Main cast: Travis Aaron Wade (John Hickman), Tina Huang (Brooks), Howard Johnson Jr (Ben), Trevor Bullock (Quincy), Rajiv Shah (Wayne), Jason Foster (Jake), Nick Tagas (Ricky), and Bryonn Bain (Hippie Stranger)
Director: James Isaac
When your uncle goes MIA while on a boar hunt in the woods, of course it makes perfect sense to bring all your friends – who are far from outdoor people – to that same area for a day of shooting hapless animals. That’s what John Hickman does in this movie. He invites his buddies Ben, Wayne, and Quincy to a weekend of booze and guns in his uncle’s cabin. The three friends are dismayed, however, when they discover at the last minute that John’s girlfriend Brooks is tagging along. She doesn’t get along with John’s friends at all.
In the woods, John meets his distant cousins Jake and Ricky, who are, predictably enough, crazy hillbillies. Ricky is especially crazy – he’s emotionally unstable, high on drugs, and trigger happy. They also learn that the woods are said to be the home of the Ripper – a very, very big boar that weighs several thousand pounds and is responsible for many people going MIA in the recent years. The guys wave that story off – the boar can’t exist, surely. Right?
For a low budget movie, Pig Hunt is surprisingly well-acted. Travis Aaron Wade is earnest and likable in his role and Tina Huang’s Brooks is bitchy yet funny without being abrasive. The rest of the cast play stereotypes, but the actors acquit themselves well. The lines are delivered well, the acting is never stiff or awkward, and punchlines, when delivered, make me laugh. It is especially amusing when Brooks turns out to be able to shoot better than any of the guys despite being the person most unfamiliar with firearms out of this lot. Yes, she’s pretty capable and can hold her own here, and I really like that.
The script is a mess. There is the boar, and then there are a weird commune of hippies with creepy intentions and a bunch of homicidal hillbillies, so much so that the boar ends up being more like an afterthought in this movie. Things just keep going wrong for our gang, and I have this feeling that the people behind this movie are just making things up as they go along. Despite the hot mess that is the script, however, the end result is a movie that is unexpectedly campy and fun.
If you watch this movie for the pig, you may be disappointed as the pig is, as I’ve mentioned, more of a background monster until later in the movie, and the pig looks awfully plastic here. As for gore, a lot of it is packed towards the end, while nudity is limited to several topless women and Mr Wade baring his rear end in the first few minutes of the movie. Instead of gore and T&A, watch this one for its entertaining silliness, and you’d probably like this one as much as I did.
