Horror Marathon Recap 2 - Some Pretty Bad Movies Of The Marathon

Once again, working from bad to less bad, counting down towards the number 1 spot.

24. Manhunt (2008)

Plot Synopsis: A group of friends on holiday end up getting kidnapped and dumped in the middle of the woods. They then find themselves being hunted for sport.
The Sweet: Initially I thought there was a lot of potential in this Norwegian horror movie. The characters have some interesting interactions and seem to get properly fleshed out. There's a boyfriend character who is irritable and rude, but his girlfriend feels that he is just misunderstood. I was particularly interested to see how that would play out, since it seemed like he would either prove himself better than he'd been given credit for or would end up betraying the lot of them in some way. The four characters pick up a hitchhiker who seems a little desperate and things seemed to be getting interesting. Unfortunately this is where the whole film goes downhill.
The Sour: Of our initial five characters, two are instantly killed off. That's before the "manhunt" part of the film even gets started. That leaves us with just three of the characters getting dumped in the middle of the woods. So what, eh? Still plenty you can do to develop three characters. Yeah, but they don't do that...
Our three remaining protagonists get split up pretty quickly and very little of the rest of the film pays any attention to the character-building which made the film seem so promising at the start. The main source of tension is a few scenes where the bad guy runs a knife along the skin of his victims and it is admittedly pretty unnerving. However, it goes on forever and when the exact same trick is used later on it gets quite dull. Also there's a lot of inconsistency in the characters, with hysterical screaming one minute and careful stealth the next. Also with careful use of resources in one scene and then bizarrely running off completely leaving all potential weapons behind the next.
This is a film which thinks that pure shocks and gore is enough to make an interesting horror film. They are wrong. Character building is not something you do at the beginning of a horror film to waste time. It should carry on through the rest of the film and early interactions should foreshadow later developments. If they'd bothered to do that, this could potentially have been a good movie.

E+

( Reviews for Critters 4, Ghost Ship, The Haunting, I Spit On Your Grave, The Orphanage, Saw II and Zombie Holocaust under the cut... )