Popular reviews

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 14

  80

  The minimalist SKYRIM adaptation you've been waiting for. A natural world of specters, skeletons, monsters, and grief. Balanced as a poetic and delirious character study, The Head Hunter only cost $30,000 and yet it whispers with authenticity and anguish. A nearly wordless experience that is a defining no-budget victory. Would make for a killer double-feature with Hard to Be a God.

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  Review by pd187 ★★★½ 2

  OFFSCREEN: THE MOVIE

  cut this down to 27 min & you got the best segment of any VOD horror anthology, hands down..... as it is we get some rubber monster action at the end & lord knows i respect a serious effort from the writer/director of thankskilling 3 (enid coleslaw voice "those are our people....") but this is never as fun to watch as it is to say the title in a lil scrappy voice.. i call bullshit on the $30k budget too

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  Review by Jayson Kennedy ★★★ 1

  This dungeon crawling barbarian's quest for the head of the ghoul that slain his daughter nails one of the most important qualities that low budget productions should strive for. It never lets its ambitions exceed its means. Modest fantasy films should always reach; however, this can be detrimental revealing limitations that pull one out of the experience. There's a fine art to accepting and mastering work within such confines.

  So The Head Hunter pares down to focus on narrative development and technical execution. Norms aren't obeyed, like conforming to the usual movie length of an hour and a half. We get a trim fighting duration of seventy minutes. Dialogue is sparse with motivations entrusted to viewers to decipher. Battles between…

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  Review by Freyr ★★★★

  Spectacular production design. Seriously, a $30K budget? I've seen multi-million dollar films that don't look half this good. The sets, costumes, makeup, and creature designs are all fucking rad. The score is ominous, the landscapes stunning, and Christopher Rygh puts on a great performance. It smartly hides a lot of action off screen, but still delivers killer visuals, and an overwhelming atmosphere. The only thing that could be held against it is being on the slow side, but with a mere 72 minute runtime, all the while looking this awesome, it's hardly noticeable.

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  Review by DreamScape40 ★★★½

  Not having any background to this story I thought it was
  done fairly well.
  Really liked the cinematography as it boggles your mind in certain sequences.
  Loved the costumes and those monster heads!
  Some pretty awesome heads there.

  Sound alone also was a strong focal point.

  💀

  - Previous watch: HULU
  Brittany Murphy: An ID Mystery
  Well goodness that was twisted and sad.

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  Review by More_Badass ★★★½ 2

  The Head Hunter might have worked better as a short film. Or rather a shorter film, since it isn't even 80 minutes. Low-budget genre fare with a main cast of one, it fits snugly in that short film mold with a very minimalist premise and a singular focus. An isolated monster hunter finally gets the chance to avenge his daughter; that's the plot of The Head Hunter.

  But the extended duration also works in the movie's favor. It's a one-man show, and Christopher Rygh as the titular character absolutely sells the monotonous preparation, the painful aftermaths, the loneliness and festering grief. The pacing lets The Head Hunter establish a lived-in atmospheric corner of a larger world, through the protagonist's messy…

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  Review by sirvived ★★★

  This was a lot better than expected. I went into this expecting a brutal, violent, action-packed horror but what I got is a slow survival/revenge tale instead. But I'm incredibly impressed by how compelling this film actually is. There's a lot to admire in this low-budget effort. The story while minimal works incredibly well and what it lacks in action makes up for overbearing sense of dread and alluring atmosphere of the period it is set in. It does feel like a short film that is stretched out to fit a feature length, but for me its 72-minute runtime is still tolerable. This obviously won’t work for everyone but I highly recommend this to anyone who's looking for a slow-burn revenge story.

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  Review by _Jack_ ★★★★½ 4

  Exemplary fucking filmmaking - knowing exactly what you are capable of with the budget you have, and making every single choice made out of practicality (namely, showing almost nothing except for the aftermath of the Head Hunter's gruesome journeys and the conquests of his past) one that is also made creatively. Darkness, selective focus, and careful shot composition are THE HEAD HUNTER's secret weapons, and it uses them with lethal efficiency.

  The true victory of the film is the production design. Authenticity burst from every frame; the rough leather and rusty chains, the greasy dessicated bait carcasses, the slimes and sludges and blood and dirt mixing together on the stone, the wall of severed monster heads, and much, much more.…

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★ 1

  Oh, a dungeons and dragons movie where it leaves most of the lore building up to your imagination, awesome, very cool, but I can't get over the most immersion breaking element in this which is the fact that the creature kept hissing "awww--sss yeeaaah" like its mere existence alone is something worth celebrating, maybe it's just glad to be alive who knows? #2

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  Review by Mondo Cinema ★★ 1

  No monsters, not really.
  Just some asshole walking around the woods with a torch for 112 minutes, yippie skippy!

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  Review by Ryne Walley ★★★ 4

  Efficient and evocative, this eerie slice of low-budget dark fantasy impresses highly as a fable of lonesome, bloody revenge. Though the very end does leave a little to be desired given the immensely atmospheric journey there, writer/director Jordan Downey's The Head Hunter remains mighty admirable considering the scope of the imaginative material and meagerness of the budget. He and his fellow creatives make effective use of $30,000 to conjure a tattered tale revolving around an anguished father of lethal expertise in a wilderness of terrible evil. The full experience is deliberate in pace and style, firmly proving that potent horror is earned through filmmaking that respects both the story and audiences it services.

  With any hope, the cast and crew…

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  Review by MrSneakyMan ★★★½ 1

  A grimdark fantasy tone poem. Sparse and cold. Bloody and metal. Maybe a dozen lines are spoken. I appreciate the brevity at 72 minutes, but it feels a clip longer. It's a choice to keep nearly all the action off-screen. But the fact that it is means all we get is some of the travel and nearly all of the downtime. Whole lot of grunting and yelling and screaming and brewing and hammering and some sawing (at the end, ha!). We get all of that as our hardened anti-hero wallows in his cold and painful existence, shunning society, speaking only to his kills and his daughter's grave.

  It's cool and it looks great, but not something I see myself re-visiting.