The Hunt (said with Australian accent)

I suppose it has something to do with being the only 5-year-old at the movie theater watching The Running Man, but the hunting humans subgenre of action horror has just always packed a lot of appeal. Even the worse ones--and golly, Amazon Prime has some very low-priced duds--offer a little more automatic intrigue over a basic slasher or Saw trap-themed gorefest.

Onward today with the unimaginatively titled The Hunt! 

No, not that one.

Wait: did this 2009 movie get retitled on Amazon Prime with the same title as a marginally successful mainstream film in order to scoop a few viewers who might watch the entire thing without realizing their mistake? 

Genius.

Quick Plot: On the last Friday of every month, a group of loosely connected wealthy frenemies take part in the titular hunt, wherein they kidnap a batch of strangers and, well, kill them. The "hunt" part seems a bit like false advertising, as once the subjects are (easily) captured, the killers mostly just tie them up and torture them in their various styles until they're done.

The twist at this particular iteration of the game is that the soon-to-be-victims are loosely connected as classmates of "The Inquisitor", a former huntee who survived her game and now gets to play with the rest. On the menu are a sleazeball named Ricky, rich snob Sarah, deaf runner Ariel, her goth sister Callie, and Callie's computer expert buddy Chris.

The killers aren't that much more interesting. There's the big bad: a boring rich man. His daughter is a marginally more watchable martial arts expert. There's also a mysterious "sniper", cruel hacker, and sadistic ex-military guy trying to channel his inner Mick Taylor. 

Surprised? 

Written and directed by Jon Cohen, The Hunt (or The 7th Hunt, depending on where you see it) isn't terrible. It's just kind of nothing. You can't expect more from a low budget horror that came out of the grimy ashes of the post-Saw era wildfires. It would just have been nice to have found something. 

High Points

As you expect in this kind of story, one of the targets is a rich blond snob, but surprisingly, she ends up making for the most sympathetic victim. If only we had more of her

Low Points

Most of the running time

Lessons Learned

When trying to escape from a violent man, the best exit is to run straight into his chest

Finger count doesn't correlate with ball size

Lunacy pays well

Rent/Bury/Buy

Eh, The Hunt is far from the worst thing to come out of that ugly 2009 era of torture-y horror, but boy, remember how rough that era was?