THE HUNTING PARTY showed its pustular face in 1971, nestling like a molting rattlesnake at spot #95 in the box office lineup. The year was besmirched by as crummy an array of well poisoners—in this case infecting westerns—as you could retch up, the lousiest ever for the durable—if wounded—genre. This spirit-sapping entry shows, if nothing else, that talented actors can sometimes bite into tasteless fare, and after post-meal ralphing up the rancid ingredients realize it may be time to change agents. *

Wealthy cattleman ‘Brandt Ruger’ (Gene Hackman) decides abusing his schoolteacher wife ‘Melissa’ (Candice Bergen) isn’t enough to slake his domination drive. He invites a slew of rich pals (all craven, of course) to go on a hunt, using his arsenal of new, high-powered rifles with telescopic sites. The ‘game’ they’re after changes form when scuzzy rustler ‘Frank Calder’ (Oliver Reed) and his gang (scum, with one exception) kidnap Melissa. Courtesy of the truly stupid screenplay (Gilbert Ralston, Lou Morheim and William W. Norton, guilty as charged) and sledgehammer direction (Don Medford, stick with TV) Melissa finds being raped by Calder (his men try, too) somehow preferable to her husband’s version, and vicious Brandt and his giddy brutes get off by long-range sniping at Calder’s crew of creeps. Misogyny on parade. Gore galore. Eventually, everyone dies. The End.

A career nadir for all. Hackman for example, had 23 movies that didn’t make as much money as this did (and it was a bomb), but none ranked lower on the quality scale. Performance-wise, Bergen out-shamed herself the year before with Soldier Blue, but why she then thought the degradation in this was worth undergoing remains a mystery. She and Hackman would saddle up a few years later for Bite The Bullet. a decent western. Excess, thy name is Oliver: miscast Reed wallows in it: likely helped by being 100-proofed 90% of the time. The peach-eating scene he shares with Candy and Mitch Ryan is one of the more ridiculous, grotesquely out-of-place you could find in any movie outside of a comedy made by & for cannibals.

Cost factor: $1,600,000. Return tally: $2,700,000. Shot in Spain, mostly in the Tabernas Desert of Andalusia. 111 minutes of logic-absent, blood-spattering, venomously sexist crud that will add nothing positive, revealing or helpful—let alone entertaining—to your life. The sort of show that would go over big in maximum security prisons. With Simon Oakland, Mitchell Ryan (the one halfway decent male character), L.Q. Jones, G.D. Spradlin, Ronald Howard, William Watson and Rayford Barnes.

* How the Rest Were Done—not out, but certainly down, The Western as a reflection of the USA (before a once-proud shorthand seig heiled into “U-S-A! U-S-A!”) in 1971 had as many wounds as the ironic ‘heroes’ of The Wild Bunch. Reviews of The Hunting Party—tracking down a positive one is like looking for an affordable apartment—dutifully regurgitate tracing the Peckinpah classic from 1969. But Sam’s blood ballet was graced by—among other virtues, like sheer film-making skill—the possibility of redemption thru self-sacrifice, catharsis with conscience, something exploitative “egg-sucking, chicken stealing gutter trash” like The Hunting Party couldn’t nick with a telescopic site. Recipe: a nation riven by revulsion over the horrific and needless Vietnam war, a fault-opening, blame-shifting society that rejected Richard Nixon in 1960 was now saddled with him in the top job, the gobble harvesting of cash at least as much a driving force behind the marketing of art as creativity and passion, allowing cheapjack poseurs rein to trot out manure socks labeled as daringly ‘revisionist’ but that were really just lazy ripoffs. The once-ebullient genre self-medicated with leeches. Joining the sick six-shootin’ suicide squad in ’71 were Lawman, Red Sun, Hannie Caulder, “something big“, Catlow and ‘Doc’.