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Hunting Grounds
Canada 2008
produced by Eric Bilodeau for FICTIS Productions, Team HG
directed by Eric Bilodeau
starring Patrice LeBlanc, Patrick Baby, Marie-Ève Lemire, Émilie Gilbert-Gagnon, Valérie Tremblay, Luc Rivard, Louis Amiot, Jean-Sébastien Boudreault, Jean-Eudes Dallaire, Sébastien Bouchard, Marie-Élaine Fortin, Dave Harvey, Tim Morgan, Jean-Francois Potvin-Tremblay, Francois Soucy
written by Eric Bilodeau, music by Luc Tremblay, special makeup effects by Texa FX Group, visual effects by FICTIS Productions
review by Mike Haberfelner
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The year is 20-something (and who cares, really?): Humankind has been
destroying the enviroment for decades, now it has walled itself in in
order to give nnature room to recover. But since living in walled-in cities might be
a bit dull, humankind has invented the alternet, a holographic cyberworld
where one can experience everything he or she could experience outside,
but also play silly holographic computergames that exceed all real-life
experiences. However, for a quartet of guys and girls (Patrice LeBlanc,
Marie-Ève Lemire, Valérie Tremblay, Luc Rivard) who like to go hunting
on the alternet, the digital experience is no longer enough, so they hire
a tracker (Patrick Baby) to take them to the outside, to as real forest for a real
hunt. Escaping the city is easy enough, but it goes downhill from there,
as the tracker turns rogue and now wants to kill our four heroes, zombies
show up and want to eat everyone, and the army of course gets involved as
well. In the end, only the couple (LeBlanc, Lemire) you have been made to
root for all the time survives ... It all starts out as a blend
of Tron, Matrix and Fight Club - which does not
exactly spell originality -, then the film takes the bold step to leave
these influences behind - which above all else makes the whole setup
redundant - and veers straight into zombie territory. Unfortunately
though, the film shows remarkably little inventiveness as far as the
zombie genre involved, and since it also remains very predictable on a
narrative level and features next to no really likeable characters, it
becomes pretty dull pretty soon. There are one or two hightlights though,
I give the film that at least, like one of the guys wearing a silly
superhero-like body armour that makes him almost invincible once he's a
zombie, and a showdown between good and bad guy sandwiched between
attacking zombies ... but all that is unfortunately more than off-set by not
only the weak script and direction but also really bad and unnecessary CGI
effects. In all, a film one really can do without.
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