Hunting Grounds (2015) (Blu-ray Review)
DIRECTED BY: John Portanova
STARRING: Bill Oberst Jr., Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, Jason Vail
RATED: UR/Region: O/1:85/1080P/NUMBER OF DISCS 1 (BDr)
AVAILABLE FROM Uncork’d Entertainment
There are few things more relaxing than heading out to an isolated cabin with your dad, your son, and two old friends for a nice weekend of hunting.
Fresh air. Bonding. Nature.
And, apparently, getting your ass handed to you by an entire tribe of Sasquatch.
Welcome to Hunting Grounds.
Directed by John Portanova, this 2015 creature feature has a pretty damn good setup. A father, his son, and two friends head into the woods for a hunting trip and soon discover that they’re not the only hunters out there. They’ve wandered into the territory of a group of Sasquatch who aren’t exactly interested in sharing their vacation property.
Honestly, I can’t blame the Bigfoots.
Four heavily armed dudes show up in your backyard and start shooting things, and suddenly you’re the monster for objecting?
Unfortunately, Hunting Grounds doesn’t quite deliver the balls-to-the-wall Sasquatch movie that its premise promises. The movie takes its sweet time getting where it’s going, and there are stretches where watching these guys wander around the forest starts to feel less like a horror movie and more like an extremely stressful episode of The Outdoor Channel.
There’s a lot of walking.
A lot of talking.
A lot of looking at things.
And then occasionally…
SASQUATCH!
It’s almost like the movie is playing hide-and-seek with its own monsters.
The good news is that when the creatures finally show up, they’re pretty damn cool. The Sasquatch are nasty, aggressive, and genuinely intimidating in spots, and there’s an old-school creature-feature quality to them that I really appreciated. These aren’t cuddly forest giants who just want their personal space respected. These things want you dead.
Which makes the decision to spend so much time away from them even more confusing.
It’s like making a vampire movie and saying, “We’re going to save the vampire for the third act because you should really get to know the realtor first.”
The human characters aren’t necessarily bad, but they don’t exactly give us a reason to become emotionally attached to them either. They’re basically four guys wandering around with increasingly large targets painted on their backs.
And, because this is a horror movie, they occasionally make decisions that can only be described as spectacularly unhelpful to their own continued existence.
You hear a horrifying noise in the woods?
Investigate it.
Find something that looks like it might have killed a person?
Get closer.
Realize there’s something enormous and angry hunting you?
Split up.
At this point, I’m starting to think the Sasquatch aren’t actually the villains. They’re just performing population control.
The low budget is also pretty obvious, but I’m willing to cut an indie creature feature some slack in that department. You don’t need millions of dollars to make a good monster movie. You just need atmosphere, imagination, and enough creature action to make people forget they’re watching four guys stand around talking.
Unfortunately, Hunting Grounds doesn’t always have enough of that last ingredient.
That’s the real frustration here because there’s a good movie hiding inside this movie.
The premise works.
The setting works.
The Sasquatch work.
The violence works when it finally arrives.
It’s just that the movie occasionally seems to forget that the reason people clicked on Hunting Grounds was not because they desperately wanted to watch four men discuss hunting techniques in the woods.
We came for Bigfoot.
We want Bigfoot.
Give us the damn Bigfoot.
When the movie does lean into the creature-feature side of things, it becomes much more fun, and there are some nicely nasty moments sprinkled throughout. Those sequences made me wish the entire movie had been paced more like them.
Instead, the movie is constantly building toward something, and just when you’re ready for things to go completely off the rails, it sometimes hits the brakes.
Still, I have to give Portanova and the cast credit for making something that clearly comes from a genuine love of old-school monster movies. There’s an earnestness here that makes it difficult to completely dislike. Even when the movie isn’t working, I could see the filmmakers trying to give us the kind of bloody, backwoods Sasquatch movie that genre fans would appreciate.
I just wish they’d given us more of it.
Hunting Grounds is ultimately a movie I wanted to like more than I actually did. It’s slow, occasionally frustrating, and spends entirely too much time hunting for its own titular action. But there’s enough creature work, gore, and indie horror charm here to keep me from writing the whole thing off.
Think of it as a Bigfoot movie where Bigfoot is fashionably late to his own damn movie.
When he finally arrives, though, he knows how to make an entrance.
And after watching these four guys spend half the movie wandering around the forest, I’m pretty sure the Sasquatch were just sitting behind a tree thinking:
“Should we kill them now, or give them another twenty minutes to bore themselves to death?”
Extras
- Photo Gallery
- Deleted Scenes
- Deleted Scenes Commentary
- Audio Commentary
- Documentary
