[Once again I'm going to attempt to do
a horror(ish) movie review a day for the entire month of October. I've done
this the last few years on The Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I
succeeded. Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can pull it off this year.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
THE HEAD HUNTER pares itself down to one actor, one
set (with a bit of outdoor location shooting), and a few very simple effects. To
say it’s a minimalist film is perhaps an understatement, but director Jordan
Downey (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Kevin Stewart) shows that
limitations can be a virtue.
I was reminded of Bela Tarr’s last film, THE TURIN HORSE,
in the way that much of THE HEAD HUNTER is comprised of repetition. In
that film, we saw an old man and his daughter coming together at the end of each
day of drudgery to eat a single baked potato in silence over and over again
until it became almost hypnotic. Here we have a medieval warrior (Christopher Rygh) heeding the
blow of a horn signifying that monsters are about. He then heads off to do
battle with the creatures off-screen, later returning to his tiny stone hovel to
heal his wounds and impale the head of his latest kill on the wall. He does
this all in hopes of one day finding and killing the monster who killed his
daughter.
THE HEAD HUNTER would fit
in the sword and sorcery genre as well, but the tone is without a doubt
one of horror. It’s a slow burn, to be sure, but eventually it does reach a violent
and exciting climax made all the more effective by the build-up and atmosphere.
It also helps that the movie is a mere 72 minutes long counting credits. There’s
no guarantee that some (perhaps most) viewers still won’t find this boring,
especially given the attention spans and expectations of the average movie goer
these days. But there is a small audience who will welcome the rawness and
simplicity of a film like this, too. And for them, THE HEAD HUNTER will feel like some kind of masterpiece.
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