 |
| Yet another nasty with an alternate title. Oh and at no point does the monster either have a knife or look like that. Even the poster is inept. |
There's a little moment about halfway through Devil Hunter when the camera focuses on a water lily before zooming out to show us a pond filled with lily pads and surrounded by beautiful jungle foliage. It's the best 30 seconds in this entire piece of shit. The Devil Hunter is bad. Oh so bad. Amazingly it's not the worse of the nasties but there's some serious competition amongst that famous 39.
The film starts with a woman being tied to a tree in an unknown location. She's a human sacrifice. Something primordial emerges from the jungle and takes a big dirty bite out of her. All this is watched by the tribesmen who tied her up and they all look terrified. Meanwhile a model named Laura Crawford (Ursula Buchfellner, a playboy model in real life) is living the life of reilly in a South American city. That is until she's kidnapped and held to ransom for 6 million dollars, a sum her kidnappers are sure her rich husband can pay. Rich people don't like to part with their money though and so Peter Weston, a Vietnam vet, is hired to get her back. Laura's being held on a remote island and her kidnappers aren't very nice people and as they grow more impatient their treatment of her gets worse. This being an Italian video nasty you can imagine what that entails. Peter arrives to the island and during the hostage handover things go wrong and Laura does a runner into the jungle. The very jungle where the tribesman from earlier live!!! I'll bet you didn't see that one coming did you. They see her as a real treat, a sacrifice the jungle monster will love. Now Peter, has to use all his military skills to get her back.
There's a scene near the end of this where Peter (played by Al Cliver aka Pierluigi Conte, a familiar face to fans of exploitation cinema) is climbing up a cliff during his rescue mission. Well, no, director Jess Franco wants us to believe he's climbing up a cliff but he's actually lying down on his front with a camera placed on the ground sideways beside him. It's this level of amateurish nonsense that makes every aspect of this film so hard to take seriously. The acting is dreadful, the action is awful, the dubbing turns everything into a comedy (Weston's hispanic sidekick is given a Texan drawl that would make your eyes water) and the special effects are some of the worst I've ever seen. Blood that looks like and has the same consistency as strawberry milk, a toy helicopter crashing into a cliff and the monster itself. Ping pong balls for eyes. Yup. Look at the picture below.
Yup, he's a black monster and he wants to devour the pretty blonde white lady. Septic acting and shite effects aside it's the racial politics on display here that really make this a tough watch. It's racist through and through. In this film's mind, black is evil and white is good. It makes old Tarzan films look progressive. The tribes people here don't get names or dialogue, all they do is grunt, the men exist to kidnap white woman and the woman exist to get naked. You'll cringe yourself into a knot watching this. Throughout you'll be thinking "This is a nasty, it's going to have a crunchy ending at least, all this has to be leading up to something. It doesn't. It goes out with a whimper. You might be wondering how this isn't the worst of the bunch? If you are it's because you haven't seen Mardi Gras Massacre yet.
Would I recommend this? Not on your nelly. It's fucking awful.
Did it deserve to be a nasty. No. but it's iffy racial stance makes it a very unsavoury watch
Next up - Don't Go In The Woods. More tosh.
No comments:
Post a Comment