Daddy's Gone A-Hunting

A surprisingly potent and strangely disregarded psycho-stalker picture marked by taut direction and capable performances, it also benefits from its appealing San Francisco location filming. It's a distressingly plausible scenario...girl aborts the child of her former lover, latterly marries another man, and becomes pregnant again. The first lover, now quite clearly a dangerously unbalanced nutcase, shows up to settle the score.

A briskly paced little nail-biter which occasionally goes a tad bit over-the-top, DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING is ripe for a much-deserved reinvestigation.

6.5/10

In an early scene, a snowball is thrown at someone in the city of San Francisco. It doesn't snow in San Francisco.

I had to get that out of the way. This film is a pretty good thriller. A young woman meets and moves in with a mentally unstable man. She becomes pregnant and decides to terminate the pregnancy (back when it was illegal). He becomes obsessed with the fact and obsessed with her.

She leaves him and marries a conservative politician. They have gave a child of their own. There is no way the stalker is going to let them be happy. I won't go into details and spoil it.

This film is an effective thriller and also a great time capsule showing 1968 San Francisco.

The one and only time I saw this movie was with my mother and younger sister at a Drive In theater on Cape Cod when I was ten years old. That was forty years ago, yet the movie made such an impression on us that night, that I've never forgotten it. For years I tried to find it or see it again without success, and then once more made a search last night. At last, here it is, being talked about at least! The sense of creepy fierce tension, coupled with the child like theme song is what I remember most, aside from the closeness and talking that it inspired afterward in my little family as we drove back to our campground. If impressions that last for decades count, this movie is certainly worth tracking down, and I, for one, look forward to seeing it again!

The premise of the movie is simple enough..Cathy, a young, beautiful girl arrives in America to find work, meets Kenneth, a handsome young photographer, they fall in love, but it turns out the young man isn't all he seems to be, and when she learns she's pregnant, she decides she doesn't want him-or the baby and has an abortion, and he decides to seek revenge.

The setting is San Francisco, and the visuals are well played out in the city, along with a taut, tense script by Lorenzo Semple and Larry Cohen, with sure footed direction by Mark Robson, fresh off of his smash hit 'Valley of the Dolls' two years earlier. The cast includes Mala Powers as a sympathetic coworker of Cathy's who talks her into the abortion, Paul Burke (fresh off of his work as Lyon Burke in 'Valley') as Cathy's new husband, a senator wanna be, and of course, Scott Hylands, who as Kenneth, brings a creepiness to his role, but at the same time, you do feel for him as the spurned lover who wants revenge for the abortion that Cathy decides to get.

The only weak link in this movie is Carol White as Cathy. Beautiful as the young Brit who arrives to seek work and becomes involved in a nightmare, is harsh, childish, and for most of the movie, a total bitch. You never feel how Paul Burke's character fell for her, suddenly they are wedded, and there is very little passion between them in their scenes. She comes across shrill, completely obnoxious, and downright hateful. You wonder if she really wanted to have a baby in the first place with the way she acts. For the most part, this movie is a fine addition to the 'damsel in distress' genre, but having a heroine that is more sympathetic might have worked much better.

Brit beauty Carol White ("Some Call It Loving") stars as Cathy Palmer, a newcomer to San Francisco. Almost immediately, a stranger named Kenneth Daly (Canadian actor Scott Hylands ("Death Hunt"), receiving an "introducing" credit) contrives a way to meet her. Initially, he seems quite charming, and they enter into a relationship for a while, until he starts revealing himself as a major league turd. She breaks it off with him, even aborting the baby that he had fathered. She moves on, and finds a new guy (Paul Burke ("Valley of the Dolls")), a rising politician, and gets pregnant by the new guy. Trouble is, Kenneth is not going to let her go unpunished. He begins to terrorize her, demanding that she kill her baby in order to atone for the death of his child.

This is a pretty decent movie, albeit with some flaws. It's kind of a mixed bag, with a lead character who's not terribly sympathetic, a script credited to Larry Cohen ("The Stuff") and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. ("Flash Gordon") that has lines both bad and good, a lack of complete credibility, and performances that are uneven. It does get better and better as it plays out, leading to a seven minute finale high above the city streets that will actually have people catching their breath. Director Mark Robson, who'd started out crafting some fine psychological black & white horror for producer Val Lewton, and graduated to bigger things like "Valley of the Dolls" and "Von Ryan's Express", handles things with a certain degree of style. The filmmakers don't seem too concerned with making viewers choose a side in the still-contentious "pro life" vs. "pro choice" debate, and mainly focus on making an entertaining, slick, tried-and-true revenge thriller.

Ms. White is lovely to look at, but doesn't make her character all that interesting. Hylands is fine, having a little more to work with; Kenneth supposedly was prepared to become a better man upon learning of impending fatherhood, so he takes the abortion thing VERY hard. Burke has little to do in the grand scheme of things. The very fine supporting cast includes such familiar faces as James Sikking ('Hill Street Blues') and Barry Cahill ("Coffy") as FBI agents, Mala Powers ("Cyrano de Bergerac") as Cathy's friend Meg, Walter Brooke ("The Graduate") as Jerry Wolfe, Mathilda Calnan ("Silver Streak") as Ilsa the maid, and Dennis Patrick ('Dark Shadows') as the abortion doctor.

Excellent location shooting and an effective pace help to make this reasonably engrossing, and worthy of another look from genre devotees.

Seven out of 10.