The Eternal Love Affair With The Most Dangerous Game Premise
Turkey Shoot (1982), directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, is an Australian film shot in Queensland, with various interesting types of vegetation and landscape, including a beach scene. The beautiful scenery, including jungle, gullies with roaring waterfalls, lush valleys, agricultural fields, make the movie a plus for nature watchers, but the movie lacks when it comes to something we're supposed to take seriously.
A totalitarian near future state puts "deviants" in work camps out in the country for political dissent and anything else deemed unpalatable by the state, including cases of mistaken intent, like the situation faced by Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey). During a riot, a man chased by the police sought refuge in her shop. The cops assumed she was sheltering him and arrested her. She finds herself, after being drugged, in the back of a van with Jennifer (Carmen Duncan) and Paul Anders (Steve Railsback). The doors open on a work camp somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The prisoners all wear yellow one-piece suits. The guards are all brutes. The camp commandant, Charles Thatcher (note the last name, for Margaret Thatcher was in charge of the UK at the time) is a technocratic degenerate locked into the mechanisms of power that run the state.
Thatcher, along with three who pay to participate, goes on a regular hunting expedition against selected prisoners given the chance to evade getting killed for twenty-four hours. If they make it, they'll be set free, or that's the idea.
After much abuse by the guards, Jennifer, Paul, and Chris, along with two others, make the desperate attempt to avoid getting killed in various novel ways devised by Thatcher and his friends. One of them has with him a kind of lycanthrope with slits for pupils. The mutant thing wears human clothes and does as he's told, delighting in causing pain. This man and his wolf-man drive around in a bulldozer. The woman hunter uses a crossbow firing bolts with explosives attached. She's vicious to the core and apparently quite rich.
This shitty society is run by wealthy amoral cretins who exploit the lives and freedoms of the underclasses. Sounds familiar.
Paul Anders has in the past escaped from a few of these places. He's a troublemaker and is singled out often for extra punishment. He helps Chris a great deal, saves her life on the outside of the prison camp. He also commits himself to eliminating the motherfuckers hunting him one by one. It's sort of fun to watch the villains suffer and die. None of them go peacefully and without pain.
Once the riot at the prison starts, guards alert the home base on the mainland (the prison is on an island). Fighter bombers are scrambled with orders to blow the place to smithereens unless provided with a cease and desist code by Thatcher, who, by this point, has been shot to pieces by Paul Anders firing a heavy machine gun. Delicate Olivia Hussey (Juliet in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet) as Chris, too, kills a bunch of guards with a machine gun, looking out of place as a combat fighter, but by this point in the film it doesn't matter. If the viewer has reached the climax of Turkey Shoot, it's likely he or she has decided to just sit it out until the end.
Vic Neptune
Turkey Shoot (1982), directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, is an Australian film shot in Queensland, with various interesting types of vegetation and landscape, including a beach scene. The beautiful scenery, including jungle, gullies with roaring waterfalls, lush valleys, agricultural fields, make the movie a plus for nature watchers, but the movie lacks when it comes to something we're supposed to take seriously.
A totalitarian near future state puts "deviants" in work camps out in the country for political dissent and anything else deemed unpalatable by the state, including cases of mistaken intent, like the situation faced by Chris Walters (Olivia Hussey). During a riot, a man chased by the police sought refuge in her shop. The cops assumed she was sheltering him and arrested her. She finds herself, after being drugged, in the back of a van with Jennifer (Carmen Duncan) and Paul Anders (Steve Railsback). The doors open on a work camp somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The prisoners all wear yellow one-piece suits. The guards are all brutes. The camp commandant, Charles Thatcher (note the last name, for Margaret Thatcher was in charge of the UK at the time) is a technocratic degenerate locked into the mechanisms of power that run the state.
Thatcher, along with three who pay to participate, goes on a regular hunting expedition against selected prisoners given the chance to evade getting killed for twenty-four hours. If they make it, they'll be set free, or that's the idea.
After much abuse by the guards, Jennifer, Paul, and Chris, along with two others, make the desperate attempt to avoid getting killed in various novel ways devised by Thatcher and his friends. One of them has with him a kind of lycanthrope with slits for pupils. The mutant thing wears human clothes and does as he's told, delighting in causing pain. This man and his wolf-man drive around in a bulldozer. The woman hunter uses a crossbow firing bolts with explosives attached. She's vicious to the core and apparently quite rich.
This shitty society is run by wealthy amoral cretins who exploit the lives and freedoms of the underclasses. Sounds familiar.
Paul Anders has in the past escaped from a few of these places. He's a troublemaker and is singled out often for extra punishment. He helps Chris a great deal, saves her life on the outside of the prison camp. He also commits himself to eliminating the motherfuckers hunting him one by one. It's sort of fun to watch the villains suffer and die. None of them go peacefully and without pain.
Once the riot at the prison starts, guards alert the home base on the mainland (the prison is on an island). Fighter bombers are scrambled with orders to blow the place to smithereens unless provided with a cease and desist code by Thatcher, who, by this point, has been shot to pieces by Paul Anders firing a heavy machine gun. Delicate Olivia Hussey (Juliet in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet) as Chris, too, kills a bunch of guards with a machine gun, looking out of place as a combat fighter, but by this point in the film it doesn't matter. If the viewer has reached the climax of Turkey Shoot, it's likely he or she has decided to just sit it out until the end.
Vic Neptune
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