Hunt Club (2023) Movie Review: A Campy Eat-The-Rich B-Movie with a Feminist Twist

Hunt Club (2023) Movie Review: As far as cinema is concerned, the ultra-rich have been giving us a hard time lately. They lured a bunch of gullible South Korean working-class folks into playing a sadistic children’s game, drove a world-class chef played by Ralph Fiennes to murderous madness, and hunted Samara Weaving to preserve a ludicrous familial legacy. And now, in the recent Hunt Club (2023), starring Mena Suvari and Casper Van Dien, the rich take a bunch of unsuspecting women to hunt them on a privately owned island.

But in a campy B-movie twist, some of their victims might have received some combating skills from the likes of Sarah Connor and are prepared to fight back. While its premise sounds incredibly generic (and to an extent it is), Hunt Club is a surprisingly campy ride that benefits from director Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’s feminist gaze and the script’s over-the-top critique of toxic masculinity.

Hunt Club is set to release this week, but it might just have been released in the late 1990s or early 2000s as a direct-to-video feature. Its opening credits, generic musical cues, outrageous gore, amateur filming choices, and a game cast including the likes of veteran genre stars like Van Dien and Mickey Rourke perfectly pigeonhole the film into the kind of feature you’d usually associate with lowbrow entertainment. And while Hunt Club isn’t exactly a genre-bender, something about its handling of current gender politics does elevate it above other run-off-the-mill features in which Van Dien and Rourke have been starring lately.

Cassandra (Mena Suvari) is on holiday with her stiff girlfriend, Tessa (Maya Stojan), when a brief misunderstanding between the two leads Tessa to storm out of the café they are in. Seated alone, Cassandra meets up with a teenager, Jackson (Will Peltz), and his cowboy-hat-donning father, Carter (Casper Van Dien). Impressed by their courteous and chivalrous behavior, Cassandra agrees to accompany them on a hunting expedition on an island near the beach.

A tempting offer is attached to the trip—the hunter who wins gets a 100-grand reward. Joining the trio are a couple of male friends of Carter who have also brought in Lexi (Jessica Belkin), a broke college student looking to score some extra cash. When they arrive at the island, everything is like paradise—the beach, the expensive drinks, and a club night. But the ominous musical cues have already alerted the audiences of the nefarious intentions of these rich white men. Something just does not seem right.

Cassandra soon realizes that she has been brought here to function as prey for the demented game orchestrated by these men. When she is thrown into an old barn with other vulnerable women, Cassandra realizes that a traumatic incident from her past might just be connected to this devilish cult of men. Meanwhile, the headstrong Tessa has kayaked her way into the island, and the haughty guys are about to receive a taste of their own medicine.

Even though the central appeal of Hunt Club is badass women fighting abhorring men, the film also surprisingly devotes enough time towards character development—which is central to its feminist politics. The major conflict of the plot involves Jackson’s inhibition in participating in his father’s sick ritual of christening him into a real man. His father, the leader of the clan, delivers sermons that might as well have been derived from any alpha-male podcast today.

There are lines uttered by these sexist schmucks about refuting inclusivity, reclaiming masculinity, and how the current gender discourse has emasculated a generation of men. Although the script by David Lipper (who co-stars in the film) and John Saunders does not engage in anything beyond the Twitter threads mentioning the same, it certainly aids in giving our misogynistic villains enough personality and reasons for us to cheer when the women begin to chop them off one by one.

Director Elizabeth Blake-Thomas also subtly subvert several conventions of a narrative of this sort. In a rape sequence involving Belkin’s character, Thomas pans the camera away from the space—refusing to pave room for male titillation that is often the scopophilic tendency of scenes of sexual assault abounding in films of the genre. Not to mention the film’s radical decision to employ a lesbian woman and her bisexual lover as kickass protagonists!

More surprisingly, the film does not just merely invoke lesbians to account for a masculinized femininity but takes enough care to contextualize their struggles within legal homophobia—this choice alone makes the film feel a breath of fresh air. Despite this feminist awareness from Blake-Thomas, she fails to inject momentum into her payback sequences, which significantly subtracts from the cathartic appeal of the film.

From trite gore sequences to hammy editing, Hunt Club ultimately struggles to successfully deliver on its central premise of women turning the tables on vile men. Adding to this are a bunch of frustrating character decisions and lackluster payback sequences—which might disappoint fans of the genre who are just here for the action and not for ideological interventions. A great point of comparison would be Coralie Foraget’s brilliant Revenge (2017) which executed its standard premise with finesse—earning every bit of its over-the-top action sequences. By playing safely on the formal front, Hunt Club derails the potential of its premise as well as the actors committed to it.

Talking of actors, Mena Suvari plays her part with utmost conviction, taking her assignment seriously even though the film around her is situated in campy roots. Van Dien plays a villainized version of the hypermasculine heroes that he frequently played in the 1990s, with the same energy. However, this time, his impassioned sermons deconstruct masculinity rather than embrace it.

At the same time, Academy Award nominee Mickey Rourke, playing the island’s caretaker and another vile misogynist, has one of the most thankless roles in the entire cast—the part seems a paycheck gig for Rourke rather than a genuine investment in the project.

Hunt Club does not fully exploit the potential of its premise—a fault that might ultimately work against the film’s success. But somewhere in the future, a college film major looking at feminist interventions in B-movies will find much to appreciate in Hunt Club and its urgent examination of toxic masculinity through a campy queer lens.

Also, Read: The Slumber Party Massacre (1982): Movie Ending, Explained – Who Kills Russ Thorn And How?

Hunt Club Movie (2023) Links – IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes
Hunt Club Movie (2023) Cast – Mena Suvari, Casper Van Dien, Will Peltz

Where to watch Hunt Club