Unlike all of my more fortunate friends, I don’t stream many movies, mainly because my satellite Internet provider allows me very limited streaming time unless I do it between the hours of midnight and 5:00 AM. If I want to stream a few movies at any other time
(a.k.a. non-vampire hours) I have to upgrade to their higher-priced
package…and I barely can afford the one I currently have.
So because I still want to see the new releases as cheaply as possible, I pay $8
per month to Netflix to have them send me movies in DVD form, and I watch
those. All I have to do is provide them with a list of the movies I want to
see, in the order of my preference, and they send me whichever one is
available. When I’m done with the movie, I just send it back, and they send me
another one. It’s simple, and the shipping is free, so it’s not a bad deal.
Anyway, I was pretty happy with Netflix and their DVDs…until
this whole pandemic thing started. Suddenly, instead of being sent one of the
top movies on my want-list every week, I began receiving the ones at the bottom
– like around number 45. That’s because
people are stuck at home and watching more movies now, so the supply of top
hits rapidly becomes depleted.
And I’m stuck with the leftovers.
Last Saturday, I received a DVD called Bone Tomahawk. I
barely remembered putting it on my list because it had been so long, like five
years. But when I skimmed over the description –a western starring Kurt Russell
– I figured it sounded pretty good. I mean, I enjoy westerns, especially if
they have hunky looking bare-chested Native-American guys running around in
them. And this movie mentioned that it was about a kidnapping by an area tribe,
and Kurt, the local sheriff, was going to gather a posse to go rescue the victims.
So I was intrigued.
I got ready to watch the movie – my favorite pillow, a cup
of tea, a blanket – and then curled up on the sofa. My two dogs stretched out
on the rug in front of the sofa and dozed off.
The movie turned out to be…well, really “unique,” to put it
mildly. First of all, the Native
Americans weren’t your average run-of-the-mill movie types. No, these guys were a tribe of cave-dwelling
cannibalistic troglodytes (a direct quote from the movie) who got their jollies
from snapping people in half (referred to as “bisecting”) like wishbones, and
then chopping them into snack-sized pieces (referred to as “dissecting”) to
save for future nibbling. And the
leftover bones were used to make weapons, which I assume contributed to the
movie’s title of Bone Tomahawk.
The movie was 132 minutes long – the first 120 of which the
posse spent traveling to the cave. The reason why the trip took so long was
because one of the posse members was nursing a compound-fractured leg he’d
injured in a construction accident weeks before, and they had to keep stopping
to allow him to whine and complain and perspire a lot because of the severe,
debilitating pain he was suffering.
But his wife was one of the people who’d been kidnapped
by the troglodytes, so he had to be a part of the posse, even though the
other members were ready to find the nearest cliff and shove him over the edge
after he’d subjected them to a few hours of endless choruses of groaning in a
variety of octaves.
And things got only worse after all of their horses were
stolen as they slept one night… and they had to walk to rest of the way
to the cave, which was about 1,150 miles (or so it seemed). Needless to say,
“Gimpy’s” groaning and whining escalated to a whole new level after that.
Just as I was about to doze off and join my snoring dogs,
the first of the troglodytes finally appeared, spying on the intruders. To my
disappointment, he resembled Quasimodo, not the muscular hunk I’d been
anticipating. But that wasn’t the worst part. What happened next made me
seriously contemplate suing the filmmaker for irreparable, emotional distress.
As it turned out, these cave-dwelling, cannibalistic creeps
also had a special way of communicating with each other. They had devices
implanted in their windpipes that allowed them to produce a horrible,
screeching whistle-like sound that could be heard throughout the canyon.
The first time one of the troglodytes let loose with one of
those screeches, it was SO loud, both of my dogs jumped up out of a dead sleep
and bolted out of the room. In the
process, they sent the rug skidding across the floor and into the fireplace,
and they knocked over an end-table. I, who had been half-asleep, ended up
sitting upright with my eyes bulging and my heart pounding like a bongo drum in
my throat.
I'm pretty sure no judge would deny the three of us compensation for the trauma we endured.
I won’t ruin the ending of the movie for anyone who might
still want to see it, but let’s just say that the posse member I was hoping
would be turned into a giant ground-meat taco by the cannibals ending up
living, and the guy I thought for certain would be the “happily ever after”
hero, ended up getting gutted like a freshly caught trout.
And were the hostages saved? Well, one was, and the
other two tragically became yet another pair of giant human-wishbones who both were “bisected” and “dissected.”
I honestly can’t wait to see what Netflix sends me next week.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the
author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor” and “The
Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation." Contact her at:
sillysally@att.net.
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