Hunting Humans

For a LOW BUDGET FILM, this was actually a fun watch; my wife and I took it in on a rainy Sunday afternoon here in Knoxville. It was included on a four movie DVD with a British film from 1970 entitled "The Beast in the Cellar," but I digress...

O.K. the previous review just before mine is correct about the opening. A famous on-line reviewer once wrote that if you see a woman's breasts in the first five minutes, it is a bad movie. The narration was annoying, just as the previous review mentioned. However, if you're killing some time, give this movie a chance. The writing is pretty well done after the first eight to ten minutes of the movie. The plot is about a serial killer, and there is an interesting twist. THE MAIN PROBLEM I had with the film was THE SOUND. One could hear the lead character's voice, but the supporting cast's voices were harder to hear for all of the office scenes.

The reviewer before me commented on the bad acting. Not all of the acting was bad, just most of it was... The lead character and his antagonist were played by good actors, IMO. Many of the film angles were creative, surprisingly so for such a low budget film. A trick the main character plays on a detective is darkly funny.

Finally, this is no "Silence of the Lambs," "Seven," or "American Psycho." But it is somewhat original, and it has a good plot, which makes it a fun view.

From the opening monologue the movie drags. For a movie so obsessed with patterns you would think that they would notice just how monotonous the narration is. First we talk about patterns and how the guy doesn't have any. Then we go kill someone. Then back to the pattern talk again. While the premise of two killers going toe to toe is a good one the acting cannot save the movie. While the main characters can be overlooked the supporting cast must have been picked up from the local bus stop. Avoid this movie at all costs.

Not bad at all. This is a very low budget horror movie, and the picture quality is total crap. Acting is pretty bad, too, except for the main character, who does a genuinely okay job of it. The real reason to watch this movie is how intelligent some parts of it are...it's a battle of wits between the two men, and despite how low budget it all is, there are some fun kills and intelligent plot elements/twists for you to sink your teeth into. It surprised me how entertaining this could get, compared to the hundreds of other terrible B-flicks coming out all the time. The creators of this one definitely did their homework.

It's really cheesy at some points, though, and the directing is pretty sloppy. I guess that's something you can expect when you're walking into a B-flick though, so don't say I didn't warn you. This is raw, uncompromising, and rather unprofessional, but who needs polished refinement in this genre, anyway? Recommended to horror fans only.

Aric Blue hunts humans. He's very good at it. He learns people's daily patterns then exploits them. However, problems arise when a rival serial killer learns Aric's patterns. At first, I wasn't expecting much. The shoddy photography and disjointed editing gave it the feel of bad backyard movie, but the style soon grew on me. The old cliché of a low budget giving a film a documentary feel kicked in. I found the murder in the pre-title sequence somewhat engrossing. The sequence was essentially MOS footage accompanied by sardonic voice over from the serial killer. Very nice. Unfortunately, the titles warned me that the film would eventually fall apart. How? Well, first the titles credited all of the actors in the film.

That's okay. The scary part were the crew credits, where many of the names of the actors reappeared in other capacities. Since it is rare to find excellent crew people who can really act, or excellent actors who work on crews, I correctly feared for the quality of the movie. The bottom line was that the film managed to develop some good energy when it stuck to essentially MOS (mit-out-sound) footage accompanied by voice over. However, there wasn't a single good dialogue scene in the film. Technically, the sound recording itself was horrible, but not anywhere as bad as the acting itself. The lead, Rick Ganz, is adequate, but I would venture to say that the guy who plays Aric's annoying co-worker gave the worst performance I have ever seen in a commercially released film. This is all a shame because this film offered a fresh and original perspective on the tired serial killer genre, and small snatches of it worked reasonably well. This was a frustrating movie. I wish it were better.

This movie really took me by surprise. For the first few minutes I thought it was a fairly standard issue low budget slasher flick, but just as it looked like it was going to take a nose dive, it took a major, unexpected left turn and became a really engrossing and fun ride. I can't say much without giving anything away, but I'll say this - the writer/director did a terrific job working with what could have been cliche'd material, and turned in a film that delivers. Clearly done on a shoe string budget, the movie transcends its low cost and entertains massively.