Backwoods horror is hard to get wrong as the basic ingredients are quite simple.  All one needs are some dirty hillbillies looking to possibly do a little raping and some definite killing and a bunch of hapless victims on the receiving end of it. Hunter’s Blood has that and more and turns out to be one of the better films in the genre.

Directed by Robert C. Hughes, the man begins it all with a bunch of guys looking to go on a hunting trip and they do so quite a ways off the grid, so to speak. They want the real experience and while there, they meet some of the locals whom they are both fascinated with and intimidated by. Because of that, they find themselves in some trouble and little do they know it, they stirred up the hornet’s nest as the locals have now fixated upon them. After a tense car chase, the hunters think they are in the clear but are soon visited in the middle of the by the same men and they are looking for a little more than payback. Once again, the hunters avoid a terrible fate but after a little hunting the next day, they run into the poachers whom they cannot seem to avoid and things go downhill from there. What follows is the hunters becoming the hunted, blood and gore and death and everything that one wants to see in a picture like this.

The great thing about this picture is that Hughes starts things out a little slowly, letting the movie breathe a little and giving time for the audience to become familiar with the characters so that when it eventually comes time to start killing them off, it means a little more. That being said, aside from a couple of them, they are not the best that mankind has to offer so even though what Hughes had planned works, seeing a certain few of them go is not a problem. Soon enough, the tension and the pace pick up, specifically at that moment when one of the hunters played by Clu Gulager picks a fight with the redneck poachers and ends up squaring off against Billy Drago who always seems to play the slimiest of villains. After an arrest, an escape and a couple of mutilated cops, the hunters are on the run and the horror that was hinted at earlier on in the film is now firmly cemented and as frightening as one would think it to be. Hughes not only uses the poachers and the threat they present to get this horror across but the locale as well as being isolated in the forest, away from everything the men know as familiar can make things just as scary as anything else.

The cast is solid, most especially the aforementioned Drago while Kim Delaney puts in an appearance and even Joey Travolta, John’s older brother. The score was good, the photography and editing sharp and the amount of gore and blood just enough to really drive home that this is a horror movie. All of that was enough to take what might have been just an average story and even one that might have been a little cliched and make it better and on top of that, truly entertaining.

3.5 out of 5