Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
Thanks for introducing that historical note. The Most Dangerous Game - Wikipedia
In the 1924 version, a big-game hunter from New York City falls off a yacht and swims to what seems to be an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean, where he is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is inspired by the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were particularly fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.
[Wikipedia] Adaptations and in popular culture
Film
The first major film adaption was RKO Pictures' film released in 1932, The Most Dangerous Game. Joel McCrea stars as Rainsford; Leslie Banks portrays Zaroff. The adaptation by James Ashmore Creelman adds two other principal characters, brother-and-sister pair Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong), who are castaways from a shipwreck. The Most Dangerous Game was co-directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel; also with a score by Max Steiner, the film was a favorite project of producer Merian C. Cooper. The production shared several sets with King Kong (1933), a simultaneous RKO project that also involved Schoedsack, Cooper, Wray, Armstrong, Creelman, and Steiner. The Most Dangerous Game was a modest success.[8][9][10]:51
RKO produced a remake titled A Game of Death (1945), directed by Robert Wise, from a screenplay Norman Houston wrote. This film stars John Loder and Audrey Long, with Edgar Barrier as the mad hunter.[10]:206 In order to keep with events of that time, A Game of Death changed Zaroff into "Erich Kreiger", a Nazi, and was set in the aftermath of the Second World War.[11]
In 1956, United Artists released another film adaptation, Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark, Trevor Howard and Jane Greer.[12][10]:206 In 1961, the film Bloodlust! was released, directed by Ralph Brooke and starring Wilton Graff as the Zaroff-type character, and Robert Reed as the leader of a band of youths who become stranded on the island.[13] 1972's The Woman Hunt starring John Ashley and Sid Haig made for Roger Corman's New World Pictures is an unofficial remake of the story.[14]
Also in 1972, The Suckers, tells a sexploitation version of the story, with the hunter using models as his prey.[15] In 1973, The Perverse Countess was released.[16] The 1982 Australian film Turkey Shoot has similar elements.[17]
The 1987 film, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, transports the story to an alien world using scantily clad women as the hunted and a mad scientist, Zed as the Zaroff character.[16][18]
John Woo's first Hollywood directorial effort, the Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller Hard Target (1993), was loosely based on the same story. The locale was shifted to 1990s New Orleans, with homeless Vietnam war veterans voluntarily serving (in return for potential payment from a shady businessman) as human prey.
In Surviving the Game (1994), a homeless man is hired as a survival guide for a group of wealthy businessmen on a hunting trip in the mountains. He is unaware that they are killers who hunt humans for sport, and that he is their new prey. Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson, the film stars Rutger Hauer, Ice-T, and Charles S. Dutton.
The Pest (1997) is a comedic parody of the story, with German huntsman Gustav Shank accidentally bringing Puerto Rican teenage hustler Pestario "Pest" Vargas to his island instead of the skilled man he had intended to hunt, only to decide to hunt the Pest anyway due to his sheer obnoxiousness. Shank's ambition is to have a head of a warrior of every ethnicity in his Trophy Room. He also rigs the "game" by having his prey unknowingly drink a slow-acting poison before the hunt, making sure that they die even if they escape him.
In The Eliminator (2004), seven captured people are hunted at night for sport on an island as a betting game for the wealthy.
The 2019 film, The Hunt follows a similar premise.
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- From the OP, "I have no doubt that it will embolden some lefty ANTIFA types to more violence."
- Say what?? Antifa-types emboldened to more violence by a goofy, violence-filled movie about purportedly-deplorable prey eliminating their purportedly-leftist elite hunters? Gee, who'd have thought Antifa-types could be so easily emboldened?
- From the OP, "Violence and threats of violence have become part of the hardcore lefts playbook."
- Monkey-see, monkey-do?
- Back in the early 2000s, when that black senator from Illinois became President, I was dumbfounded by a Texan 1st-cousin's assurance that "There's going to be a war". I finally had to unfriend about a 130 of my FB friends to preserve what was left of my sanity. Do I have to "ignore" most of RF to do the same?
- From the OP, "If you are a politician and disagree with them, you are fair game to harassment, or worse. Ask Steve Scalise."
- Or just ask "The Squad" [AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley].
- Oh wait, ... wrong examples. Besides, death threats against any of them are "fake news."
- Or just ask "The Squad" [AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and Pressley].
- From the OP, "The hunt is the ultimate lefty dream, as our society becomes more debased. I think we are about circling the drain now, how long before we go down?"
- "Ultimate lefty dream"??? More like the "ultimate righty nightmare", I'd say.
- Wisdom of Solomon 17:11 ... Someone with a guilty conscience will always imagine things to be worse than they really are. 12 Fear is nothing but the failure to use the help that reason gives. 13 When you lack the confidence to rely on reason, you give in to the fears caused by ignorance.
@Kangaroo Feathers
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