Saw Turkey Shoot, AKA Escape 2000. It shares many similarities to the Death Race films: heavy-handed allegory about oppressive society and the violent overthrow of same. This one is set in a prison camp which is hastily introduced before the plot is put into motion. The plot follows a human-hunt of the inmates by bored upper-class folk. This is clearly an absurd and surreal exaggeration of actual events, but such is the nature of satire. This one increasingly loses its sense of sardonic fun and becomes increasingly sincere, even solemnly flashing an H G Wells quote before the credits: "Revolution begins with the misfits..." dot-dot-dot indeed.
The film is fairly dour, guards sneeringly attempting to rape an inmate one moment, having their brains righteously bashed out the next. The decadent hunters are fairly fun in their despicable dissipation, the lone female especially being this great melding of murderous psychopath and blue-blooded fox-hunter. The others are variously repulsive, but of course they're the villains and are mostly in the background of our noble and personality-less leads.
Most of the film's interest anyway lies in awesome explosions of which there are many. The woman hunter, for example, uses a crossbow that shoots explosive arrows. Kick-ass am I right? Unfortunately, explosions don't do much for me. This film is pretty dour and lurid. For some reason men's groins are focussed on a lot. Several groin-kicks are had and it's suggested that the prison guards are eunuchs, which in a DeSade book might suggest a harem-esque direction, but alas this film is a fighter, not a lover. It smacks of a juvenile obsession with methods of inflicting pain. Okay, okay.
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