By Terry Sherwood
Explosive titles and lurid posters or book cover illustrations for film and pulp novels work very well to draw in audiences. Hence when I saw the title of the co-directed Greg Swanson/ Ryan Thiessen Hunter Her Kill Her (2022) my first impression was perhaps some odd look at showcasing a Final Girl verse as a form of evil. What I actually viewed was a tasteless one note exercise in film making with perhaps some of the dumbest protagonists.
Let’s begin the vivisection with the plot of a done wrong husband who seeks revenge on a relationship partner for keeping him from seeing his daughter and serving him with divorce papers in front of his workmates. Yes, you heard it right, straight out of the toxic masculinity playbook and with no new ideas that are different in line with the original I Spit on Your Grave (1978). That film broke new ground in subject matter, graphic depiction with style along with Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972).
Hunter Her Kill Her begins focused on Karen (Natalie Terrazzino) who starts a new job as a night shift cleaner for a woodworking warehouse. Karen is a single mom with a sick child whom she has left with a friend while she works at night. The good premise then things get backward when she is on the phone with her upset child only to have her day shift co-worker who is briefing, he mutters ‘Is this going to be a problem?’. This is 2024 and perpetuating male attitudes towards females with children in the workplace has long passed as a plot point.
While working hard, sweeping floors, cleaning offices etc. she is having a bathroom break when two male factory workers burst in on her. What follows is some of the most inane outdated dialogue that reveal the plot like ‘Hello Bitch’ ‘Fresh meat’ etc. Later Karen gets a package delivered once it is opened, she’s chased and hunted for the rest of the movie by several masked males.
One moment Karen is hanging onto a railing with her feet on her wood nails while one of the males is standing on her fingers without seeing her. Her grip loosens and she tumbles to the floor. One wonders how one of the males could have missed a full-grown female in a lighted area hanging on a wall. Karen is hunted by the men that she manages to dispatch even fix her own wound with glue which I have seen in another film.
The inevitable meeting with the estranged victimized husband in the dark with equipment. What follows is some completely gratuitous violence and comments on male supremacy that followers of ‘Andrew Tate’ will be cheering on. No this is not satire or a type of pointing out the absurdity of the situation to illustrate a point. It’s a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers which is a shame since
Natalie Terrazzino’s performance, at least at the beginning of the film is wasted. She does well almost Camile Keaton like in the beginning of the film to degenerate into a cliché screaming, commando woman who does anything to survive without style.
Hunter Her Kill Her is just a pile of wood chips waiting to be fabricated, nothing else but gratuitous hate with no purpose.
Bloody Flicks 