Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

zardoz-13 Violence escalated in Hollywood movies by the late 1960s with the shoot-out in "Bonnie & Clyde" and later the bloodbath that celebrated masculinity gone berserk in Sam Peckinpah's seminal masterpiece "The Wild Bunch." Presumably, this must have inspired Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner, well known for their family oriented television series "The Rifleman," to produce this riveting western shoot'em. When you consider the wealth of talent that went into this western lensed mainly on the plains of Spain, you have to wonder how such a project could have suffered so badly with critics and audiences alike. Scenarists William Norton of "Brannigan," Gilbert Ralston of "Willard," and Lou Morheim of "The Last Blitzkrieg" definitely put their best pens forward. No sooner has illiterate outlaw Frank Calder (Oliver Reed of "The Three Musketeers") kidnapped a gorgeous woman, Melissa Ruger (Candice Bergen of "Soldier Blue"), so she can teach him how to read than the woman's hypocritical husband (Gene Hackman) pursues them with a vengeance. The husband is no ordinary individual. He is cattle baron Brandt Ruger, and he has just bought some Sharps rifles that can blast a man from twice the distance of a Winchester repeating rifle. Brandt is basically a sadist with a trophy wife and possessive streak a mile wide. Once he learns that his wife has been abducted, Brandt fears the worst. He hates the idea that Melissa will be raped and impregnated with an illegitimate child. The suggestion that Brandt might be impotent aroused my suspicions. He doesn't want to get stuck with raising a bastard. All of this occurs after Ruger has launched a hunting party with several prominent friends and a train-load of prostitutes. He decides to chase Calder and company, but he isn't so much concerned with rescuing Melissa as he is with blasting all to kingdom come. That Brandt is a sadist is clear from the outset. Director Don Medford establishes this characteristic brilliantly in the first few minutes when he cross-cuts shots of Calder and his gang carving up one of Brandt's steers with Brandt reaming Melissa out in their bedroom. Ironically, Melissa finds more compassion in the veteran outlaw.Ingeniously, "The Hunting Party" scrutinizes masculinity under-fire in what initially struck me as a mindless massacre but is far more substantial than I imagined. Ruger relishes the chance to kill Calder and his cutthroats with extreme prejudice. Calder and his men are taken aback to begin with because they cannot see their adversaries sniping away at them. Not long afterward, the gang turns on each other. By this time, in a riff on The Stockholm Syndrone, Melissa and Calder develop a mutually supportive relationship, and Brandt is predictably infuriated when his worst fears are confirmed by dying outlaw Hog Warren (L.Q. Jones of "The Wild Bunch")who Brandt stabs to death in the throat. Medford doesn't rely on exploding blood squibs. They smear blood all over their victims. By the time that Ruger and his companions have begun to whittle down the outlaws, "The Hunting Party" generates far more depth than its deceptively gratuitous violence suggests. The ending is particularly audacious. Ruger is so consumed with hate that he consigns himself to death by traipsing into the desert to kill both Calder and Melissa. The performances are exception and the line-up of western character actors who play Calder's gang is second to none. Oliver Reed delivers another stunning performance; Reed was incapable of giving a bad performance. Sadly, this rugged British actor never received the recognition that his distinguished colleagues got in the form of knight-ships! Hackman rivaled him. After the first hour, you'll wonder why the outlaws neglect to lure the hunters into an ambush and kill them. Particularly incredible is the hero who disarms himself because he had to put his best friend out of his misery after having been shot by Ruger's men. When I first saw it I loved the violence, then I turned against it later because I treated it like a derivative western with little to set it apart from other gory oaters. Now, I consider it a maligned, misunderstood horse opera that defied narrative and genre expectations. Challenging and interesting, "The Hunting Party" had more on its plate than even Peckinpah's masterpiece.

Michael_Elliott Hunting Party, The (1971) * (out of 4) This Western is pretty much forgotten by everyone except for fans of violence and gore, which this thing has plenty of. The story centers on a bandit (Oliver Reed) who kidnaps a teacher (Candice Bergen) so that she can teach him to read but her sadistic husband (Gene Hackman) is worried about her being raped and bringing home a bastard child so he and his friends form a hunting party and using their long-ranged rifles go after the men. THE HUNTING PARTY isn't the worst Western I've ever seen but I'm quite certain it's the dumbest. The film's reputation for violence and gore starts off with the first shot where we see a live cow get stabbed a couple times and from this point on one more body is hitting the ground every few minutes. The film was clearly influenced by THE WILD BUNCH as most of the violence happens in slow motion and each bullet hole has a ton of blood coming out of it. One of the more memorable scenes of violence has a guy getting shot through the guy, which violently turns his head around, which we then see the back of it getting blown off. Other forms of violence includes Reed's group getting just about every body part shot at least once. If you're completely turned off by gore then there's really no point in you watching this film because everything else is pure bad. Considering the cast it's somewhat shocking to see such trash but I'm guessing they signed up expecting the end product to be something more meaningful. One of the dumbest sequences in the film has Reed raping Bergen and then threatening not to let her eat again until she agrees to teach him to read. A few scenes later the woman is slowly cracking from not eating so Reed and a buddy decide to eat peaches in front of her. This sequence seems like it was written for a Laurel and Hardy film as it's comic in tone with the men slurping up the peaches, making funny faces at Bergen and even the music score is done in a playful manner. Out of no where Bergen cracks up laughing and it's as if she's forgotten all about getting raped and she's on a picnic with friends. The subplot deals with Hackman being a sadistic scumbag and of course it turns out that Bergen prefers to be with Reed. None of this works because the film can never make up its mind in what it wants to do other than show violence. Even worse is that Reed's group are constantly being stalked by Hackman's clan and I'm guessing this was meant to be intense stuff. The tracking and stalking just comes across boring and if the director's was trying to go for some sort of psychological drama then he failed. Reed has no problem playing the crazy guy with a good heart but Bergen isn't nearly as lucky in her worthless role. Even Hackman isn't all that impressive but there are a few scenes where he's so over-the-top you can't help but laugh. Just check out the scene on the train where he's with a prostitute and decides to use his cigar as a sexual tool. THE HUNTING PARTY lives up to its reputation as being a very bad film and what's really sad is how pointless it all is.

virek213 When you go hunting with Brandt Ruger, you go first-class all the way. But when you steal his "property", you sign your own death warrant.That is something that a notorious outlaw (Oliver Reed) and his gang have to learn in the worst way possible in THE HUNTING PARTY, a 1971 British/American western that, even by 21st century standards, is still incredibly violent. Reed kidnaps a local schoolteacher (Candice Bergen) in the (now faint) hope that he'll be taught how to read. When Bergen warns him about her husband, he tells her "It don't matter whose wife you are." A fatal misjudgment on his part, for her husband Brandt Ruger (Gene Hackman) is not one to fool around with. While out on a hunting party with a few of his friends, the dictatorial and very abusive land baron learns of Bergen's kidnapping, and thus gets blood in his eyes. And rather than going after game, he and his boys instead go after Reed and his gang, picking them off one at a time with high-power rifles that can hit from a distance of 800 yards. The result is a sagebrush variation of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, done with some of the most brutally violent shootouts this side of THE WILD BUNCH and SOLDIER BLUE. And as he is a man driven by extreme jealousy (Bergen is his personal "property", whom he physically abuses on more than one occasion), the fact that Bergen is beginning to develop a rapport with Reed now gives him whatever license he feels he needs to kill her as well, though he drags it out for the sheer sadistic fun of it to a very cynical and blood-splattered conclusion.There isn't too much doubt that THE HUNTING PARTY was made to take advantage of the "market" opened up by THE WILD BUNCH and its director Sam Peckinpah's choreography of violent action, as well the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. The shootouts are extremely bloody, and they clearly mirror those of THE WILD BUNCH in the use of slow motion and quick cutting. Where THE HUNTING PARTY falls short, however, is in a crucial area that Peckinpah knew was vital to his film being successful: the action and plot must be character-driven and made to feel real to an audience. Veteran TV director Don Medford (who, among other things, directed the classic 1961 Twilight Zone episode "Death's Head Revisited) and screenwriters Gilbert Ralston, William Norton, and Lou Morheim know how to do the Peckinpah-inspired gunfights, but they don't seem to have taken too much time to really delineate any complexities in the three main characters. Bergen is merely a damsel in distress, caught between two men who are basically bastards, one merely semi-controlling (Reed), the other a sadistic control freak of the highest order (Hackman). Absent the complex psychological and character-driven narrative that propelled THE WILD BUNCH to a controversial but well-deserved glory, THE HUNTING PARTY can so easily be tagged, as more than a few critics have done (albeit perhaps too zealously), as an extremely bloody sagebrush shooting gallery in which violence is staged for the sake of violence.The film does succeed in giving us good performances from the three leads (notably Hackman, whose role is credibly sadistic to the highest degree); good cinematography done on location in Spain (as a stand-in for Texas); and supporting roles for L.Q. Jones (a member of Peckinpah's stock company); Simon Oakland; Mitchell Ryan; and William C. Watson. And one can't fault the long-distance shooting that occurs, or the way it so ingeniously borrows a great old-world story (THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) and puts it into a WILD BUNCH-type western format. Had the filmmakers only paid a bit more attention to complex characters and motives here as Peckinpah had in his epic film, however, THE HUNTING PARTY might have been a bit more than a good, if incredibly and graphically violent, post-Peckinpah/Leone addition to a Western genre that was rapidly changing during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

TheAgonyOfPlasma I'm a big fan of early 70's sadistic westerns and "The Hunting Party" has the special place in my grimy heart. It's among the nastiest, bloodiest and most misanthropic western movies ever made. Obviously influenced by Peckinpah's masterful "The Wild Bunch" it has its share of brutal violence and blown off heads. Even the cow gets its throat slit in the beginning of this nasty spectacle. Gene Hackman plays wealthy town owner filled with rage and misogynistic hatred. When the outlaw named Frank (Oliver Reed) kidnaps his wife (Candice Bergen) for teaching him to read, Hackman forms the hunting group. The bloodbath ensues... Highly cynical western, superbly acted and shot. The shocking finale filled my eyes with tears. A must-see.