"You know this story..."

At least you think that you do. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is one of the best known novels of all time. But thanks in part to Hollywood, it is also one of the most misrepresented stories of all time. I'm a fan of both the novel and the series of Universal and Hammer films going all the way back to 1931 when Boris Karloff played The Monster and Colin Clive played the mad Dr. Frankenstein. Missing from both the original novel and the James Whale Universal film is any mention of a character named Igor. There isn't even an assistant at all in the book, and in the 1931 film the hunchbacked lab assistant was named Fritz and was played by Dwight Frye. The character of Igor, spelled Ygor then, didn't arrive until the third film in the Universal series. Ygor was not a hunchback but rather had a serious neck issue from a botched hanging. He was played by Bela Lugosi, long sought for the Monster in the first film, and it's my favorite Lugosi character of his career. Ygor can be found in both Son Of Frankenstein and Ghost Of Frankenstein. He would actually inhabit the Monster through his brain in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. The point is that Lugosi made such an impact in the role that our collective conscience appears to forever link him as the default mad scientist assistant. That's where the film Victor Frankenstein comes in. Daniel Radcliffe plays Igor to James McAvoy's title character Victor Frankenstein.

The name Quentin Tarantino carries the weight of legacy of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and more recently Christopher Nolan.  I’m not saying one is better than the other, but simply by name recognition alone Tarantino is in the company of directors that when you hear that his name is attached, there will be a loyal fan base flocking to the theaters to see what they have to dazzle us with.  This time around Tarantino returns to the cinema in his biggest release to date; in glorious 70mm we have The Hateful Eight. Tarantino returns to the Western genre, only this time he heads out west to Wyoming to thrust us into his most claustrophobic setting since Reservoir Dogs. Let me just come out of the gate and say, if you’re looking for the over-the-top fun you found in Django Unchained, you’re going to have to readjust those expectations; this time around we are given something much more intimate and all the more rich with dark humor.

John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) is a bounty hunter on his way to turn in his prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang.  It’s along their stagecoach ride that they come across another bounty hunter, Major Warren (Samuel L Jackson) who is looking to collect on a bounty of his own, only his prisoners are already dead. As we’ve seen in previous Tarantino films, he chooses to tell his story in chapter form, and for the first chapter of the film we spend it getting to know this trio of unsavory characters.  If you were hoping chapter two would pick things up in the action department, I’m sorry to say instead it is spent with a new passenger hopping aboard to avoid the oncoming blizzard.  The new passenger is Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins); he’s the new appointed sheriff in the town Ruth plans on taking his prisoner to hang, and with this new addition the dialog only continues to flow.