Last Movie Watched.... The Xenforo Edition

First time you watched it?

I love it, obviously, and by some strange coincidence, today was the day the audiobook version of Mark Cousins' The Story of Film I have been listening to mentioned it, in the chapter that is partially about the movies that defined classic noir, like this one, Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon.

 

Yes. Streaming from an airline wifi resulted in some not great picture quality. I enjoyed Bogart's snappy dialogue and interplay with the other characters. Some context with other noirs or just in what it influenced probably would have helped me enjoy it more. Didn't find the romance with Bacall particularly well-established by the plot.

 

Blame rslfanboy.



Surviving the Game (1994)

It's another f'd up day for Ice-T. Homeless on the streets of Seattle, his traumatic past and losing the last of his friends convinces him it's time to find a large truck to step in front of. He's saved by Cole, a volunteer at the soup kitchen. Cole promises Ice-T there is reason to live, and offers him a job being a porter for a hunting expedition deep in the wilds of Oregon. He has an uncomfortable dinner with the rather bizarre hunting party in their cabin, and in the morning finds out the awful truth - he's not there to help the hunt, he's there to be the subject. They've done this dozens of times before. But they are going to find Ice-T a hard target to kill.

I probably liked this more than it deserves. As an action film, it's too fantastic to be realistic feeling, but not stylish enough to be top-tier 90's action, kind of inhabiting the middle world usually reserved for movies with poor budgets, lacking directors, and unsuitable locations. Wouldn't say Surviving is a bad actioner, just serviceable. I think where this movie shines is in the personalities of the bad guys, who are a real mixed bag of crazy, self-important, and just plain evil. They have a great interplay, with shifting relationships and views. Some movies know what they are about and some movies tell you what they are about and at first I was fearful that Gary Busey would be the manifesto spewing means of this being the second, but the movie eventually does a good job of reigning him in.

If "Most Dangerous Game" type movies could be said to be a thing in the 1990's (besides Hard Target and this there was also 1997's The Pest), I'd say the blame goes to Phil Collins. His song "Another Day in Paradise" was a hit at this time, and was the symbol of a wave of awareness of the homeless, and both Hard Target and Playing the Game were the result with strong themes of humanizing this class of people. And I actually think this genre of film is perfect for the task - the whole idea behind this kind of hunt is dehumanization and superiority and putting a homeless man in the role of protagonist is the perfectly entertaining counter. In some ways, I prefer that Ice-T was not the handsome, skilled, well spoken charmer that Hard Target Van Damme was. This guy was always scruffy, rough, and ill-mannered and I cheered him on because of it.

 

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Against the wishes of the captain, the owner of a large yacht orders it to pass through a known dangerous strait off the coast of South America. The ship hits a reef, and the rapid flooding hits the boilers causing an explosion. The only survivor is famed hunter Rainsford, swimming to an island containing a castle occupied by Russian Count Zaroff. Zaroff was able to escape the Revolution with most of his money, and has spent it traveling the world to serve his passion - hunting. But he eventually found it all too easy until he found a new and most unusual prey. Now the one surviving the game is Rainsford himself.

A very heavy handed movie, where unsubtle foreshadowing masquerades as cleverness. The lead McCrae was only used for his handsome forthrightness and Fay Wray was clever for her first ten minutes but afterwards was horribly misdirected or simply useless to the story. The good parts of the movie were the final chase through the swamps and waterfall, and Zaroff, who was well portrayed by Leslie Banks. The study of his motivations were probably the one thing a modern filmgoer would recognize. His prominent scar which was used to good effect for the story was an injury Banks received in WW I. As was clumsily pointed out in the opening scene, here the hunting of man is a metaphor for the hunting of animals which the movie is very against.

 

Deathstalker (2025)
Dir. Steven Kostanski



Deathstalker, once a knight at the royal court of Abraxion, now a disgraced wandering warrior who survives mostly by stripping fallen soldiers of their valuables, as the realms armies have lost many a battle against the supernatural Dreadites which have invaded the countryside. One such item he retrieves belongs to a fallen prince, an enchanted amulet, that binds itself to Deathstalker, making it impossible for him to get rid of, once he finds out dangerous individuals want the amulet and thus will stop at nothing to get it. A witch reveals that an old mage might be able to decipher the runes on the amulet: Doodad. Tracking down the diminutive mage is only part of his quest, as once he and Doodad join forces, their new mission becomes unlocking the power of a mystical sword, which can be wielded by the owner of the amulet. Along the way they are joined by thief Brisbayne, a woman with unclear loyalties.

This isn't a true remake of the Roger Corman production from the 1980s. Rather, director Steven Kostanski has used it to do his own thing. I loved his Psycho Goreman, which was a horror comedy actioner about a teenage girl who happens to be able to control a super-powerful interdimensional demon called Psycho Goreman. That film leaned on a darkly comedic tone, lots of over the top gore and practical effects and make-up that were reminiscent of Tokusatsu creature design. All of these stylistic traits are back for Deathslalker, only applied to a sword and sorcery adventure. It wears its distinct style and its limitations as a badge of honor. For instance, the puppet used for the mage Doodad (essentially the second lead of this film voiced by Patton Oswalt) does not have a properly functioning moving mouth. None of this matters and the jankyness is part of its charm and quite obviously a conscious creative decision. The lead is stuntman and actor Daniel Bernhardt, a man anyone who regularly watches action cinema will recognize, for his countless roles as villain henchmen. Some of his more memorable semi-recent roles in that regard were in John Wick and Nobody (he is the goon whose teeth are knocked out by Bob Odenkirk during the bus brawl scene). Like Psycho Gorman, this is a lot of fun, if you are someone who can appreciate the exact frequency of lunacy Steven Kostanski seems dialed into. One thing I appreciate about his films, and I appreciate about any kind of film really, is that it's the type of feature where the joy in the making is apparent in almost every frame.

 

Wait: Patton Oswalt?

 

Yeah, he voices this little guy:

 

It's part of the theme, I swear.



Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

Putting prisoners Daria and Tisa together in the amusingly misnamed solitary pit of the prison spaceship turned out to be a mistake. Despite being clad only in regulation prisoner bikinis and chained to the floor, they make an unlikely escape and hijack a shuttlepod. They crash on a nearby planetoid and wash ashore, finding a castle and its owner, Zed, the wealthy loner who seems very excited by hunting. They welcome his hospitality, not knowing that the only games will be of the most dangerous variety.

You would never guess from the title or the first ten minutes, but this is a remarkably close remake of the original Most Dangerous Game, with the initial dinner in the castle being almost a line-for-line copy and all the later major story beats acknowledged. They even give Zed a Leslie Banks-style scar. It gets a little more original later as the protagonist is now two characters, and they need to pad the original's mere 60 minute runtime, but everything they add subtracts substantially from the story. There's little to recommend here over the original, except the slightly less bad acting and the slightly better treatment of female characters (yes the Fay Wray role was that bad).

 

I don't know if I'm going to go full TheJoeGreene on this genre, but I think there is a bigger picture to the themes of this kind of movie and I want to explore it more.

 

The Hunt is a more recent example, which kind of puts the ideological context on its head.

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to see this one, but this kind of points to why I won't go the completist route - there are lots of very obviously bad and poorly reviewed movies made with the concept.

 

I genuinely enjoyed The Hunt. It's well aware of what it is and doesn't try to come off as some grand exhibition of cinematic excellence.

 

Turkey Shoot (1982)

In the far future year of 2000, Australia is under a totalitarian regime with extreme police powers. Any dissident, any deviant, or anyone looking at the police funny gets a trip to one of the many "rehabilitation" centers. While a useful source of slave labor, these camps are starting to get overcrowded. The master of Camp 47, Charles Thatcher (just a coincidence, I'm sure) has a clever plan to solve that problem and he's brought in some of the nation's highest level perverts to demonstrate. They each pick a prisoner, give them a head start in the wilds around the base, and then they.. well... shoot, how do you make a pun off of "Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity"?

Can't say I had high hopes for this one, and as low-budget future dystopian movies go it has an expectedly high level of grindhouse exploitation (mostly in the near comical style of gore) and similarly high level of clichéd scenes and dialogue. But there must be something in the water down there because Australians are experts in low-budget end-of-the-world cinema. This was well paced with believable hunting scenes (which I'm finding is a rarity in this genre) and a very exciting finish. Maybe I was just charmed by the extensive use of footage of the Australian Air Force. Or the familiarity because I used to watch a lot of movies exactly like this back in the day. Can't say this film has any ambitions in terms of theme, but it might have accidentally made a small point about the kinds of corruption that this variety of government breeds.

 

One other thing that was funny is that right-wingers objected heavily to the trailer when in reality the real villains of the piece are a certain type of liberal.

 

Tyler Perry's Finding Joy - 2025 (Prime Video)

Joy (Shannon Thornton) is a fashion designer in NYC who is in a relationship with Colton (Aaron O'Connell) that her friends Ashley (Brittany S. Hall) and Littia (Inayah) don't like. Colton invites her to meet his family in Colorado during Christmas where she finds out he's asking her to be his best man during his wedding to Heather (Natalie O'Connell). Joy freaks out, jumps out the window, hikes into town only to find that there are no flights or 4 wheel drive cars available due to a big storm coming in. She rents a 2 wheel drive car, wrecks it, nearly drowns in a local lake, and wakes up to find that she's been saved by Ridge (Tosin Morohunfola) who lives alone in a cabin off the grid and somehow it turns into the Tyler Perry version of a cheesy romance novel for a while until we get into the climax of the film back in New York.

Better than I expected.

C-

 

A Game of Death (1945)

Following the wishes of the captain, the owner of a large yacht orders it out of a known dangerous strait off the coast of South America, but too late. The ship hits a reef, and the rapid flooding hits the boilers causing an explosion. The only survivor is famed hunter Rainsford, swimming to an island containing a castle occupied by German Erich Kreiger. Kreiger has quite a bit of money from an unnamed source and has spent it traveling the world to serve his passion - hunting. But he eventually found it all too easy until he discovered a new and most unusual prey. Rainsford catches on quick and starts making plans - this will be no turkey shoot for Kreiger.

A close remake of the 1932 movie, even reusing some of the original footage (such as the explosion of the yacht), only with far better acting, script, direction, fight choreography, and film quality. As an action movie Game of Death is superior to Most Dangerous Game, but as an artistic piece it is weaker, muddying the theme, lessening the poetry of the ending, and removing the dark sexual subtext. It's weird how at every moment I was thinking this is the definitive movie directly based on the book, and yet at the end I felt a little empty.

 

The Woman Hunt (1972)

The parties thrown by multinational entrepreneur of unknown legality Spyros are legendary. And if the guests drawn from the most wealthy and powerful men of the world get a little rambunctious and accidentally kill the entertainment, no big deal. Everyone there owes their position to Spyros, and Spyros is very generous. He's also a bit of a philosopher, and thinks that to be truly great one must cast off the hindrance of morality. This year's party will be special. He has kidnapped Western women and brought them to his Southeast Asian island, and his guests will demonstrate adherence to his philosophy in a little game. Of death.

I am deeply divided about this movie. The Most Dangerous Game has been a universally recognized theme in film for nearly a century, but its simplicity and macabre nature makes it a natural starting point for slapdash productions. Filmed under Roger Corman's production company shortly after the The Big Doll House in the same location with some of the same actors, Woman Hunt is similarly limited by a tiny budget and a requirement to titillate first and foremost. The quiet parts are boring because of the lack of time and money to make them work, and the seduction scenes were written by a 12 year old and disastrously out of place. Which is all a shame because the parts related to the Most Dangerous Game were well written with cracking dialogue. Spyros' views and absolute authority grates at his guests and underlings, and I enjoyed how that ends up partially subverting the Most Dangerous Game cliché. You end up digging through a lot of dirt to get at a few gems here.

I can't help but notice a broad similarity to the Jeffrey Epstein situation, with a kingmaker who wants to draw his peers into his mire. The most interesting character is a Ghislaine Maxwell figure who remorselessly acts to further Spyros' misogyny with, it seems, similar motivations as the real person.

 

One Battle After Another (2025)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson



Sometime in the noughties, we are introduced to a left-wing revolutionary group known as the French 75. The French 75 carry out acts of terror, rob banks to finance their revolutionary work, free immigrants from detention centers. During one such operation, an intense true believer of the cause Perfidia Beverly Hills, humiliates the cam commander, Stephen J. Lockjaw. In between their revolutionary work, Perfidia gets close to 'Ghetto' Pat Calhoun, the explosives and tech expert of their group. Pat and Perfidia get close enough to have a child together, only motherhood is not what Perfidia is looking for, not if it interferes with her revolution. Shortly after Perfidia leaves Pat and their child Charlene, the French 75 find themselves rounded up and/or killed, unbeknownst to most of them initially through Perfidia's betrayal. A French 75 fixer does manage to get Pat and Charlene out in time, giving them new identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Sixteen years later, we meet the now teenaged Willa and the mostly burned out Bob again. Lockjaw, now a Colonel, and having reason to believe Charlene/Willa might be his child, has a problem. He has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, actually a group of powerful and wealthy far-right white supremacist. He knows he will be thoroughly vetted before he becomes a full member. He also knows that if Charlene is actually his child, the Christmas Adventurers will never allow him to join, having fathered a mixed race baby. So his only hope is to track down and silence both Bob and Willa before either can ruin his future...

I went into this knowing for sure this could not possibly match any expectations I might have for it. Primarily because this was absurdly well-received, I saw some critics even claim this was the best Hollywood studio movie in decades. It's not quite that good, though it's a thoroughly entertaining comedy thriller, with three of the four central performance genuinely great. Leo Di Caprio as Bob, Benico Del Toro as Sensei Sergio, Chase Infiniti as Willa are all great. I was less enamored with Sean Penn as Lockjaw, which was more of a one-note performance as an angry and crazy military guy. I am not saying there is not a little caricature in both Di Caprio and Del Toro's performances as well, only theirs are still more layered and subtle than Penn's. Especially in the more emotional scenes, like that one big scene with Chase Infiniti, you wonder what another actor could have done with that material. For instance, Kyle MacLachlan. The first 30-35 minutes was surprisingly serious, with most of the comedy moments that you might have seen in clips or trailers happening in the last two hours and especially the middle-section of the film. Di Caprio is supremely good at playing a certain type of dumb guy. Lets call the archetype a 'doofus'. Arguably he has played one in his last three films: this one, Killers of the Flower Moon and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In Hollywood and Battle more of a goofy doofus, in Killers an evil doofus. Chase Infiniti is a wonderfully charismatic actress who should have a big career (and just saying her name is fun). PTA has some stuff in his bag that I didn't know was there, among them the revelation that he is a surprisingly good and effective action film maker. So my verdict is that it's a thoroughly good 160+ minutes of film-making but perhaps not the time-less masterpiece that the critical reception might have you believe.

One final thought: it is not strange that audiences, especially audiences of a left-wing or progressive slant, react strongly to this film. A lot of the imagery, especially of immigration detention camps and militarized police have a far greater impact in the Trump years than they otherwise might have had.

 

The Pest (1997)

A life of scams and petty crime is finally catching up with Pestario Vargas. Running numbers as part of his Chinese food takeout delivery job, he dipped a little too much and now owes the Scottish mob $50,000, due in two days or else. No amount of shell games and three card monte is going to recoup that, and his situation is dim - not that his ever exuberant nature would give a hint. But in a case of mistaken identity, "Pest" is selected by Gustav Shank to be the latest target in his racially-defined most dangerous game. Pest wants no part until he finds out he would get $50,000 for surviving a day on Shank's island. The Puerto Rican hunt is on.

Well, never though I would be cheering for the hunter in a Most Dangerous Game movie, but here we are. John Leguizamo goes all out and a mile a minute with the attempted humor, but most of it is near cartoon level (literally lifted from Three Stooges and Loony Toons) and a large and very cringy portion depends on racial stereotyping that wasn't even ok in the 90's. The Pest is occasionally funny just because of the sheer volume of jokes, and there's the rare actual cleverness (the very Cosby black parents of Pest's girlfriend ask "Who is Angela Davis?"). The car stereo contest scene was hilarious, but that's the only part of the movie lasting more than 5 seconds that was. Some parts I just had to skip. Pestario was just such an unlikable character, narcissistic and self-serving, and I had no sympathy for his situation - only for the friends and family that had to put up with him.

I'm pretty sure the crossover between viewers of this movie and the 1932/1945 originals consists of professional reviewers and yours truly and no one else, but this movie had quite a few callbacks to them, including a hunter skilled at piano, the kind of trap the hunted made, the trophy room plot point, and a massive antique floor globe.

 

The Pest came out when I was in junior high/middle school and I can't count the number of times I've seen it. I might have to revisit that film. I thought it was hilarious as a teenager, but I don't think I ever made the connection of it being a film in the Most Dangerous Game genre.

 

I really want to thank @spejic for taking us all on this “Most Dangerous Game”-through-cinema-history journey. I didn’t realize how much of a trope it was for nearly an entire century.

 

It's influence, beyond the movies Spejic watched already and can be deemed direct descendants is probably broader still. Turkey Shoot is already a remix in that it's a combination of prisonspoiltation with the Most Dangerous Game premise.
But other stories can be deemed variations on the theme too, even if less directly influenced. The Running Man (the 1980s adaptation as I have not yet seen the new one), The Purge franchise, even something like Battle Royale can all be perceived as at least thematically related.
Or something like the semi-recent comedy horror thriller Ready or Not (in which a bride is hunted by the groom and his family as part of an occult ritual).
Or Coralie Fargeat's rape revenge film Revenge, which features extended sequences where the trio of men 'hunt' the woman.

 

Ready or Not was wild. I went in with the understanding it was a Most Dangerous Game type movie with the new bride being hunted. The occult side and the twist at the end was not something I expected and left me a little shocked. I enjoyed the movie and the twist.



You could also add Netfilx's Damsel movie to this list. Peasant/lesser noble girls are purchased by the royal family to wed their sons. The wedding ceremony includes a family blood ceremony and the girl is sacrificed to appease the local dragon. The dragon hunts the newly wed girls in order to appease its hunger for revenge against the royal family, and the royal family gets to continue peace in the land without losing their heirs. The dragon is led to believe it is hunting the royal family's bloodline, but the family has been deceiving the dragon in order to maintain their control of the land.

 

Of the direct derivations I'm about half-way through depending on how you define the genre. Including a 2014 remake of Turkey Shoot. But quite a few remaining are exploitation style with low 6 or even 5 figure budgets. I wanted to graph certain societal shifts based on the themes of these movies and I'm not sure how much that kind of movie will add to that.

I do count The Running Man and even Death Race 2000. I'm not going to count the alle gegen alle movies like Battle Royale, although there is some influence and some lists do. I think a vital part of the genre is the separation in class of the hunter from the hunted.