I was bored and looking through Netflix for something to watch, and it recommended to me The Wild Hunt – an independent movie where Canadian LARPers go a little mental. It had won a couple film festival awards, so I figured what the heck.
The setup is that Erik, an Icelander in Canada, heads out to a big ol’ LARP weekend in the woods to try to get his worthless girlfriend back. He’s not a LARPer but his brother is really big into it; Viking heritage, Norse sagas, the whole bit. The whole batch of LARPers are very, very, very serious about it – it almost converts over into cool, actually. You have other movies like Role Models where the people are into LARP but it’s still very cheesy and you’re like “whatever, diversity yay, ponce around all you want,’there’s nothing wrong with that’, but eek.” But here they are all so into it and put a lot of work into it – if you can make LARP seem cool, this movie comes closest to doing it.
It’s a pretty interesting movie. It starts out weak mainly because of the unsympathetic main characters – Erik is a certifiable wuss, his girlfriend is a bitchy whore, and the initial crop of LARPers you meet are reasonably insane – but evens out its keel once you get to know more of the (better, and more interesting, frankly) secondary characters and they quicken the pace. It’s a low budget thriller set in an isolated setting where romantic hassles etc. end up cascading into Lord of the Flies. The ending is a lot more dark and brutal than I would have expected from the first act. About a third of the way through, I wasn’t sold and wondered if I should bail, but after seeing the whole thing I’d give it a 5/10, decent.
Of course some roleplayers are worried that this will “demonize the hobby.” To that I say bah, many of the movies/TV shows with killers, they are doctors and lawyers and cops and moviemakers and other such. It should just be a rush to see your own niche thing breeding killers for a change. And it’s not like anyone will actually be afraid of this happening for real; they’re Canadians for God’s sake. Everyone knows Canadians can’t kill anyone; they don’t have the constitution for it. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Geek Related 
Truthfully i hated this movie. For me it just failed across the board as form of enjoyable entertainment. In fact if you look it up on amazon, i’m the guy that gave it one star.
But i expect one thing above all else in my movie selecitons: That the damn plot makes sense. For me, this movie was like a horror movie, where the only reason the bad thing happens is because no one had the common sense to say #$%& this, i’m going home.
I can understand it, if you are trapped for whatever reason, but when you can get into your car at any time & drive home, safely, then yes you deserve to be executed for your stupidity. This movie is to LARP, what Maze & Monsters was to D&D.
Oh, you’re being a bit too hard on it – the couple tried to leave but their car was dead, i f you recall, and when things “went bad” it was so sudden that I didn’t find the actual plot events unreasonable. Most of the time he was there because he was pining for that girlfriend of his and she didn’t want to leave – she sure as heck was trying to leave once shaman guy freaked out, in fact she ran linearly to the exit…
i saw this earlier in the morning, it was pretty bad. none of the characters were likeable, the plot changed tone almost incoherently, overall it just wasn’t very compelling, i also find it hard to believe that so many people would be driven to do these things over a bad larp game.
yeah i spent most of that movie fighting the urge to jump into the movie & throttle the actors myself.
I definitely wanted to smack them. Man, that chick was so not worth the moping!
Hmmm, but isn’t it missing the point to say that it was “over a LARP?” It’s a large batch of dysfunctional people, isolated in the woods, then provoked by an outsider, and the leader has his heart broken… People have done much crazier things over a woman. And then his main minion is doing what he does out of misguided mancrush for the leader… I just think that if you look at this as “the LARP drove them nuts” you’re not paying enough attention – not to say it’s a great movie.
“People have done much crazier things over a woman”
I’m sorry but that excuse always rings false in my ears. I know that calling common sense common is a misnomer, as in truth its rarer then hens teeth, but stupidity does have its limits.
As for the “dysfunctional people” thing, thats exactly what makes it the LARP version of Mazes and Monsters.
i’m not talking about the main characters, i’m talking about all the people in the barbarian tribe that went batshit crazy and started pillaging for no real reason other than the fact that some guy stole the girl from their “leader”.
on top of that there wasn’t a single person in the barbarian tribe that ever seemed to have any objections to any of the crazy shit they started doing, expecting me to believe that a group of 50 people all happen to be secretly insane and are driven to mania over the angst of one guy losing his girlfriend is too much. that’s what i found hard to believe. the movie was nearly exploitative in the way it portrays larpers and i cant think of a single nice thing to say about it aside from the camera work.