“A thousand yards is my best shot.”

Drake’s rating: I’m pretty sure this is how 90% of Dungeons & Dragons games end

Drake’s review: Originally a short story for Collier’s magazine in 1924, “The Most Dangerous Game” was officially adapted into a film eight years later. Starring Joel McCrea and King Kong’s own Fay Wray, the 1932 movie was a fairly solid vehicle for the stars and a modest hit for the budget-minded RKO Studios.

Now while the story of man hunting man in the unforgiving wilderness is a solid basis for an action-thriller, it’s really the fact that this story is fairly cheap to film that led to countless unofficial adaptations being churned out over the years. Really, you just need a hunter, one or more hunted, an optional love interest, and a dangerous setting and you’re ready to go. And this is why exploitation filmmakers have used the idea time and again to turn out such titles as Bloodlust!, The Woman Hunt, Hard Target, and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity* in the decades since the original film hit the big screen.

Plus, since the short story entered the public domain in 2020, “The Most Dangerous Game” is now free to use for any and all creatives who want to draw upon the original source material for their efforts. Prolific writer and director Justin Lee, whose filmography is filled with titles such as Final Kill and Maneater, was the first one up to bat in 2022 with The Most Dangerous Game, an adaptation that moves the tale to a post-World War II setting and peoples it with recognizable actors like Judd Nelson and Tom Berenger.

So, as per the rules for this sort of dangerous gaming, three men are shipwrecked on a remote island. We don’t see the ship actually wreck, as that would cost money, but they wash up on shore and are found and taken in by a German aristocrat, Baron Von Wolf.

No, stop giggling. I’m serious, here. He’s Baron Von Wolf. I know, the name makes it sound like he should be the villain in some bad 1970s cartoon, but as played by Casper Van Dien, he’s…

Well, yeah. He’s exactly what you think of when you read the name ‘Baron Von Wolf.’ Van Dien doesn’t just play the Baron as German, he plays him as OUTRAGEOUSLY German. I mean, Werner Klemperer was no doubt looking on from the grave and saying, “Dude! Tone it down!”

And that’s part of the movie’s problem. Casper Van Dien seems to be having a great time hamming it up as Baron Von Wolf (*giggle*), but that campy enthusiasm doesn’t extend to anyone else in the cast. Judd Nelson could well have played off of Van Dien but his character is killed off early on, leaving the bulk of the protagonism up to… Chris Tamburello?

OK, no, I had no idea who Chris Tamburello was, either, but it turns out he was a contestant on MTV’s Real World series about 20 years ago and has done a bit of acting here and there since then. And while it would be easy to point an accusing finger at Tamburello and cite his lack of experience as the problem, but that’s not really the case. In fact, his performance as Sanger Rainsford, the man being hunted by Baron Von Wolf (*hee hee*) is fairly decent. Sanger is a combat veteran of World War II suffering from flashbacks to his violent past and Tamburello plays him as serious, yet troubled. It’s not an especially deep performance, but Tamburello plays it straight.

And, besides the obviously tiny budget, that’s the real problem. Tamburello’s Sanger Rainsford and Van Dien’s Baron Von Wolf (*snicker*) are in entirely different movies. The former is in a dramatic thriller and the latter is a super villain fit to menace Adam West in the ‘60s Batman TV show. Neither performance is awful, they just don’t belong together in the same film. And honestly, if you’re going to name your main baddie Baron Von Wolf (*guffaw*), then just lean into the camp and have fun with it, because there’s just no getting away from the outright hilarity of that name.

*Review forthcoming, obviously.

Intermission!

• The 1932 film actually fell into public domain in 1961, as the copyright was not renewed.
• Right, Tom Berenger is in this! But not for long. He plays Ben Colt. DOCTOR Ben Colt. I mean, c’mon, now, we have a Baron Von Wolf and a Ben Colt and we’re not in a 1930s Republic serial?
• The movie was shot in the Pacific Northwest and it looks like it. I was just waiting to spot a Starbucks logo through the trees, or a Sasquatch to jump out for a quick cameo.