The Drivel Hunter (Devil Hunter (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Devil Hunter (DVD)
Date:	07/09/09 (53 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There are no advantages to this product

Disadvantages: It's very, very badly made

A review of just the film. A DVD will set you back £6 on amazon.

Made in 1980, this is a terrible cannibal/action movie directed by the infamous Jésus Franco, probably the worst director in film history. It was one of the video nasties, and I've tried to watch it on several occasions, defeated each time by its inept direction and slow pace. I have now managed to watch it all, just never in one sitting. Devil Hunter's recently been released on DVD in the UK, so it's probably as well to warn people not to buy it.

A movie starlet is kidnapped and taken to a jungle by her captors (it's not at all clear where this is set, but Latin America seems to be the vibe). The studio boss sends hard man Peter Weston to rescue her. But a local tribe of cannibals has a habit of sacrificing young women to a fearsome beast that also lives in the jungle...

Well, fearsome beast is probably overstating it. It's a naked black guy with unbelievably fake-looking goggle eyes. The tribe look suspiciously like regular extras in loincloths (one cannibal has an amazing afro). And I don't know where this was filmed, but I doubt it was anywhere near South America. We do see some stock footage of rainforests shot from the air, though (which looks a lot like the aerial footage from the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust).

Cannibal films were big business for a while, at least in exploitation land. Franco could always be relied on to crank out a dirt cheap, really shoddy rip-off of any popular sub-genre going, and so it is with this. It has many of Franco's usual problems - i.e. it's unbelievably badly made, with out-of-focus close-ups, confusing editing, and incredibly poor dubbing. (The characters' lip movements don't match what they're saying at all. You also never hear two characters talking at the same time, which leads me to suspect that all the voices are done by the same two people, one man and one woman.)

The actors are bad enough, even without the dubbing problems. Weston is a paunchy macho man with ludicrous hair. One of the kidnappers looks like Ricardo Montalban in a David Gower wig. The women are there purely to get naked, which they do with gusto, but they aren't very interesting otherwise. There's no sex (at least in the version I've seen - longer versions exist). The action scenes are the opposite of exciting. There's hardly even any gore.

The discordant incidental music sounds like someone's sat randomly pressing keys on an electric organ while a tape of some bongos plays in the background. The jungle scenes have the same bird noise dubbed continuously over them, presumably to help persuade us that the film is set somewhere exotic. The film's much too long, with some interminable padding, mostly involving people wandering around the jungle at great length. The monster's point of view is depicted by randomly smearing Vaseline on the camera lens. This is a bad film.

It's slightly more watchable than most Franco - at least it has a bit of narrative drive, even if the story is idiotic and predictable (do we suppose that the kidnapped starlet and the beast in the jungle might meet at some point? Yes, we do). Even Franco knows this one's rubbish, and mostly he's just trying to hide how cheap it all is. This does make it slightly easier to sit through than his more personal films, which usually involve naked women kissing very slowly to jazz soundtracks. I've no idea why it's called Devil Hunter, either.

Some of the dialogue is pretty hilarious, especially from the twitchy kidnapper who hates nature ("Flowers! Shit!") One exchange highlights just how little effort everyone was making:

Villain: "I know it's you on the other end of this walkie talkie, Weston. What the hell do you want from me?"

Weston: "I'm pretty sure it's a surprise to you, but it's me, Peter Weston!"

This kind of blatant disregard for continuity suggests either that no one bothered to watch the film before they released it, or the budget was so low they couldn't even re-record five seconds of dialogue.

But the fleeting amusement you might get from the film's various gaffes isn't enough to make it worth watching. I don't have the faintest idea why this was banned; it seems pretty tame even by 1980s standards (it's probably because it was a cannibal film, and they banned most of the harsher ones). Whatever the reason, avoid this, unless you're a video nasty collector (mercifully I've finished with that now) or a Franco completist (I believe such people exist. They have my sympathy).

Summary: One of the least essential video nasties