Michael_Elliott Turkey Shoot (1982) * 1/2 (out of 4) Released as ESCAPE 2000 in America, this Australian production is yet another take off on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. This time out political prisoners are sent to a camp where they're going to be turned "normal" but the boss man realizes that there are too many prisoners so he offers a group their freedom if they can escape him as a hunter. Two such people (Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey) decide to take the challenge. I had never heard of this film before watching the documentary NOT QUITE Hollywood and there's no question that the clips in that film made this seem a lot more entertaining than it actually is. I think fans of cult movies will probably find some entertainment here but those expecting a lot of exploitation are probably going to be disappointed. For starters, the film lost thirteen-minutes when it was released in America and we've been told that it was the violence that was cut in order to get an R-rating. Even in its uncut form this film really isn't all that violent so I'm wondering how true this is or if perhaps it was a bunch of the boring dialogue sequences that were trimmed. There's some nudity thrown in with a couple shower scenes but the highlight or campy moment of the film belongs to Hussey who takes a shower with her clothes on! What violence we do get mainly happens towards the end but there's really none so memorable that you'd recommend the film on that alone. Another problem is that at 93-minutes the film goes on way too long and in reality it runs out of gas around the fifty-minute mark, well before the actual game begins so there's simply not enough energy or excitement to carry the film. Railsback and Hussey are clearly just in this thing for the money but both of them seem to be giving it their all. The scene stealer is without question Roger Ward as the lumbering abuser. TURKEY SHOOT is a pretty bad movie that has gained a cult following over the years but I think most are just going to see a boring action picture with more hype than anything else.

the_wolf_imdb This movie is really not bright, not clever and even very naive. It tries to show "brutality of future totalistic camp" but it pales in comparison to harsh reality of real communistic and Nazi camps. In comparison to them this camp looks like holiday resort (except maybe for the "gasoline football").As a show that could teach the viewer something about survival it sucks hard. Basically, the "heroes" do almost everything wrong. The movie may act a a tutorial "how not to survive the turkey shoot". How a man can, for example, to lose firefight against the bow equipped woman when he has automatic rifle with a scope? He never tries to "camp and snipe" which would be probably the most efficient solution here. He never even tries to cover himself with suppressive fire. He just plays a target. Uh.These "heroes" do almost everything wrong - they try to run from the car on open area. The "hero" tries to run from a guy with a rifle with a scope on a rocky waterfall (yes it was pretty but you can hardly invent more stupid solution when there are woods all around). The heroes seem to be unable to stay still when the enemies are around so even if they try to hide it never works.The woman hero has enough time to enjoy relaxing bath instead of using mud for camouflage - and of course not a single hero ever trues to actually use any camouflage so they run in yellow pajamas in mostly gray and brown area. In communistic countries there were basic lessons for kids how to move in the environment unnoticed so I guess that every 10 years old would have better chance to survive the hunt. The heroes seem to like open spaces and running here in pairs hand in hand as they would be playing in the kindergarten.So - the movie is less than useful as a realistic lesson how to survive the hunt. It is just nasty, unrealistic and incoherent fun. Not particularly bright, violent, incoherent but somehow watchable.

Tortoisemogwai Ozploitation. Exploitations colloquial cousin. During a period Ozploitation films where popular and Turkey Shoot is a notable success amongst some of the trash of the Australians attempts at exploitation films. It's fairly controversial 'The Most Dangerous Game' approach has helped it gain a fair amount of cult following over the years and all though it doesn't hold up in the slightest to later films with the same honourable human hunting intentions such as Battle Royale and more recently Exam it still holds up nicely as the definitive Australian approach to the subject matter.Turkey Shoot takes place in a dystopian future, now past, where 'social deviants' can be re-educated and returned to society through concentration style camps. The films narrative starts by following the lives of three newly arrived inmates and their view upon the extreme violence and toil prisoners suffer throughout their stay, mostly beatings and depravity by a hugely entertaining large bold Australian with a handlebar moustache. In the second half of the film the camps owners, safari British style hunters, round up five one-dimensional, to the extreme, characters (we have whore, rebel, rebel mark 2, bad guy and vulnerable) and force them to participate for their possible freedom in a human hunt, staring themselves, called Turkey Shoot. When faced with the dilemma of what to do when hunted each character uses their own personality to forge different ways of dealing with the situation and in true exploitation style extreme violence bordering on hilarity ensues.Brain Trenchard-Smiths direction is riddled with plot holes but the right ingredients are there; i.e. gore, nudity and some kind of circus freak werewolf guy. What makes the film and its direction good is that it doesn't treat itself seriously, there is no character development or even some kind of message or lesson learnt by the end of the film. It just wants to exist to entertain its audience and being a film exploiting violence make money. All the factors that would bother audiences in drama films don't matter in Turkey Shoot and can be disregarded as its honesty in being a technically bad film tells the audience that it wasn't made to win awards or be visually or musically stunning.Naturally the acting is bad. But as all the characters only have one characteristic for the actors to act in the characters are appealing as comical relief from the films serious, even if not shown in the film, underlying story. The English actors are great in playing their roles as the bad guys in typical posh ascents to stress that they are 'better people' than the Ausies. The person that stands out most however is Roger Ward as Chief Guard Ritter, his enthusiastic approach to the violent sadistic character fits perfectly creating a highly memorable giant Australian with a handlebar moustache. This along with the werewolf placed in the film just to chew peoples toes and such are probably the most imaginative parts of the film and make it memorable over many other films in its genre.Visually and musically there is little going on. The film is shot and edited nicely enough but sometimes its conventional style makes you think that the director could have done so much more. The aspect that saves its dull camera work comes from the variety of lush Australian landscapes ranging from the sandy concentration camp style centre to woods, fields of long dry grass and beaches. This helps the film as a whole always capture your interest and I'm in no doubt that without this kind of variety in the sets landscapes the film might seem very boring indeed. Overall Turkey Shoot holds up as an entertaining popcorn flick and with its blend of extreme violence and lovable characters (for the most part, villain-wise anyway) makes a entirely watchable exploitation movie. If you are a fan of the The Most Dangerous Game style situations it might boost itself to a must watch.

MARIO GAUCI Last week when I stepped into my local DVD rental store, its proprietor (a film-buff friend of mine) gleefully approached me and said that he had just acquired something that would definitely appeal to my cinematic tastebuds. He proceeded to show me a DVD sleeve in German for a film starring Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey and Michael Craig which, while I didn't immediately recognize, its lurid poster promised that goofy fun was to be had by watching this flick. Even when I held the sleeve in my hand and discovered on the keepcase's insert that the film's original title was TURKEY SHOOT, it rang few bells at the time but, apart from that cast, it was the fact that (from what I could make out) the film was yet another adaptation of that horror/adventure perennial "The Most Dangerous Game", that was the main element which made me rent it immediately. While looking up the film on IMDb as soon as I got back home, I realized that what I had acquired was ESCAPE 2000 – a cultish Australian sci-fi film which I knew had been released on R1 DVD by Anchor Bay and was awarded the lazy BOMB rating from our good friends, Mr. Leonard Maltin et al… Anyhow, the film starts with a credit sequence showing real news footage of various street conflicts which had occurred in various parts of the world over the years being passed off as the ongoing riots sparked by the dictatorial rule of some anonymous totalitarian state. The subsequent flashbacks introduce us to the three major characters – Railsback, Hussey and luscious blonde Carmen Duncan – and shows how they came to be herded off to the island colony lorded over by the white-haired sadist Thatcher (Craig); indeed, another alternate and ludicrous moniker for the film was BLOOD CAMP THATCHER (no prizes for guessing the reason behind the choice of just that surname being accorded to the main villain of the piece)! This prison camp contains every dissident known to oppose the current reigning regime but we only really get to meet two other prisoners and a handful of 'eccentric' wardens. In any case, it soon transpires that Craig and his four associates – a high-ranking officer of the ruling party, a lesbian lady with a penchant for shooting exploding arrows, a fey excavator-driving young man and his (I kid you not) wrestler-werewolf lackey-cum-pet!! – organize the occasional hunt for a quintet of their own prisoners through the nearby jungle for sport and relaxation purposes. Speaking of the sexual orientation of two of these aristocratic predators, maybe the director was attempting some kind of political message here (given that homosexuality is itself forbidden by law in this society and prisoners are dubbed 'deviants') but all this did for me was add to the already high camp quotient of the film! Being more of an exploitation than a sci-fi piece, it follows that gore and nudity feature in the film's ingredients: the latter mostly makes itself felt inside the prison walls with the wardens leering over the naked girls banded together while taking forced showers but the former is more to the forefront with one of the hunted prisoners having his back broken by a moving vehicle, the werewolf being accidentally torn in half (literally) by his own keeper's excavator, the latter gets his own come-uppance by a machete blow to the head which splits his skull in two, the lady having one of her own exploding arrows shoved into her throat and capped by her head being blown off, Thatcher expiring in a hail of machine-gun fire which ludicrously tears him to shreds, etc. Apparently (and unsurprisingly), this film has been endorsed by Quentin Tarantino of late since its British director earned a "Special Thanks" in the credits of the latter's DEATH-PROOF [2007]) but looking through his filmography, it's clear that this was his only claim to fame (and a very relative one at that). The rest of the film crew, however, is more interesting in that it includes executive producers David Hemmings and John Daly (who, incidentally, has just passed away) and composer Brian May (of the MAD MAX series, rather than popular rock band Queen's curly-haired guitarist).While the film can't hope to dispel the memories of the original 1932 Merian C. Cooper-David O.Selznick production of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, its solid remake from The Boulting Brothers RUN FOR THE SUN (1956; with Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard) or Cornel Wilde's similar human-hunt opus THE NAKED PREY (1966), I have to admit to being entertained by it and, in view of the "Special Edition" nature of the Another World DVD I rented – which includes the director's audio commentary, alternate title sequences and a host of trailers for other exploitation movies like PATRICK (1978) and THE NEW BABRBARIANS (1982; which promises to be an even bigger hoot than the film under review) – I have subsequently added the bloody, goofy thing to my collection!