Rating: ★

Richard Connell’s short story The Most Dangerous Game (1924) has become a classic. The original story concerns a Russian aristocrat who enjoys hunting human game on his private island and a man who is forced to survive with only his bare hands where he succeeds in turning the tables despite. The classic film version was The Most Dangerous Game (1932) with Leslie Banks as Zaroff and Joel McCrea and Fay Wray on the run. This was remade several times – as A Game of Death (1945) and Run for the Sun (1956) where Zaroff became a Nazi instead of a Russian aristocrat, and most recently The Most Dangerous Game (2017) and The Most Dangerous Game (2022), as well as unofficial exploitation copies such as Bloodlust (1961) and The Woman Hunt (1973).

The basic premise of The Most Dangerous Game has also been updated into different settings – where Zaroff was replaced by an alien as in Predator (1987), assorted action movie variants or updated to reality tv. I have a full listing of these here in my essay Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games. The 2020s have offered a renewed series of films that draw from the basics of the Most Dangerous Game scenario with The Hunt (2020), Hunted (2020), Apex (2021), Prey (2021), The Retreat (2021), Death Hunt (2022), Hounded (2022), Hunting Ava Bravo (2022) and You Can’t Run Forever (2024).

It promptly becomes apparent that Hunt Club is construed as a feminist version of The Most Dangerous Game or perhaps even more so a copy of a film like Surviving the Game (1994) but where the basics have been drawn out across gender lines. Here the victims are all women and the hunters are all white men who are seeking to reclaim their disappearing sense of entitlement.

It is not too far in before Hunt Club begins hectoring the audience on the attitudes it deems they must hold. It ticks the boxes on what have rapidly become the clichés of 2020s woke filmmaking – the heroine is a lesbian and this is shown as the only healthy relationship in the film; the bad guys are white men who come from a position of privilege and are seething with resentment over women taking their privilege away from them; there is a nice guy but we invariably get a scene where he comes onto the heroine and she rebuffs him.

Here Casper Van Dien – outfitted in a set of severe power ten gallon hats throughout – has speeches espousing Red Pill position points about fighting notions of enforced equality, toxic masculinity and a long speech about how men feel disempowered because women now have to be present at all their meetings in case they try to hit on an employee. Hypocritically for a film that is all about standing up to gender stereotyping and abuse, Hunt Club seems happy to have the women making gender-based putdowns of men for the assumption they lack a large penis or telling them “they don’t have the balls.”

Hunt Club emerges as part of a new wave of blatantly misandrist films that hold extreme anti-men viewpoints that have come out under the banner of 2020s Girl Power filmmaking. See also the likes of She Will (2021), Things Heard & Seen (2021), House Red (2022) and Barbie (2023). As I am always saying, look at how the story would work if you were to reverse the sexes. If you were to do so in the case of Hunt Club, what you would have here would be a film about men being hunted by an elite of women who have decided to reclaim the power and control they had lost and are blaming all men for the actions of a few.

In essence, Hunt Club frames its feminist debate as an extremist one. It creates a fantasy of the war of the sexes that does not exist in the real world – of disempowered men hunting women to regain their masculinity – and correspondingly regards such men as worthy of extermination. Doing this is not dissimilar to the way that extremist groups paint horrifically exaggerated caricatures of the opposing side and their inhumane actions in order to justify an attitude of violent reprisal and vigilante justice to their followers. To me the real issue here is not a question about toxic masculinity but one of toxic feminism. If your call for sexual equality is one that involves depicting fantasies about the extermination of men because they are men, my feeling is that what you are talking about is no longer sexual equality.

Casper Van Dien who has spent too much time in B movies – and indeed, went through this whole human hunting the same year in a remake of The Most Dangerous Game – at least rises to the fore with a gravelly toughness. The saddest one among the group is Mickey Rourke, who seemed on a major career revival path a few years ago with Sin City (2005), The Wrestler (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010), among others – but here is reduced to no more than a supporting heavy. A big thing about Rourke’s return is how his once impossibly handsome features look like they have become battered like a plastic surgery accident, while here he is made up in a way that makes his face look like a porcelain doll.

Hunt Club is directed by British filmmaker Elizabeth Blake-Thomas. Blake-Thomas has made assorted dramas, family films and romantic films since the mid-2010s. The only other genre work of hers that concerns us here is the fantasy film The League of Legend Keepers: Shadows (2019). I have to quote Blake-Thomas’s bio at the IMDB – there should be some law preventing people from submitting their own bios as the results are always ridiculous. “Director Elizabeth Blake-Thomas is a British award-winning filmmaker and philanthropist based in Los Angeles … An Official Ambassador of Awareness Ties for Human Trafficking … Her award-winning short film Unseen … is used by multiple organizations and schools to help educate on potential lure tactics … Elizabeth mentors wherever possible, ensuring she sends the elevator back down to all other female directors and filmmakers.”

Trailer here