How many Westerns present a woman doctor having sex with her nice-guy husband? Bone Tomahawk (2015) does; it’s different—as well as one of the best Westerns I’ve seen.

The kind of R-rated adult Western that The Wild Bunch is, S. Craig Zahler‘s movie is as shocking as the Peckinpah classic was in 1969. As I indicated in an earlier review, it is “grungy” and “gory” as it relates the tale of the abduction of three people by brutal, cannibalistic primitives. It conveys, I think, a message about men and women who work to maintain a society sometimes being forced to encounter the ultra-criminal, the ultra-violent, even the “anti-social” types like David Arquette‘s Purvis who deserve to die. Ah, but do they deserve to die at the hands of the primitives?—a necessary question.