Shudder’s ‘Hunted’ is a Generic Survival Horror with an Idiotic Final Girl

Sommerleigh Pollonais, Horror Head Writer

Plot: After spending an evening dancing and drinking with a man, a woman is abducted by the man and his accomplice and taken into the woods where she has to decide: is she predator or prey?

Review: A modern day interpretation of the Grimm’s fairytale Red Riding Hood, Hunted starts off on solid ground, with a woman telling a story to her grandson around a campfire. The use of animation here sets up the film to be something more than your by-the-numbers thriller, but unfortunately all that promise goes right out the window as soon as our main characters reveal themselves.

They’ll never take, her FREEDOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

I’ll give props to the actors, specifically Lucie Debay as Eve and Arieh Worthhalter as The Guy. Both play their parts with vigour and their interactions as representations of Red Riding Hood and The Wolf are the only reason I kept watching, Worthhalter especially. He’s so menacing and gleefully psychotic in this role, one could actually picture him as the Big Bad Wolf. Eve was your typical Final Girl and I’m not gonna lie, I found most of the decisions made by this character to be completely idiotic. Somehow I think they missed out here and should’ve cast a much younger actress in the role. It would’ve upped the tension and made her naiveté much more believable.

Sadly, everything else here is generic and predictable. Remove the Grimm fairytale aspect, and Hunted is nothing more than another “psycho in the woods” horror movie. While I’m always up for a good slasher, this one goes straight in the “meh” pile.

Sommer’s Score: 5 out of 10

You can view Hunted for yourself along with other great horror/thriller content on Shudder by clicking the big red logo:

For a review of the thriller The Hunt you can click here. And for more than 50 thriller film reviews you can click here

2755F829-2EEC-4A68-B6F7-F963F48C9D92 Sommerleigh of the House Pollonais. First of Her Name. Sushi Lover, Queen of Horror Movies, Comic Books and Binge Watching Netflix. Mother of two beautiful black cats named Vader and Kylo. I think eating Popcorn at the movies should be mandatory, PS4 makes the best games ever and I’ll be talking about movies until the zombie apocalypse comes.

Double Tap Baby!

You can also follow me as Moviejunkies Cont’d on Facebook and watch my movie review videos on YouTube. For my longer bio you can click here. 

Leave a Reply