When the call is sounded from a nearby castle, a monster somewhere needs killing.
I’ve watched quite a few recent VOD releases lately in a search for another diamond like Prospect, and The Head Hunter is probably the best of the lot. While it’s obvious that budgetary constraints forced all but one of the battles off-screen, focusing on their aftermath and the day to day activities of the protagonist pays off because of Christopher Rygh’s commitment to the material. As mentioned in the review, his body ain’t too bad, either (somebody tell Christien).
It’s not a movie that demands rapt attention. It’s small and simple. What little dialog there is could be completely removed and it would still be easily understood. The only real misstep here is Downey’s insistence on showing Rygh toss that plastic skeleton around. I’ve seen enough ultra-low budget productions to give the quality of the scene a pass, but it just felt unnecessary considering that the movie had already convinced me that seeing its fights wasn’t important.
A modest review for a modest movie? I was eyeing this one, so I guess I’ll actually watch it now.
“The things are everyone[where].” Found towards the end of the second paragraph. When I first read it, I thought you and the movie were going in a totally different direction.
I suspect that his Thankskilling tendency at work. I had higher hopes for what the head would do once it got the corpse, but there simply wasn’t enough payoff. And, yeah, if you can’t do your being-attacked-by-a-small-thing without the force and power of the face-hugger in Alien, I wish you wouldn’t bother. I don’t need to see people holding something against their neck, writhing around pretending to be attacked.
Yikes. good catch! You win editing MVP!
-Tom
Is the general sense that The Witcher will be bad/poor quality? I haven’t been following it. Very disappointing.
I think I missed something with the ending. Can someone explain it to me?
Don’t want to be to specific and I’m not sure about how to use spoiler tags.
I think it’s pretty straightforward what happens in the end. If you’re searching for how, I don’t think that’s something that can be gleaned from the information provided by the movie. As far as why, I think that’s straightforward, too. I can’t imagine that it was anything more than Downey thought it would be cool.
Spoiler tags are just the word spoiler in brackets. Then close it with this: [/spoiler].
The ending was basically that the soul arrow accidentally worked as intended.
-Tom
It is with the Gamer Gate set, which made me cringe when I saw that title.
The Witcher series that’s coming may well be bad. It could very well suffer from the kind of episode padding nonsense that has plagued other Netflix action/adventure series, like the Marvel stuff they’ve done.
But for now…all that’s known is some of the casting, a makeup test with Henry Cavill, and a couple of fairly blurry on-set smartphone snaps surreptitiously taken.
Well, I have no idea about any general sense, and I couldn’t care less what the Gamer Gate set thinks. But I’ve suffered through enough Netflix disappointments to keep my expectations low.
Oh, we know a lot more than that! Looks to me like all the casting is posted on IMDB. And if you want to know the creative pedigree of the show, and get a sense for how Netflix is handling it, check out this list:
Netflix seems to think Geralt is a superhero. You can also check the credits for the writers of all eight episodes. That’s a lot of information, and not much of it implies something that’s going to appeal to what I like about the videogames. But I would love to be wrong.
-Tom
Ok, I believe I missed something as I was shopping for used cars on my computer as I half watched the movie with my sister in law. That was the first time I saw the “soul arrow. And what did it hit? I couldn’t identify the mass of fur it punctured.”
So did CDPR – who made Geralt a sort of Arkham Knight to great effect – and that worked out OK.
At any rate, while it’s fair to be skeptical given the pedigree behind it, what I meant to convey is that there’s quite the layer of secrecy still draped over much of this – no official on-set stills, not so much as a teaser trailer yet. I’m waiting to see how “on the cheap” it all looks, for instance.
I am slightly more optimistic than pessimistic about the Netflix show, because Tom Baginski is exec producer on it and he directed all three Witcher games intros and is a huge fan of the books. Lauren Hissrich is too, but with her I don’t know about her writing chops, haven’t seen West Wing or Defenders.
Still, hopefully she can adapt Sapkowski’s writing well enough.
I am definitely not sure about Cavill, maybe he’ll surprise somehow.