerns that hides a science fiction horror depth on the type of the thing, that the music of Morricone, partly recovered from that Carpenter's film, exalts. But the end is also something deeper and even more free. For this more difficult to win the Oscar. But it's a great film.