IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Ti West
Ethan Hawke, John Travolta, Taissa Farmiga,
James Ransone, Karen Gillan, Tommy Nohilly,
Toby Huss, Burn Gorman, Larry Fessenden
A stranger rides into a town called Denton, accompanied by his best (and only) friend, a dog. In the saloon, a punk confronts him and challenges him to a fight out in the street, an encounter that does not end well for the punk. It turns out the punk is both the deputy and the son of the town marshall, who tells the stranger to get out of town, which he does. So the stranger's camping out on the range somewhere when the punk and his gang ambush him and throw him off a cliff and kill his dog. They don't check to make sure he's dead, though, which is a mistake, on top of the mistake they made by killing the dog. You can guess the rest. Ethan Hawke plays the stranger. John Travolta plays the marshall. It's a spaghetti western, or a riff on spaghetti westerns, enhanced by West's affection for the genre and a musical score by Jeff Grace that owes a lot to Ennio Morricone. There's a rule in movies like this that the punk should've paid more attention to: No matter how tough you think you are, if you want to be breathing when the end credits roll, you'd better not kill no dog.
