It's the Summer of 1974 and a group of four friends set out on the road for a weekend of hiking in the forests of northern Europe. At a truck stop they pick up a female hitchhiker who is constantly on the edge of hysteria. She's obviously terrified of something but they can't calm her down enough to get any sense out of her. Further along they stop at an obstruction in the road and are suddenly ambushed by a handful of middle-aged men with weapons. The hitchhiker is brutally killed before their disbelieving eyes and the four friends are rendered unconscious. They wake to find themselves tied-up deep in the forest. As they struggle to free themselves, they hear a distant hunting horn and realise the men who attacked them earlier are now hunting them for sport...

Manhunt is to all intents and purposes a violent adult horror version of Scooby-Doo. All they're missing to complete the picture is a perpetually cowardly dog. Perhaps the hitchhiker fills this part in human form. We have two men and two women in a Mystery Machine-type van. There's one man who sees himself as being in charge, his girlfriend who appears to dote after him, but is stronger than she looks, a quieter girl who constantly tries to talk sense into the other, and a comic-loving geek. In this respect the grouping of characters is not too dissimilar to those in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre either. They stop at an isolated place (always a mistake in these films), and wind-up the locals.

This film could have devolved into a violent run-around example of the ten green bottles rhyme, but it does at least have depth of character enough to show how people change when faced with extreme circumstances. So often their true nature is revealed.

The girlfriend (the Scooby-Doo Daphne) quickly learns that when it comes down to survival some people are only interested in themselves. In one scene where she appeals to her boyfriend for help he spurns her to save himself, and so later on when the roles are reversed she hesitates and then runs off into the trees, leaving him to his fate. She also has to adapt to survive. Her somewhat gentle nature gets an extreme makeover, as she is forced to kill to protect herself. The scenes where she comes across the hunters' camp are quite gripping. There is real tension when she hides by sharing a sleeping bag with a dead body.

Think a blood and guts retelling of Deliverance and you won't be far wrong.

6

Ty Power