At the request of a viewer of my youtube channel, I ‘Hunted’ down a copy of ‘Hungting Season’ because he said he’d be interested in hearing my thoughts on the movie. And the moment I put the film in and saw the ‘Sterling Entertainment Presents’ logo, I realised that i’d been bamboozled into sitting through another incredibly dull ‘Camp Blood’ esq picture.

And im really not wrong in that assessment, this film was made the same year that both ‘Camp Blood 1 and 2’ were shot back to back (near enough) in pretty much the same location, using pretty much the same ‘stereoscopic 3d’ kit that the ‘Camp Blood’ movies used. Hell, for as much as this thing LOOKS like the ‘Camp Blood’ movies, im genuinely surprised it didnt have Brad Sykes name on it.

The plots the most basic thing i’ve seen in a good while, a young couple go hiking in the woods, they set up camp in an area known for hunting, some hunters randomly appear, seriously injure the boyfriend of the couple and rape the girl (Sarah). Sarah manages to get her boyfriend to a hospital, her and a sheriff go back to investigate the crime scene, and find the hunters permit on the ground. Leading Sarah to take up bloody vengence against the hunters who violated and assaulted them.

And that basically then leads to a 50 minute sequence of some hunters wandering around in the woods, while Sarah wanders around in the woods and very occasionally the pair meet up, have a brief dust up, before returning to montages of walking. all leading to one of the STUPIDEST plot twists in cinematic history and one of the most underwhelming endings to boot.

This is a poor POOR excuse for a movie. the script feels like the writers had a friend tell them the plot and some of the backstory to ‘I spit on your grave’ after a few beers, and without looking into it anymore than that, they just decided to try and remake it.

Hell the pullquote for the poster of this thing is ‘I spit on your grave, for the new millenium’ and that simply couldnt be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say ‘Someone trying to remake ‘I spit on your grave’ but with almost no budget, and they dont wanna offend anyone’.

Theres no context or build up to the rape scene itself, it just happens seemingly completely at random, is almost entirely softcore and lasts for about 1 minute before we’re straight into the tamest ‘revenge’ portion of a rape revenge film i’ve ever seen. Bizarrely the film inserts a CRAP ton of nudity into the film AFTER the rape scene, but clothes stay pretty firmly on DURING the rape sequence itself. it’s almost like the films trying to overcompensate.

The pacings dull as dishwater, its a *slight* step above ‘Bigfoot vs DB cooper’ in terms of the fact that, at least this film has a couple of attempts at gore shots mixed in with the endless walking scenes. Theres not really any kind of act structuring, the cast just sort of…wander about until they’re picked off with no rhyme or reason and the plot for the film almost seems like a framing to get the characters wandering around in the woods…rather than the plot ACTUALLY having a consistent point across the runtime.

It just feels really lazy and slapped together, it has no depth, no deerp contextual meanings, no subtlety, no subtext, it doesnt feel like its trying to say anything particularly, theres just…no passion in this thing, it’s dead behind the eyes, just making titilation for titlations sake…only it doesnt have the gonads to ACTUALLY try and be a bit more ‘edgy’ or creative in how it portrays what it wants to show.

The dialogues also SO stiff, awkward and stilted. It’s got no fire behind it and when married up to a cast who are ALL frankly dire. (Literally only Cindy Pena is worth talking about as ‘Sarah’ our main protagonist…and even then, she’s only ‘okay’ nothing standout) it produces a film that borders on the insufferable in places both in terms of just how dull it is, and how poor the casts performances are.

Surprisingly the cine and direction are the least of this films worries. Its absolutley not great. but for an SOV film being produced by the company that unleashed the original ‘Camp Blood’ onto the world around the same time, i’d say this was a *bit* better comparatively. Sequences do have something of a structure, they bothered to get some decent B-roll here, most of the shots have a compositional focal point, the shot lists seem to have been at least somewhat considered (it isnt just shaky handheld footage of people wandering around cut seemingly at random like with ‘Camp Blood’)

They actually use some minor CG effects here, they go a bit overboard with the gore. for SOV, this is still a pretty poor offering, but it’s absolutely not the worst i’ve seen, and in some places I was actually kind of impressed on a technical level.

Of course, this film suffers from the same issues that a lot of ‘Sterling’ productions from around this time suffer with. They chose to shoot the film on a rig that allowed the film to be presented in an early form of ‘Stereoscopic 3d’ as such, the camera sits inside a device that splits it’s frames out into two seperate fields, which; when played back using the appropriate kit, *SHOULD* give the illusion of 3d.

However…it doesnt. instead using this rig basically just means the film has multiple technical problems. For a starters, the actual stereoscopic element *WOULD* work, had they not screwed up the encode. The result is one field presents normally, but another field is jittery, pixellated and skittish. meaning with 3d glasses on, it looks almost exactly the same as with them off, only one layer is garbled nonsense for 70% of the runtime, while the other layer plays like the 2D version.

Thats another problem though, because they didnt bother to do a proper 3D > 2D downconverion…instead, they just removed one of the field layers. Meaning the image has 50% less detail associated with it, leading to a smeary, blocky, pixallated image that looks awful even in DVD quality and looks abysmal when it’s blown up on a 4k TV, so lord knows what a bluray remaster would look like.

The rig itself also causes several technical issues with the picture, the main offenders being that the ‘hood’ of the rig is constantly kreapt into the shot so theres a dark fringe that fluctuates in size across the entire film. it also has somekind of glass front to it, which has effected the colour and exposure, meaning the picture image is washed out, drab and overexposed for the most part. its just…an awful way to present the movie, and im sure with the proper time/money/consideration, you COULD do a proper 2d downconversion that looked pretty solid…but that isnt going to happen for these movies.

thats not to mention a totally forgettable cheap and nasty soundtrack thats so bland it almost vanishes into the audio mix.

This wasnt a bad film, its just a forgettable one. almost all of my one star rating is simply down to the fact that one a technical level, its not the worst for the genre and they actually did try to put a bit of effort in on a couple of scenes. But on almost every other level its either bad, poor quality or TOTALLY forgettable.

Not worth your time hunting it down, the only people I think would have a good time with this thing are people who enjoyed the aesthetic of movies like ‘Camp Blood’ and want more in the same style vein, but dont care if the plots crap.

Hard swerve, do avoid.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hunting-season-2000/