[miketardis]

SPOILERS!!!

OPEN SEASON (1974)
Three football buddies (Peter Fonda, John Philip Law and Richard Lynch) take their annual vacation in an isolated forest. "What do you guys do up there?" one of their wives asks at the going away party. What they do is kidnap a couple (Alberto de Mendoza and Cornelia Sharpe) and psychologically torture them before they release them into the wild to hunt them.
This film elicited the same sort of reaction from me that FUNNY GAMES (1997) did. In fact, I think one could argue that Haneke just might have seen this one before making his film. This is one of those kinds of films that really unnerve me. The victims are brutalized and you wait for that cinematic revenge on the aggressors and you keep waiting and waiting and waiting. Fonda is exceptional as the sadistic ringleader because he uses that easygoing charm you always associate with him. All three guys are so vicious, I wanted to reach through the screen and strangle them.
Director Peter Collinson (THE ITALIAN JOB, FRIGHT) does a great job ratcheting up the tension and masks the Spanish locations perfectly for United States. There is also some nice subtext too involving war (all three killers are Vietnam vets). William Holden has a brief but important role in the film as well.