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.
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.