Bullet Points: Star Hunter
Movie posters are meant to do one thing; sell the film to potential audiences. Star Hunter is one that I randomly saw at the bottom of the page on YouTube. It’s the kind of place where a good poster or thumbnail is needed because all I had to go on was the picture and the title of the film.
You can see that Star Hunter is kind of a thrift store Predator. My second thought was that someone in the costume department got ahold of the Saurod costume from Masters of the Universe!
Synopsis: A group of high school kids get lost returning from a football game and wind up in the bad part of town in an even worse situation. An old blind guy welcomes them into his gun-filled apartment only to reveal that they’re soon to be the prey in an extraterrestrial hunting expedition. A pair of Star Hunters have landed on Earth and are focused on taking out each of the teenagers in a most violent way.
- Text: The movie starts with a bunch of text telling us about a race of hunters who travel around the galaxy killing for sport. It’s essentially just telling us the backstory of the Predator character. But it goes one further and mentions that these “Star Hunters” hunt in groups of two, using one as the lure and one as the killer. The specific Star Hunters in this movie were imprisoned on some penal colony but escaped and are now on Earth and chopping heads off. Oh yeah…and they’re being chased by some space police guy or something.
- Annoying “teens”: Some movies have one or two kids running around being annoying and dragging down the movie but Star Hunter has five! The kids end up riding on a bus apart from the rest of the football team/cheerleaders and their driver/coach somehow gets them lost in the hood. The bus breaks down thanks to the Hunters and they wander around the streets until they come upon Roddy McDowall being all blind, weird, and creepy. They soon find a room with a bunch of severed heads in it and the hunt is on.
- Not a good hunter: Whoever this dude on the movie poster is, he certainly isn’t a killing machine like the Predator. Hell, he’s not even a Saurod and that dude got offed by his own people! This cat fails so many times at killing these kids that it gets a bit sad. I actually felt sorry for him and his ability to not murder some cornered teenagers. He’s also the most easily distracted being in the galaxy. At one point, a couple of the kids take their shirts off and throw them in the corner of the room to distract him. Apparently his sense of smell is so good that he was drawn to it but so bad that he didn’t recognize their body odor.
- Not again: About half of the movie is the Hunter chasing the teens around and being killed, only to be rejuvenated by the weird voice and sound of Roddy McDowall. He probably gets killed at least three times and most of them were by the tiny cheerleader played by Rebecca Budig. I have to give her some credit because she was the only character who wasn’t a total waste of life. She pretty much immediately picks up a rifle, blasts away at the Hunter while everyone else runs, and even kills him multiple times. It came as no surprise to me that she would eventually be standing over the Hunter with an axe in her hands.
- Alien Tech: These alien hunters make it a point to hunt their targets by using whatever technology is available to them on that planet. Maybe they shouldn’t have done that. The Hunter is clearly a shitty marksman, even with a shotgun. And if you couple his terrible shooting with his complete lack of fire safety knowledge, the Hunter becomes maybe the worst since Jeffrey Jones in The Pest.
The movie might not deserve but I do have a couple of bonus Bullet Points:
- Rebecca Budig is not only badass but she was also cute as can be.
- What the hell is a “keylark”? I don’t think that even the Star Hunters knew.
- This movie could have been saved by a Good Samaritan homeless person. The Hunter could have taken out a few of the kids, toyed with them a little, and then be ultimately defeated with the help of the homeless Vet. It would have brought the movie back full circle from when the kids kept mentioning that they were in “the Hood” and that they didn’t see all the homelessness that they expected.
The Verdict: Star Hunters is just bad. I love when movies do their best to rip off the classic sci-fi movies of the 80’s like Predator or Aliens but this one was pretty terrible. You’ll notice that I mentioned the alien police dude only once and that was because he played such a minimal role that it became almost offensive when he finally tried to help. As much as I love my cheap alien killer movies I just wouldn’t be able to sleep soundly (no matter how much rum I drank) if I didn’t implore you to stay away from this pile.
