Hunting Grounds review

The setting is Quebec, specifically Northern Quebec, the Saguenay region. Sometime in the future, humans have screwed with the environment to the point that only a select few are allowed to go out into the wilderness. The only way of reversing the damage done to the planet is to avoid all contact with the outside, a world now replaced with virtual reality. But a resistance has formed against this virtual experience of all things outdoorsy, and for Paul Austin (Patrice Leblanc), whose grandfather was a “real” hunter, those virtual reality hunting games just ain’t cutting it no more. Along with a motley crew of friends/virtual hunting gamers led by mysterious real-life “tracker” hunter Simon Roy (Patrick Baby), Paul will dupe military personnel and breach the gates to reach the great outdoors. With potential love interest Lexa Monroe (Marie-Ève Lemire) and Sébastien (Luc Rivard), the son of a high-ranking military official, Paul is about to live his life-long dream of real-game hunting. But not quite in the way he ever intended! You see, a secret military serum (tested in these very forests) has turned cadavers into the walking dead! Also, Roy is a psychopath with a deadly secret and Sébastien is about to become a zombie cyborg killing machine that needs to be seen to be believed!

HUNTING GROUNDS is fun, though very laboriously paced and awkwardly directed and edited. The visual FX and green screen shots are decent as are the make-up FX, set design and cinematography. The actors ham it up but, in the end, this all added to the fun. Inexplicably though, the mainly Francophone cast speaks English throughout most of the entire film. This was baffling as they could have easily all been speaking French, though it did add a bit to the charm of the film. The story was interesting as was some of the dialogue/narration (courtesy of screenwriters Jonathan Gagné and Eric Bilodeau) regarding the divine nature of hunting. In spite of all this, director Eric Bilodeau’s HUNTING GROUNDS still managed to provide excitement and laughs.

Lines in the movie include: “Ignorance is the mother of most downfalls!”, “His chances for survival just dropped dramatically!”, “A wounded animal is at its most dangerous!”, and “A hunter remains a hunter till the end I guess!” With such dialogue and with its serious tone rendering it, for the most part, unintentionally (at least, I think) fun and campy, HUNTING GROUNDS does manage to provide a good amount of entertainment value and could please certain fans of low-budget/high concept sci-fi horror film-making. And props to the filmmakers for pulling off something this ambitious!

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