The Six Missing Minutes of The Hateful Eight -- With One KEY Scene
SPOILERS for both versions of THE HATEFUL EIGHT:
When I saw The Hateful Eight at the theater on opening day at Christmas time 2015, there was a scene in which Kurt Russell and Demian Bichir discussed a half-plucked chicken in their midst, and Bichir went on to pluck it.
When I bought the DVD some months later...that chicken scene was missing, though I think the chicken was still in there in a few shots and lines.
The "plucked chicken scene"(in which Russell notes that a plucked chicken is bad luck -- boy is it!) is back in the Netflix "mini-series" that QT has re-cut into four episodes of "The Hateful Eight."
"Scholars" have noted that if you take out the credits (fore and aft) for the episodes, there are only about six minutes of "new scenes" in The Hateful Eight on Netflix, and evidently the plucked chicken scene(which I saw in 2015) is one of them.
But I managed to find the "new scenes" that WERE new, and one of them is very interesting. The others -- well, they are unnecessary scenes that nonetheless allow QT's lines to be well read by his actors.
These are the scenes:
After failing to get Kurt Russell to help put the bodies atop the stagecoach, Sam Jackson negotiates with "OB the stagecoach driver." The offer is $250 and, "once we reach Red Rock" -- drinks at the saloon and dalliance with the ladies at a "social club" there. Sold. Kurt Russell agrees to hold the horses reins while OB puts the bodies up top.
Later at Minnie's Haberdashery, Jackson and OB"re-negotiate" the Red Rock deal, but since the first scene was cut, this scene is cut, too (and thus James Parks as OB lost two dialogue scenes.)
A brief scene shot from above in the Haberdashery. I"ve already forgetten it -- I think it was Kurt Russell talking to Michael Madsen.
AND:
The big one.
In the movie as we have it, we get the flashback that reveals that Jody Domingue(or is it Domingre?) and his gang kill Minnie and everybody else except Bruce Dern, andthey set the stage for the arrival of Kurt Russell. We hear -- outside - -- some of the dialogue we heard before from Russell ("I've got two of my best men on it") and then Russell kicks open the door and enters with Daisy and "sudden blackout." And we're back to the present time(Russell is long dead and Sam Jackson is badly wounded.)
In the mini-series that jolting "sudden blackout" is gone and the scene with Russell and Daisy entering the Haberdashery continues on just as we had seen it earlier in the movie -- they deal with the door that needs to be nailed shut, Dern, Roth and Madsen are introduced, etc.
But then we get something different. As we see and hear Russell and the others deliver dialogue we've already heard(including Daisy's racist joke about a banana and the unseen Sam Jackson, now in medium-shot close-up from a different angle), the scene turns into somethine else:
Michael Madsen, reaching for the pistol under his table, is going to try to get a killing shot at Russell. He exchanges a wink and a knowing smile with Tim Roth, and he's about to get the shot set up when -- Russell says he has two other men with him, outside. Madsen and Roth exchange disappointed looks and Madsen takes his hand off the gun. Can't kill Russell now.
Its a good scene in how it reminds us that earlier in the movie, when the "main story" was taking place, Jody Domergue was hidden beneath the floor all the time and Madsen and Roth were plotting to kill Russell on the spot. What we THOUGHT we saw versus what was REALLY happening...is interesting.
But QT decided to drop this whole scene.