Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Hunting Grounds

Hunting Grounds
2008, Canada
dir. Eric Bilodeau
cast: Patrice Le Blanc, Patrick Baby, Marie-Eve Lemire

After an ecological collapse, people are confined to sealed cities to allow nature to heal. Fed up of virtual reality hunts, a group of hunters arrange an illegal expedition out of the city to hunt for real in the wilderness. Unfortunately for them, a military experiment into a regeneration serum has caused a zombie outbreak in the woods, but they may find a worse danger among their ranks.

While it had an interesting set up, it's actually pretty disappointing that once the characters leave the automated VR heavy city, they just run into zombies. It could have been much more interesting if they had been faced with natures revenge. Hell, even these days some backwoods cannibals would feel less hackneyed than zombies. The tone is a bit odd, too- initially it feels quite serious but when the zombies appear, there's a lot of blatant stabs at comedy, such as the zombie in the exo-skeleton who is unkillable as he's wearing a high-tech helmet so can't be shot in the head. It's nicely filmed and makes the best of the low budget, even if it 's a bit CGI heavy (though the green screen actually work well for the virtual reality scenes). Not bad but could have been better with a bit more imagination in the storyline.

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