THE HUNT
DVD. MVD.

In recent years, French horror has been rightly lauded as being at the top of the game for the genre – inventive, brutal, uncompromising and stylish. Still, a few films do seem to have slipped through the cracks. The Hunt is a prime example – a film that can more than hold its own against bigger budgeted efforts like Martyrs, Inside and so on, both in terms of quality and extremity, but which seems to have slipped by unnoticed, only not creeping quietly out on DVD in the US.

The Hunt’s studio pitch selling point would almost certainly be ‘Hostel meets The Most Dangerous Game’, and the film certainly offers an effective blend of those two stories. Jellali Mouina plays Alex, a reporter for a semi-pornographic scandal mag who we first see setting up a faux-bestiality shoot and who is under pressure to come up with a story that will shift copies. Tapping up his stripper girlfriend Sarah (Sarah Lucide) for leads, he initially starts to investigate one of her clients, a local big-wig who likes to be filmed in submissive sex acts. But while looking for the tapes, he finds a letter and phone message that hints at something juicier, and following the lead goes to the scheduled meeting place, an old house in the country. Here, he joins several other masked men as they place money in a number of mini-safes, change into military fatigues and are driven out into the woods, dropped off one by one with assorted weapons – bow and arrows, machetes etc. It doesn’t take long for the mystery of what is happening to become clear, as a desperate businessman, one of the safes chained to his hand, flees through the woods and is cut down by an arrow to the back. Alex realises that he is caught up in a sick game where men are hunted down and killed – and he is one of the hunters. But this is a game with no rules and high stakes, and he quickly realises that he is also a target for his rivals who are out to win as much money as possible.

Director Thomas Szczepanski does a good job of breathing new life into what is a fairly well-worn story, with the neat twist of making the protagonist one of the hunters rather than a fleeing victim, and keeping up guessing about where the story will take him as he is drawn into a ‘kill or be killed’ scenario. The film mixes slick production values – the sound mix and music score are especially effective – with moments of ultra-gore that might even make the most hardened horror fan pause, and then takes his story into an unexpected left turn that could have derailed it, but actually works quite well.

A dark, nasty and utterly downbeat movie that locks itself down to a tight 74 minutes, The Hunt deserves a bigger audience than it is likely to get. Fans of French hardcore horror should seek it out..

DAVID FLINT

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