Les prédateurs

This one sentence sums up the TV series 'The Hunger':

Big budget softcore aimed at pseudo-intellectuals who cannot admit that they watch porn.

Imagine the worst excesses of mediocre film students: pretentious dialogue, fast cutting, jumping backwards and forwards through the story, endlessly repeating visuals and dialogue, blatant weird sex - and attach it to a generous TV budget. It's TV Hell for anyone with taste. Someone needs to grab hold of the directors and slap them... hard (on second thoughts, they'd probably film it as an episode, so forget it).

Do you think that crass and unsubtle plotting and dialogue linked to gratuitous sex makes interesting points about human nature? Are you deluded enough to think that throwing a camera around fast enough to induce epilepsy and hide the shoddy editing makes you a modern and talented director? If so, The Hunger is for you. Everyone else can go and rent some Playboy tapes - at least they get to the T&A quickly and don't make you feel seasick.

This is a Canadian/British anthology series of erotic tales about every conceivable hunger. Terence Stamp hosts the first season and David Bowie does the second.

I only have the first season although the Jennifer Beals episode from the second season is on the web. Stamp really camps it up. There is a bit of fun from that. There is an inverse relationship between the requirement for nudity and the ability of the actresses. The series starts off well with a memorable sword lady. The second episode has Lena Headey and Daniel Craig filming in Britain. After that, the show declines with a few exceptions. Often, it is the non-acting B-actresses who are willing to strip. The stories lack a certain drive. This is a cheaper series of the late 90s cable softcore era.

Scott Free produced this series based upon the Tony Scott movie 'The Hunger'.

The meaningless stories have talented directors like Russel Mulcahy or the Scott brothers. Unknown actors and actresses play among the soft-sex, soft-horror elements and the impressive production design.

So if you want sex, see something else. You like mystery? See the 'X-files'. Looking for crime? Stay tuned with 'Columbo'. But don't even waste your time on 'The Hunger'. Unless you want something called 'art'.

I have seen most of the episodes from the two seasons of "The Hunger" the audacious project in sex and horror of the Scott brothers. Most of the 30 minutes episodes are based on well known horror stories from such terrific sources like Graham Masterton, David Schow, Poppy Brite, Karl Edward Wagner, Brian Lumley, Kim Newman (to name only a few), while directors are often very famous, like Russel Mulcahy or Tony Scott. First season was hosted by Terence Stamp, while the second by David Bowie. Most of the stories have a strong sexual element and almost all of them (especially in the second season) have one or more sex scenes, nudity and very often also graphic violence. Several of stories are really disturbing and among them there also a few masterpieces, like "Wrath of God", "Sin Seer" and "Week Woman" from season two, "Anais", "Necros" and "Bridal Suite" from season one. Apart from a few real turkeys, most of the stories are at least enjoyable for the horror fan and several of them are worth repeated viewings

Not having cable, I recently discovered this series on DVD... the well-done horror based series is not easy to find, TALES FROM THE CRYPT being an exception, but this one seemed to deliver... some of the time. The DVD only featured four episodes from Terence Stamp's reign (David Bowie sounds like a promisingly good replacement, as at least he was in the original movie) and although not every segment packed a punch, a couple were pretty good... in particular, "Necros," directed by Russell Mulcahy. It was also interesting that the scenes involving passion were on the forceful side, as the typical Hollywood movie usually depicts such primal action as slow, tame, and loving.