A stagecoach driver and his young daughter are tasked with the difficult assignment of transporting a group of chain gang prisoners across the wintry prairie. Along the way, they get held up by some bandits who think they’re carrying a shipment of gold, there is a confrontation, and the stagecoach is destroyed. That means our hero and his daughter have to lead the convicts by foot through the snow. He also has another reason for seeing his job through: One of the prisoners just might’ve been the man who killed his wife years ago.
Cut-Throats Nine is a tense, mean, and nasty western featuring a bunch of ugly dudes doing ugly things to people (and each other). It’s bleak, downbeat, and unpleasant most of the time, but it’s also suspenseful, gory, and well-made. The script is also surprising as it gives us a pretty good plot twist halfway through that sets up the intense second half. It’s consistently entertaining and keeps finding new ways to hook the viewer while simultaneously raising the stakes for the characters in an unexpected way.
This was already a tough and mean-spirited movie, but the gore sequences help to really put it over the top. These gory moments make it feel like Herschell Gordon Lewis was hired as a second unit director on a Sam Peckinpah western. Heads are bashed in, throats are slit, faces get shot off, bodies are burned, brains are blown out, and guts are ripped out.
You almost get the feeling Tarantino might’ve watched this before he made The Hateful Eight. In fact, it would make a great double feature with that film. It kind of loses some of the tension in the third act once the convicts take the proprietor of a general store hostage. However, whenever they are on the road fighting for survival and banding together against their captor, Cut-Throats Nine makes for some gripping, downbeat entertainment.
AKA: Bronson’s Revenge.
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