Manhunt (2008)

A Masterpiece!

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The backwoods/survivalist horror genre is one of my favourites, but the films do have a tendency to follow the same formula, Manhunt being no exception. A typical example of 'doing things by the book', it starts in time-honoured fashion with four friends travelling through the wilderness in their VW camper-van (the film is set in 1974, a tribute to that classic of the genre, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre perhaps). After the predictable run in with hostile locals at a roadside diner, they do the expected thing by picking up a scared hitch-hiker, inadvisably stop in the middle of nowhere, and, in yet another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, fall prey to a group of hunters who prefer killing humans to animals.Despite all of the familiar trappings, this sort of thing can work very well just so long as there are regular thrills and inventive bloody kills, the protagonists are likable, and they don't behave like absolute idiots; Manhunt is suitably vicious in tone and features some reasonable splatter (although it's not as creatively bloody as I would have liked), but sadly its young victims aren't very appealing and act like morons. They constantly bicker with each other, stupidly insult the locals, and repeatedly make ill-advised decisions that only worsen their already dire situation. In short, I couldn't care less if they survived or ended up as trophies lashed to the bonnet of a Norwegian maniac's Landrover.

Rovdyr or as I know it MANHUNT, is the third Norwegian film I've added to my collection, the first two being COLD PREY and COLD PREY: RESURRECTION, while I enjoyed the COLD PREY movies very much, this one appeared as if it had suffered a bit.The makers of this film had the right idea of what they wanted to do, the film was nicely shot, the make up effects were splendid but from what this film suffers from is an inability to build a sufficient amount of tension to keep people on the edge of their seat and this is not because of the lack of plot, the central characters were somewhat undeveloped, sure some of them weren't very likable but believe it or not that wasn't the problem either, the main problem with the characters is that they're stupid, because even in serious situations a complete jackass of a person doesn't have to be a complete idiot he can be dis likable at first and end up being likable at a latter stage.Another problem is once the film gets started you can already tell where this is going making the film obviously too predictable and that is the main problem for its lack of tension, you can tell whose going to die, you can tell exactly when and where the hunters will strike, it just makes this film an uneventful horror movie experience.Overall, bearing in mind this the director's first film, this was a good effort nonetheless but unfortunately the major flaws render it as just another cliché driven mess, my idea of a good survival horror however is one that can be as intense as possible, sadly this one isn't.

Yeah..it was quite influenced by TCM or other survival genre movies but I think it has its moments. Like it almost started like TCM. The same TCM like van..the time period of 70's...the hitchhiker definitely reminded me the Tobe Hooper's masterpiece but when the survival game & blood shed started I began to like it. There were no chainsaw or Leatherface, the villains were attacking with knife & guns in the woods and there was no record or background shown about them. But the question is..."Does it really matters on the way to enjoy a movie?" A group of young people were getting terrorized & killed by some maniacs in the woods and the victims were trying to escape...the simple math, to see is whether any of them in the end able to survive or not.Though the plot was unoriginal but as it pretty successfully able to entertained me so I didn't mind at all. In this days of crap remakes I think we should at least try to appreciate this kinda effort of putting different shade in this popular sub genre of horror.

Patrick Syversen and Ninni Robsahm must be the most dangerous couple in Norway. Together they transformed the harmonic Norwegian woods into a dark nightmare. When this film kicks in you can either love or hate it, but that's how it should be with this kind of movies.The title music by David Hess(taken from Last House on the Left) sets the mood and from there on you can just lean back and get scared out of your mind. This is not the sterile dreamy and slightly funny kind of horror that we usually see these days. Rovdyr has taken back the hardcore thrill ride story telling we saw in American and Italian horror movies during the 70's.I hope Syversen and Robsahm will continue on the route they have started because they are most interesting as makers of Norwegian horror.