Outlaws and Angels (2016)
Directed by JT Mollner
A gang of cold-blooded outlaws narrowly escapes a blood-soaked bank robbery in a grimy frontier town. With a notorious bounty hunter hot on their trail, these nefarious criminals desperately need a place to hide out before night falls. Fate brings them to the home of the Tildons, a seemingly innocent family with two feisty daughters. As the men settle in, an impetuous game of cat and mouse plays out during the cold, black night. Come morning, nothing will ever be the same.
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What critics compared Outlaws and Angels to
Not unlike “The Hateful Eight,” “Outlaws & Angels” is a Grand Guignol nod to spaghetti Westerns that soon abandons the great outdoors for one equally bloody interior location.
The sensibility is more grindhouse gore than spaghetti western, perhaps hoping to mine the same vein as Quentin Tarantino’s “ The Hateful Eight ,” but lacking Mr. Tarantino’s lively dialogue and wicked sense of humor.
Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” took a low-budget B-western premise and staged it like an expensive old-time Hollywood epic.
The premise naturally evokes Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, particularly when it comes to the outlaws, however light their presence may be.
If you found yourself wishing The Hateful Eight would quit its circuitous gabbing and get to the point already, this is the knife-twisting oater for you.
Though comparisons to Quentin Tarantino's 2015 The Hateful Eight are inevitable, especially given Mollner's anti-intuitive decision to largely foreswear big sky and open landscapes for the claustrophobic confines of the Tildon cabin, he's clearly going back to the source: It can hardly be a coincidence that one of the outlaws hisses a paraphrase of the title God Forgives...
For whatever other Westerns may have also inspired “Outlaws & Angels” ( Frances Fisher of “ Unforgiven ” makes a brief cameo), Mollner’s contribution always comes back to its core Tarantino influence—even the film's allegiance to Kodak film stock makes its blood-bursting action directly echo the albeit smaller-scale violence of "Django Unchained."
Mollner, best known for his first feature film, Outlaws and Angels, which was a remarkable sobering vision of the American West, borrows his love of 70s thrillers to create a taut horror thriller that is as ingenious as it is terrifying.
"Strange Darling" goes from there, unfolding in six chapters, which are jumbled up (we start with Chapter 3) like writer-director JT Mollner (2016's "Outlaws and Angels") tossed the pieces in the air and assembled them back together in random order.
This isn't Mollner's first rodeo — the writer/director made “Outlaws and Angels” before this — and he knows what he's got.
Mollner (whose debut feature Outlaws and Angels was a Sundance selection) nearly loses his audience up front with an extreme amount of preamble.
Strange Darling is the second feature by the writer/ director JT Mollner, following Outlaws and Angels (2016), a revisionist take on a Western. It stands to reason to suggest that Strange Darling somewhat plays a bit around revising the genre of thriller, and to some extent it does ring true.