“The Hateful Eight” Trailer Previews Quentin Tarantino’s Long-Awaited Western Showdown
It feels like it couldn’t have been any longer ago than about Noon yesterday when director Quentin Tarantino declared his long-gestating Western passion project The Hateful Eight would never see the silver screen. Thanks to a mysteriously leaked script the acclaimed director has since claimed to have traced back to one almost-certain culprit, Tarantino was tossing around the notion that he would merely novelize the story and be done with it.
That was January 2014. It took commanding a live read of the allegedly dead script at the United Artists Theater in Los Angeles, but over a year and a half later, the official teaser trailer for the eighth film from writer-director of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained is here.
Love Tarantino’s dialogue-indulging style or loathe him, one impression is certain: from its Ennio Morricone score to familiar faces Samuel L. Jackson and Tim Roth, this sure is a Quentin Tarantino picture.
This little glimpse opens in a stagecoach where legendary bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), his allegedly deadly fugitive Daisy Domergue and their accidental companion, former Union soldier and fellow bounty hunter Major Marquis Wilson (Jackson), are trying to hold their lead on an approaching blizzard. They’re bound for Domergue’s appointment with the gallows in the Colorado town of Red Rock when they come upon salty southerner and self-proclaimed new sheriff-to-be of Red Rock Chris Mannix (Walter Goggins) not long before the coming storm derails them into seeking shelter in Minnie’s Haberdashery along a mountain pass.
There, they meet Red Rock’s (literal) hangman Oswaldo Mobray (Roth), aging cow-puncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern), and the establishment caretaker, Bob (Demián Bichir). After Ruth’s warning to their four new friends that getting in the way of Daisy’s fitting for new neck-wear is just one hell of a bad idea, Ruth eventually discovers that one of the latter four “is not who he says he is.” Looks like someone won’t live to see what promises to be the most amazing snowball fight history would ever know…
The Hateful Eight hits select theaters Christmas Day this year and theaters everywhere Jan. 8, 2016.
