BA_Harrison 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.

Paul Andrews Manhunt is set in 1974 in Norway where four teenagers, Mia (co-writer Nini Bull Robsahm) & her brother Jørgen (Jørn-Bjørn Fuller-Gee) together with Mia's best friend Camilla (Henriette Bruusgaard) & her obnoxious boyfriend Roger (Lasse Valdal) are driving deep into the Norwegian wilderness to spend a day or two hiking through some thick forests in the name of fun. The friends stop off at a small gas station to fill their camper van up & buy some food where they meet a girl named Renate (Janne Starup Bønes) who ask's Roger the knob for a lift, since Renate is quite attractive he says yes. As the five drive along the isolated forest roads Renate feels ill & ask's Roger to stop so she can be sick outside, while waiting for Renate to feel better the five are attacked by three men wielding shotgun's & knives. Two are killed straight away while the other's find themselves stranded in the thick forest miles from anywhere being hunted down & killed like animals by the men, but why & can they beat the odds & survive?This Norwegian production was co-written & directed by Patrik Syversen & is a fairly simple mix of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Deliverance (1972) with it's camper van of teens picking up a strange hitchhiker & then running into trouble deep in the woods as they hunted down & killed at which point the film plays out like a survivalist backwoods horror film that doesn't really stand out from the crowd if I am honest despite it being well made & thankfully short at just under 80 minutes (including end credits). While Manhunt isn't exactly a terrible film by any means it's hardly great, there's no much originality here as virtually every scene, character, concept & idea feels like it has been lifted directly from another film. From the setting to the clichéd teens to the killers to the creepy locals to the final surviving girl who gets to dish out some revenge & stay alive long enough for an ambiguous ending that leaves things up in the air. Manhunt just feels so routine, even at under 80 minutes long the pace is sluggish at times & it's hard to care for anyone involved. The very minimalist nature of the script & concept doesn't help either, dialogue is extremely sparse & after the first thirty minutes barely a word is said for the remainder of the film with the three killers themselves not saying a single word during the entire time they are seen on screen, obviously this means the killers never reveal any sort of motive & as a result it's never made clear what's going on exactly or why. It became quite frustrating actually not to know about anything or anyone & Manhunt does feel empty & shallow as a consequence. It's just the whole film & everything that happens seems almost pointless as no reason or explanation for any of it is ever given or even as much hinted at. Who was Renate anyway? If she knew of the killers why not just contact the police or tell the group? Who was the guy tied to the tree? Manhunt is effective enough in a minimalistic brutal sort of way but don't expect any sort of story or originality.I do feel that there is a little hypocrisy here as any Hollywood made film so simplistic & with so little plot would surely have been mercilessly trashed but because Manhunt is Norwegian it is praised for it's basic & shallow nature as it makes the audience more detached & the killers more inhuman? I don't think so, Manhunt just has no story or originality of it's own although that in itself doesn't make it a bad film at all. Originally called Rovdyr in Norway (which translates into English as Predator) the international English title is Manhunt (which explains what happens in the film more than the script does...) while it was apparently called Manhunt - Backwoods Massacre in Germany & strangely known as Naked: Booby Trap in Japan. There's some decent gore here, people are tied up with barb wire, people are stabbed & shot with someone's ankle being blasted off & in the films goriest moment a guy has his stomach sliced open & his intestines pulled out. Manhunt is a fairly grim & brutal film, the killer pressing the knife against Camilla's throat & rubbing it against her body as her boyfriend watches along with one or two other unsettling scenes.Filmed in full 2:35:1 widescreen Manhunt looks nice & is well made with minimal shaky hand-held camcorder camera work & none of that awful machine gun editing that I hate so much. Being a Norwegian film Manhunt is subtitled although there's hardly any dialogue anyway & I think you could probably watch it without subtitles & still figure out what's going on fairly easily. The acting seems alright.Manhunt is an alright backwoods slasher survivalist horror film from Norway that passes 75 minutes effectively enough bu the glaring lack of any reasoning behind anything that happens annoyed me & it's also quite predictable. I can't say I hated it but I can't say I loved it either, to be honest I will probably have completely forgotten about it by the end of the week.

sanjid_ccl 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.

wickenhofer Wow, this movie is underrated by IMDb users. Just saw this again on DVD, and it still holds up. A lot of people i know really love this movie, so I'll give it a ten just to even things out.The people who dislike it don't seem to be familiar with the sub-genre it obviously homages. Rovdyr is an exploitation-film in the best sense; a dirty, uncompromising little low-budget gem devoid of pretensions. Hell, it even has a David Hess song on the opening titles! It seems like most people expected a snappy and glossy teen-flick with lots of twists and turns, but what they got was a dirty and gritty horror-film that pulls no punches.The films style is rugged, and it comes across as a simple and horrific survival-horror. It doesn't focus on plot, this is not a whodunnit by all means, but it's more about the exact situations the characters face and how they react to it, as survival-horrors are supposed to. As always in these films, the prey becomes the hunter and the characters find their inner strength and so on. So nothing new, but it's well done.The actors are good as well, being both realistic and believable in the beginning, and convincingly portraying real terror as all hell breaks loose. This is actually pretty powerful stuff. It's well shot, with a dirty visual style, almost all hand-held and in close-ups throughout the film. The sound-design is top-notch, and the music by Simon Boswell (who also scored Jodorowskis "Santa Sangre" among others, another cool detail) is surprisingly serious and emotional. It's evident that the folks behind this film love the genre, know the genre and take it seriously. The effects are great and the violence is punishing too; there's some really nasty stuff here.Sure, we've seen these types of films before, but done right it's always entertaining. It's as if someone made a shameless rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1975, without any of our modern-day influences, intending it to play in drive-in theaters. There are a few problems in the first act, and sometimes you wish they had been more original, but it's simplicity is also one of it's major strengths, so i guess it evens out.So, this is not a flawless piece, but i liked it because it was brutal and true to its roots.I also read somewhere that the director was just 24 years old when they started shooting it, that it was made for an extremely low budget, and that the main crew worked for very little money in order to make this film. Take that into account and it's a pretty impressive little film.