THE HUNTED (Philippines, 1970)

Yes, yes, I know, don't tell me; that's SCREEN GRAB OVERKILL!! But it's just that Cesar J. Amigo's THE HUNTED from the Philippines, 1970, is sooo extremely rare that I thought it was justified! So kill me.

Just a word on the picture quality; If you think the screen grabs look slightly blurry you got that right! It's just my (our) luck that the only release of this film is a crappy Greek VHS! Not that all Greek video tapes are crappy, of course, but this one sure is! The picture looks like it's overmodulated like in the old days when you'd attempt to make a vhs-to-vhs dupe and the frequencies were too close. Actually, it's so bad I thought someone had switched the original tape with a dupe but that's not the case. Not that it would make much of a difference cos I may never find another copy anyway. Maybe it's possible to make a dvdr copy and remove the distorted image but if it is I have no idea of how to. I grew up in the jungle. Among apes.
Anyway, having watched my way thru many a pan & scan-un-dubbed-un-subbed-pixelating-taped off a VHS Malay video-cd I can say with confidence it's not that bad sitting thru this film. Okay, so it's fairly bad but the film makes up for it!

(plot run down & shit still to come)

The Hunted (Philippines, 1970)

I won this Filipino movie on eBay today. As with so many of these films info, any kind of info, is scarce. The director is Cesar Amigo who also wrote the screenplay for THE BLOOD DRINKERS (1964) which is one of my favourite Filipino films. Charito Solis, Mario Monte and Fred Galang are all in the movie and according to the Greek seller (Onar-Bill) it is a:

[...] nasty exploitation revenge colossus, with tons of gratuitious violence plus some trashy fulci-ish gore, like acid on face that melts like a pizza!!!

I certainly hope he's right. xD


Here the original Filipino poster. Thanks to Andrew for making me aware of it. It comes courtesy of the amazing Video48 blog in the Philippines.