While I still think Pulp Fiction is probably my generation’s most influential film, Quentin Tarantino’s most entertaining film for me is Inglourious Basterds. That opening scene, between Hanz Landa and the poor dairy farmer, is one of the tensest, funniest, scariest, and most beautifully patient things ever burned to celluloid. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino attempts to sustain that note for nearly two hours in the snow-covered scenery of Wyoming.

The film opens on Major Marquis Warren, a bounty hunter played by Samuel L. Jackson. He’s sitting on a saddle which is mounted to a pile of dead bounties. The cold weather has killed his horse and the pile of frozen corpses amount to a few thousand dollars—if he can get them back to town. A stagecoach comes his way and he finagles a ride with the man in the back: John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell), who’s handcuffed himself to Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a vile woman wanted for murder. She doesn’t seem to mind much when Ruth beats the shit out of her, which is often. Hell, she may even like it.

Along the way they pick up another suspicious traveler, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims he’s the new sheriff. Ruth—who starts out paranoid and becomes increasingly so by the minute—reluctantly agrees to take the man into the stagecoach. Unable to beat a blizzard, they hole up at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cozy outpost with a stocked bar and a chess game by the fireplace. Ruth begins to suspect that at least one of the eight people in the haberdashery is planning to free his prisoner. When they ask Domergue herself, she says, “You’re right! Me and one of them fellas is in cahoots! We’re just waiting for everybody to go to sleep… that’s when we’re going to kill y’all!” The way she says it is both hilarious and chilling and manages to tell her captors nothing more about their predicament.

There’s a reason Tarantino uses Kurt Russell and music which was originally produced for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Surprisingly, that film has more influence on The Hateful Eight than the spaghetti westerns that so heavily inspired Django Unchained. Imagine The Thing, without the alien, and a western setting. That’s The Hateful Eight.

Russell plays the kind of confident dork he was in Death Proof, but it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh who steals the show with her over-the-top villainy, hilarious in the way she only gets meaner the more she’s used like a punching bag. I don’t think Samuel Jackson is quite as good as he was in Unchained, but that was a role of a lifetime; in this one he gets the most substantial monologue of the entire movie. The rest of the cast, including Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen, are perfectly suspicious. With any luck, Tarantino will do at least one more western before his career is over, but topping his first two will take more than skill.

The Hateful Eight is long, slow, and gratuitously violent. My kind of movie.

In 1973, the year before Blazing Saddles released, the spaghetti western was dead. Sergio Leone had already made what many consider to be the greatest western of all time. His assistant director on the first two Dollar films, Tonino Valerii, went on to direct Day of Anger with Lee Van Cleef. So it was surprising that Leone arranged to have Valerii direct My Name Is Nobody, a send-up of the subgenre they had defined.

Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) is a bit of a legend in the gunslingin’ world, which means he frequently has to dispatch the men who’ve come to kill him for rep. In the aftermath of his latest shootout, a bystander asks, “Is there anyone faster?” The reply: “Nobody.” Enter Nobody, a childlike wanderer played by Terence Hill.

Three bad guys attempt to dupe Nobody into delivering a booby trapped picnic basket to Jack. Nobody agrees. When Jack asks what’s in the basket, Nobody says, “Oh, this? I reckon it’s a bomb.” To which Jack replies, “I reckon you’re right.” Nobody tosses the basket back to the bad guys and yells, “He didn’t want it!” as the basket explodes.

Meanwhile, a group of bandits known as the Wild Bunch (an intentional reference to Sam Peckinpah, whose name also appears on a grave marker) are laundering stolen gold by passing it off as the production of a dummy mining operation. Although Jack assumes Nobody is just another gunslinger who’s come to kill him for a shot at fame, Nobody reveals that he idolizes the gunslinger; he actually wants Jack to take on the gang single-handedly so that his name can go down in history books. Jack just wants to quietly retire to Europe.

Like Two Mules for Sister Sara, My Name is Nobody is not what I’d call a classic, but it’s more memorable than most movies. Then again, maybe it’s only memorable because we’ve seen some of these scenes a hundred times before, only this time Leone and Valerii have turned them into gags. Also in on the joke: Ennio Morricone, whose score plays like a parody of his own works. You get the feeling these guys weren’t mourning the death of the spaghetti western, but merrily digging its grave.