January 2, 2016 -- This movie is set in Wyoming around Christmas time, not too long after the Civil War in the 1870s. I saw it in Laramie, Wyoming around Christmas time, so it kinda hits close to home. Some of it is old school, shot in 70mm film and Panavision cameras (instead of digital) and is has an Ennio Morricone (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) musical score, including a striking opening overture, accompanied by wilderness winter images and opening credits.

It looks like a Western, but it quickly becomes obvious that this is no Sergio Leone type western. This is writer-director Quentin Tarantino doing a reworked version of his “Reservoir Dogs,” set in the Old West, a gore fest with most ending up dead, and the rest writhing in pain and blood. It is also a bit like an Agatha Christie type of locked room mystery, with everyone stuck in a room, trying to figure out who everyone else really is and what they are up to. The story isn't quite believable, but it works.

The film opens with a stagecoach headed to Red Rock (There is no such town in Wyoming, but it is the second film I know of, the other being the noir film “Red Rock West,” to use this name for a Wyoming town). Along the way, the stage stops to pick up two stranded travelers, a bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins of “Django Unchained”). Mannix claims to be the new sheriff of Red Rock, but the men in the stagecoach don't believe his story.

In one of many coincidences in the movie, all three men who end up in the stagecoach together just happen to know each other. Mannix fought in the Civil War for the South, the other two, Warren and John Ruth (Kurt Russell of “Furious 7”) fought for the North. John is also a bounty hunter, who is taking a prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh of “Welcome to Me”) to Red Rock to hang for murder.

The stage can't make it to Red Rock because of an approaching blizzard, so it makes an unscheduled stop at the nearest building, a rural tavern called Minnie's Haberdashery. Warren has been there before, and he knows something isn't right as soon as he gets there. He knows that people in this place are not who they seem to be. He knows there is danger, but he doesn't know who to trust. He makes an uneasy alliance with John, the bounty hunter, but that is fleeting.

The shifting alliances and suspicion in this remote building, with a blizzard raging outside, make for a situation with a lot of uncertainty. The tension in this room is high as death could come for anyone at any minute. As is common in Tarantino's films, the characters make several speeches about different things, Civil War atrocities, a brutal murder, the nature of frontier justice, conspiracy theories. These speeches are punctuated by violence and murder of various kinds. The number of people trapped in this room keeps getting smaller. The story is told in six chapters, one, “The Four Passengers,” is a flashback.

Most of these speeches however, do serve a purpose, mostly to give us background on the characters, and how they relate to each other. There are yet more coincidences that form extreme hatred between Warren and General Sandy Smithers, as told in a speech and flashback to a really awful incident that may or may not be true. That hateful incident, and the projectile blood vomiting, might turn off some viewers.

Racism hangs like a fog over the film, with stories of black prisoners murdered during the Civil War, and the word “nigger” is said so many times, its shock value wears off. If this movie has anything to say about people, it is about racism. This is related to a letter to Warren from President Abraham Lincoln. Unlike most locked room mysteries, there are no real good guys in this room trying to find out who the bad guys are. All of them are bad.

Tarantino fans will recognize some of familiar faces in this movie from previous Tarantino films in addition to Jackson and Goggins, such as Tim Roth (“Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction”) Bruce Dern (“Django Unchained”) Michael Madsen (“Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill”) James Parks (“Django Unchained” and “Kill Bill”) and Lee Horsely (“Django Unchained”).

One thing about Tarantino films (this is his eighth film, get it?) is that they are never boring, although the speeches themselves can sometimes be boring and distracting. In this film, I thought the speeches worked, and the film did hold my interest throughout, although I kept waiting for the intermission that never came so I could put more butter and salt on my popcorn. I guess the intermission was only in those special 70mm film projection showings. I saw the digital version, which just keeps grinding on for close to three hours.

This movie left me feeling cold as I left the theater to step back into the sub-freezing Wyoming winter. Despite the fact that the movie is well crafted, it is not my kind of Western. It reminds me too much of what I don't like about the society I live in, and maybe that is the point. There are some good characters, at least normal kinds of people, in this movie, but all of them are murdered early on. This is more like a shark cage full of sharks ripping each other apart. Which shark wins? At the end, I didn't care which shark survived. This film rates a B.

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