The October Zombie-Thon - Day 11: Hunting Creatures
Posted by Trevor Snyder on 10.11.2008
Wow, a crappy German zombie movie...what a shocker.
HUNTING CREATURES (2004)
Written & Directed by: Andreas Pape and Oliver Kellisch
Country: Germany
In my review of Zombie Campout, I hypothesized that I would not again encounter another movie as unbelievably awful this month. I stand by that conjecture, as I simply can't imagine another flick sinking to such miserable lows – but damned if Hunting Creatures didn't give it the old college try.
At least in this case, though, I kinda knew what I was in for. After all, Hunting Creatures is yet another entry in the all-too-prolific "German, shot-on-video, zombie splatter film" sub-genre, so it's not like I expected a whole lot. At best, the German zombie craze occasionally offers up mildly-entertaining but easily forgotten diversions like Premutos. More often than not, however, we end up with brain-dead trash like today's movie – films that seem to exist only to throw buckets and buckets of blood and guts at the screen, with little to no thought given to pesky details like plot or character.
As the movie kicks off, we meet a group of criminals who rob a bar, and then immediately proceed to throw a rave in an abandoned warehouse. Right away, we have problems. For one thing, why they hell are these guys holding a rave? I don't pretend to know much about the German underworld, but are secret techno dance-parties really a big money maker for the criminal element? Even if that was the case, I don't see how the party in this film could be doing these guys any favors, as it looks to be attended by about roughly seven people (and that's a generous estimation). Could the filmmakers really not wrangle up a few more friends and family to make this sequence a little less laughable?
Anyway, it turns out that this warehouse is actually the secret storage facility for an experimental chemical, which unfortunately explodes from the ceiling pipes and douses the partygoers, turning them into flesh-hungry, orange-faced zombies. Despite their criminal ways, the gang holding the rave shows a surprising amount of social conscientiousness, deciding to hunt down these murderous ghouls before they can destroy the whole country. They are joined in their task by one of the scientists responsible for the chemical, who for some reason transforms into a Rambo-like warrior once handed a sword and gun.
Kinda sounds more like the plot for a video-game than an actual movie, doesn't it? It might as well be, as that's pretty much what it turns into at this point. Any further story development is more-or-less thrown out the window in favor of scene after scene of our main characters wandering around, finding zombies, and then butchering said zombies. It's tedious stuff, and believe me, it won't take you long to get really sick of it. For one thing, it's obvious that the actors all think they are total bad-asses, and the filmmakers are all-too-happy to indulge this delusion with numerous slow-motion, stylized shots of them walking around, looking cool. Forget the title Hunting Creatures, this movie should have been called Man, How Sweet Are We?
The over-reliance on stylized shots isn't limited to these moments, either. Clearly wanting to make up for the shot-on-video feel and their limited technical know-how, directors Andreas Pape and Oliver Kellisch film every scene in a ridiculously exaggerated cinematic style. They want every single shot to look different and cool, which I guess is somewhat admirable, but it gets old fast. If you want to try to make your action stands out with a heavy mixture of angles, fine. But how about laying off on the camera wizardry during simple dialogue exchanges? Add in an incredibly grating techno/death-metal soundtrack that never stops, and you have a movie that almost seems designed to piss its viewers off.
Now, I realize that if Pape and Kellisch were here, they'd probably say that I'm concentrating on the wrong elements. Like other German splatter flicks, this film primarily exists to show off the red stuff, and I'm sure the filmmakers would like me to focus on the gore, as well. Alright, I can do that. I'll admit that the sheer amount of onscreen carnage in this one will probably satiate gore-hounds with low standards. Sure, it's undeniably cheap-looking, even by German splatter standards, but I suppose it's impressive enough given the small budget I'm sure they were working with. The problem, however, is that Pape and Kellisch seem to think quantity beats quality. Yeah, it's wall-to-wall bloodshed, but it's fairly standard stuff, with a noticeable lack of inventive gore gags. It's the same complaint I had with Premutos (albeit even more pronounced here) – you can only show the same kind of headshot after headshot so many times until the whole thing just gets tiresome.
Maybe the filmmakers should have spent less time blowing up fake heads, and a little more time addressing the plot's more glaring problems. For instance, although the story spans an entire month (although the weather changes clearly show the movie itself was filmed over a few seasons), we're never really given any indication of how much this zombie outbreak is affecting the entire country. Hell, I'm not even sure whether anyone else even knows about it besides the main characters. I'd assume so – our "heroes" seem to have no problems finding zombies wherever they go, so I can only guess that these things must be all over the place. But it apparently never even occurred to Pape and Kellisch to film any sort of scenes that would hint at the size of the problem.
That little mistake, along with every other I've noted, points to the real problem with Hunting Creatures: Andreas Pape and Oliver Kellisch simply have no business making movies. I realize that sounds kinda harsh – I'm sure their hearts were in the right place, as this is clearly another example of zombie-fans making a movie for fellow zombie-fans. But their utter failure on nearly every level left me, one of those fellow zombie-fans, wishing they had never bothered. And anyone who thinks I'm being too cruel with that criticism has obviously never sat through Hunting Creatures. Thinking it over, I realize the only compliment I can possibly give it is that it's certainly not the worst thing Germany has ever been involved with. I suppose that's something, huh?
