The Hunted (2013)
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Josh Stewart (better known as Arkin from The Collector and its sequel) makes his writing and directorial debut with The Hunted--a micro-budget found footage flick. As I've said in the past, I'm not a fan of found footage movies, but I still watch'em anyway hoping that the next will be a gem among the sea of terrible efforts. Sadly The Hunted is not that gem, no matter how much you try to polish it.
The movie essentially just follows two characters--Jake (Josh Stewart) the adventurous hunter that's eager to make his big break in reality TV and his sole cameraman Stevie (Ronnie Gene Blevins). The duo hope to film themselves catching a legendary deer that roams the secluded mountains of West Virginia and use that as a pilot for a potential show. Instead, they find themselves caught in the middle of a supposedly haunted bit of forest (don't you hate when that happens).
While The Hunted isn't a good movie, it does offer a couple somewhat creepy scenes, especially since it's primarily shot at night and in the middle of the woods. The creepiness is especially effective when the "ghost" is first introduced by way of screaming. Unfortunately that's all this spectral is capable of doing (at least until the climax). For whatever reason the filmmakers used the same exact female panting and screaming audio file whenever the ghost was around.
Look, it was creepy the first few times, but it gets old pretty damn fast, especially after the 50th time we hear it. I mean, seriously? You guys couldn't have tried to change the screaming just a little bit? It had to be the exact same track over and over? (*sigh*). That's literally all this ghost does until towards the end, but even by that point we don't see anything. So essentially the antagonist in this movie is simply a repeated audio file...
Aside from a couple somewhat creepy moments, The Hunted is just more proof that the found footage subgenre needs to end. I mean, you're really reaching at the bottom of the barrel when the antagonist in the film is just an audio file that gets played over and over. Unless you're huge on found footage movies, I'd say skip this one.