Sordid Cinema Podcast #567: The Hunt is Killer Thriller Entertainment

After much controversy surrounding its premise and the timing of its original release, Craig Zobel’s The Hunt finally dropped into theaters before suffering an unceremonious death due to pandemic closures. But did this tongue-in-cheek story of rednecks being hunted by elitists deserve better? Was misleading marketing a factor in its ultimate demise? This week, Rick and Patrick are joined by returning Sordid Cinema Podcast host Simon Howell to give this entertaining genre film its due. Sure, the satire might be toothless, but it’s hard not to appreciate all the humor and bloody kills that The Hunt does so well.

From gleefully dispatching expected protagonists to a knockdown brawl in a rustic manor, there is a lot to love here. Perhaps more than anything else, however, fans of this type of film will want to savor a fantastically restrained, physical performance by Betty Gilpin (GLOW) as a reticent former soldier who finds being tracked down by self-righteous psychos as a form of stress relief from her daily life as a car rental agent. Streamlined and more mainstream than many of the ads and rhetoric would have suggested, The Hunt should be on the radar for anyone looking for a fun movie night where a guy gets stabbed by a stiletto heel, a woman is doubly impaled by a spiked pit, and a pig names Orwell runs rampant (at least for a while). For a discussion on all this and more, have a listen!