Craig Zobel
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“The Hunt” tries to tackle America’s zeitgeist by riffing on Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” and pitting liberal elites preying on Trump’s “deplorables” for sport.
It’s loosely based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game , about a millionaire who kidnaps people and brings them to his island where he hunts them for sport – until he meets his match.
Advertising for The Hunt suggested a modernized The Most Dangerous Game , chronicling a group of wealthy liberal elites hunting uneducated, low-income conservatives for sport.
It’s a setup inspired by The Most Dangerous Game, but with a politically-charged twist: the hunters are wealthy “liberal elites” and their prey is a random assortment of working class folks they’ve designated as “deplorables.”
An admittedly delicious riff on Merian C. Cooper’s The Most Dangerous Game , The Hunt imagines a world in which the worst nightmares of Breitbart readers and QAnon conspiracy theorists are true: there is a cadre of rich elites who look down on gun-clinging and Bible-thumping “hicks” and rednecks—assuming every white Southerner is a racist, and each cowpoke who says “ma’am” is a not-so-secret misogynist.
Which is to say The Hunt fails as a genre exercise too, busy being self-satisfied about its dud point-making to escape the shadow of funner, similarly themed “human hunt” films including Hard Target (1993), the Adkins-starring Hard Target 2 (2016), right back to pre-code The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
Which is to say The Hunt fails as a genre exercise too, busy being self-satisfied about its dud point-making to escape the shadow of funner, similarly themed “human hunt” films including Hard Target (1993), the Adkins-starring Hard Target 2 (2016), right back to pre-code The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
Richard Connell’s story, The Most Dangerous Game , has inspired movies from the literal 1932 adaptation to ‘90s hits Hard Target and Surviving the Game .
There’s usually some sociopolitical element involved—whether it’s about class commentary of HARD TARGET or SURVIVING THE GAME, or fascistic oppression like in TURKEY SHOOT, or commentary on government corruption that the Battle Royale novel utilizes or an indictment of the media as in the BATTLE ROYALE film.
The plot is based on a 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, which has gone through multiple adaptations ( Hard Target , Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity ) and parodies over the past century.
The initial plot dynamics are right out of The Most Dangerous Game meets Hard Target playbook.
Perhaps the umpteenth retelling of the short story The Most Dangerous Game (our favorite adaption: the '90s flick Surviving the Game , where Ice-T gets hunted by Rutger Hauer and Gary Busey?), Hunt comes to us courtesy of producer and TV impresario Damon Lindelof, who wrote the script with Nick Cuse (son of frequent collaborator Carlton Cuse).
Here are the basics: A group of super rich elite-types round up a dozen rednecks to kill for sport, "The Most Dangerous Game"-style (or "Surviving the Game," if you prefer your references through Ice-T movies).
Richard Connell’s story, The Most Dangerous Game , has inspired movies from the literal 1932 adaptation to ‘90s hits Hard Target and Surviving the Game .
Past examples include "Surviving the Game," a 1994 movie in which a homeless man (Ice-T) becomes the unwitting prey for a bunch of wealthy hunters.
The one mediating figure between these starkly opposed camps is, amusingly enough, an ex-National Guard, Dale (Steve Mokate), who claims to have worked as a trainer on the 2003 Bruce Willis war movie Tears of the Sun !
Pop culture references from Ava Duvernay to Tears of the Sun (2003) earn laughs as do exchanges about guns and problematic representation.
The script—adapted by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse from the nearly century-old short story "The Most Dangerous Game"—is witty and often hilarious, including some outstanding jokes about the action movie Tears of the Sun.
Navy veterans fantasize about their Hannity tell-all interviews while brash billionaire sociopaths are trained by military consultants from Tears Of The Sun .
A few cultural references, to the Bruce Willis movie Tears of the Sun and to Ava DuVernay’s Twitter presence, land because at least they sound specific, instead of like weak imitations of Very Online discourse.
Even with an impressive Amazonian turn from central star Betty Gilpin as a battle-hardened Southerner, it’s fair to say that The Hunt is following in the footsteps of a different tradition—chiefly the trend in social satire genre flicks, including Get Out (2017), Ready or Not (2019) and, most obviously considering the shared production house, The Purge (2013- ).
While the hunters have their amusing moments, as when one brags about being Twitter friends with Ava DuVernay, none are sketched with the surgical accuracy of, say, Bradley Whitford’s self-congratulatory patriarch in Get Out (“I’d have voted for Obama a third time if I could!”), or Toni Collette’s Paltrovian Instaguru in Knives Out (“I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about you!”).
Naturally, the project recalls Jordan Peele’s recent “Get Out,” which implicated well-mannered white people in a nefarious plot to steal the brains and skills of unsuspecting African Americans, as well as 1995’s early Cameron Diaz starrer “The Last Supper,” wherein a group of liberals lured contemptible conservatives to dinner, only to poison them when they refused to see reason.
The gonzo violence brings to mind Christopher Smith's 2006 horror comedy Severance and the stinging humour is akin to Jordan Peele's Get Out .
If we hadn’t seen Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017) or “Us” (2019), tagging it as unique, new or groundbreaking might work, but that crossover zone has already been defined and owned.
Naturally, the project recalls Jordan Peele’s recent “Get Out,” which implicated well-mannered white people in a nefarious plot to steal the brains and skills of unsuspecting African Americans, as well as 1995’s early Cameron Diaz starrer “The Last Supper,” wherein a group of liberals lured contemptible conservatives to dinner, only to poison them when they refused to see reason.
It can’t touch the Clinton-era satires The Last Supper (1995) or Citizen Ruth (1996), which succeeded for reasons other than being on “the correct side.”
It’s akin to THE LAST SUPPER, GOD BLESS AMERICA, or THE RUNNING MAN, where it’s meant to build on current situations and blow them up to ridiculous proportions.
The Hunt reminded me, with its human hunting, vicious glee and abundance of hideous deaths, of 2006 British horror comedy Severance .
The gonzo violence brings to mind Christopher Smith's 2006 horror comedy Severance and the stinging humour is akin to Jordan Peele's Get Out .
Even with an impressive Amazonian turn from central star Betty Gilpin as a battle-hardened Southerner, it’s fair to say that The Hunt is following in the footsteps of a different tradition—chiefly the trend in social satire genre flicks, including Get Out (2017), Ready or Not (2019) and, most obviously considering the shared production house, The Purge (2013- ).
On the surface, The Hunt resembles straight-forward hack ’em ups like Blumhouse ‘s The Purge, but Craig Zobel (of Z for Zachariah and Homestar Runner) has a little more on his mind.
( The Hunt comes to us by way of Blumhouse Productions, the company behind movies like The Purge and Get Out. ) Many are gunned down or blown to bits before we even have any sense of who they are.
This is a satirical thriller, in some ways reminiscent of The Purge series, that can’t seem to maintain focus or initiative as it moves along from one scene to the next.
Quite often, when producer Jason Blum presents something controversially topical, we get The Purge franchise.
Throughout The Purge series, the idea of political identity remains a lasting thematic undercurrent, coming to the forefront in obvious fashion in The First Purge, which was marketed with a blatant “Make America Great Again” tip of the hat towards #45 and his followers.
The film “The Hunt,” not to be confused with the 2012 Danish film of the same name starring Mads Mikkelsen, had been shelved by Universal last year because of sensitivity issues related to the film’s central plot of humans using other humans as prey – nothing new, but back in the day Fay Wray was in “The Most Dangerous Game” (1932) or Cornel Wilde was “The Naked Prey” (1965), Charles Whitman had yet to show the world what human-on-human carnage was really about.
The concept is not a new one to fans of the 1965 thriller “The Naked Prey,” or the 1932 action feature “The Most Dangerous Game,” before it (based on the classic 1924 short story of the same name).
After review, The Hunt harks to the Alexander Payne film, Citizen Ruth.
It can’t touch the Clinton-era satires The Last Supper (1995) or Citizen Ruth (1996), which succeeded for reasons other than being on “the correct side.”
Or there are the Brazilian collaborators Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles, whose new film Bacurau – out now in select U.S. cities, and set for a Toronto release in a few weeks – takes the hunting-humans-for-sport set-up to stranger, more intoxicating places.
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s rollicking, unclassifiable genre mash-up Bacurau explores strikingly similar themes of a lower class taking revenge on elites hunting them for sport.
If anything, this is a good opportunity for audiences to familiarize themselves with Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s genre hybrid, “Bacurau,” which explored eerily similar themes, and has Brazil’s elites hunting down native small-towners, but did it with the kind of artful urgency that is severely lacking in Zobel’s film.[C]…
The ideological incoherence of The Hunt is especially frustrating given that it’s heading to play in theaters alongside Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s rollicking Bacurau , an infinitely sharper story about the hunting of humans for entertainment, and proof that a movie can have something on its mind without surrendering its exploitation bona fides.
There’s certainly a parallel to Parasite in this story of two combative factions, but the movie is much closer to an U.S. film that remains infamously unreleased: Craig Zobel’s The Hunt , which was dropped by its distributor after arousing the ire of the Twittersphere and, in particular, President Donald Trump for a premise in which wealthy U.S. liberals pay to hunt rednecks in their natural habitat—blue-state sportsmen shooting deplorables in a basket.
While Blumhouse provided popcorn with their “The Hunt,” cowriter/directors Kleber Mendonça Filho ("Neighboring Sounds") and his "Aquarius" production designer Juliano Dornelles offer a three star Michelin meal with this Cannes 2019 Jury Prize winner.
From her numerous kills throughout to a tremendously entertaining face-off against Hilary Swank that reminds of The War of the Roses (1989) even as it feels ultimately fresh, she is a force to be reckoned with.
Toothless and obvious as a satire, “The Hunt” does not even play fair in terms of the humans hunting humans theme that began in film with 1932’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” which shared some cast, crew and RKO sets with the legendary “King Kong.”
It Comes at Night (2017)
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
influenced by Z for Zachariah (2015)
Themes Plot
Sharing more similarities with 2015's quiet apocalyptic indie " Z for Zachariah " than the film its teaser trailer and promotional materials most resemble, 2004's M. Night Shyamalan thriller " The Village ," the film certainly conjures an unsettling aura but does so at a deliberate tempo where its characters' emotional journey and insular world takes precedence over predictable genre tactics.
The film’s nearest analogue is probably Craig Zobel’s underlooked 2015 thriller , Z for Zachariah, though that film—troubled with unease as it is—looks downright gentle compared to Shults’s harrowing chamber piece.
Psychological trauma isn’t exactly untrammelled territory as far as dystopias are concerned, with “The Walking Dead,” Z for Zachariah, Snowpiercer and the Hunger Games movies all touching on that subject to varying degrees just within the last several years.
From “Z for Zachariah” to “The Survivalist,” minimalist post-apocalyptic survival stories have repeatedly gone underseen, in part because they don’t entirely fulfill the potential of their central conceit.
While “It Comes at Night” bears similarities to such recent films as “10 Cloverfield Lane” and the little-seen post-apocalyptic drama “Z for Zachariah” — all are about strangers in close quarters after the social fabric has been ripped to shreds — “Night” lacks the fantastical elements of the former and is more tensely terrifying than the latter.
Not unlike Sharni Vinson in You’re Next , Crystal goes well in a film that has no shortage of memorable characters, whether they last for one scene or several.
You’ve met this archetype before, the unexpectedly prepared prey-turned-predator. Think Sharni Vinson in You’re Next , or Samara Weaving in Ready or Not .
A 90-minute ride that zooms as right-wingers are hunted down, the movie – like “You’re Next” and “Ready or Not” – tweaks the “final girl” trope with Crystal (Betty Gilpin of “GLOW” fame), a seemingly ordinary Mississippi woman who battles back with heroic mettle.
Kill-or-be-killed thrillers about the most taboo of hobbies, human hunting, have been around for about a century, from 1924’s “The Most Dangerous Game” short story, to 2000’s “Battle Royale,” to the blockbuster “Hunger Games” franchise.
Lindelof and Cuse have looked at our political moment and decided, “If you guys hate each other so much without even understanding each other as individuals, why don’t you just kill each other Battle Royale style?”
The hunt is on, and the thickening air of mistrust adds a nice layer of “Battle Royale” suspense to the mayhem that follows.
La película de Craig Zobel, realizador de la contundente Compliance (2012) y de la estimable distopía futurista Z for Zachariah (2015), parte de un planteamiento, el de la cacería humana, que se ha venido explotando en el cine desde los tiempos del clásico El malvado Zaroff (Irving Pichel, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932), donde un loco millonario disfrutaba cazando a los náufragos que llegaban a su isla como si fuesen animales, y que ha dado obras tan variadas como el vehículo de acción para lucimiento de las capacidades elásticas de Jean Claude Van Damme Blanco humano (John Woo, 1993) o la violenta Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000), donde un juego de supervivencia funcionaba como medida drástica para acabar con la superpoblación.
This is no Battle Royale.
At first, it seems we’re in for an American version of Battle Royale , but with Fox News blondes and Carhartt rednecks standing in for the Japanese school kids.
Writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof borrow from Hitchcock’s Psycho as they immediately kill off, in the bloodiest of fashion, character after character, barely giving us a chance to latch on to anyone.
It’s as much of a mirror to society as, say, Escape From New York or The Warriors.
You’ll watch it longing for the lefty proselytizing of something like John Carpenter’s “They Live” or the fervor of director S. Craig Zahler’s reactionary bloodbaths in “Dragged Across Concrete.”
The movie’s unabashed effrontery connects it to American cinema’s great B-picture and exploitation past, including films like Barry Shear’s Wild in the Streets (1968), the major counterculture hit about a rock star who rises to the presidency and sends everyone over age 35 to “re-education camps.”