I was very disappointed to see the back of the DVD case for “Sex Hunter” compare this short Roman Porno to “Thriller: A Cruel Picture.” It’s very misleading to pair one of the greatest grindhouse revenge thrillers ever made to “Sex Hunter.” It’s an hour long endurance test in tedium and finishes with a climax that is both abrupt and incredibly unsatisfying. Granted, there’s not much to expect in the way of characters and action from a movie barely clocking in at seventy minutes, but a little blood shed wouldn’t have hurt.
Much of what occurs in “Sex Hunter” is just inexplicable, and often times the writing feels very confused. Not to mention the protagonist for the film is a dunderheaded worm who accomplishes little in winning over the audience to root for his journey in vengeance. Okamoto is a man whose sister and best friend were gang raped by American soldiers on leave, and the attack was so vicious his sister sought fit to hang herself. Attempting to escape prison, he’s caught and must serve another few years. It’s a badly staged escape sequence that goes nowhere, but you can’t blame his insistence on escaping when his lawyer oddly hints his past deeds may have led to his sister’s demise.
That point leads utterly nowhere as Okamoto leaves prison and is on a mission to find the men who aided in her suicide. But not before breaking in to an apartment, forcing a woman to give him oral sex and ejaculating in her throat which ends in a gross moment and Okamoto merely running off and moving on. What was the point? Most of “Sex Hunter” revolves around Okamoto trying to work his way in to the seedy underbelly of the world involving the soldiers, and he does so as a drummer for a stripper performance, and engages in a very long sexual performance that leads nowhere. Much of Okamoto’s mission leads nowhere, especially when he begins tracking down the soldiers one by one.
As he begins finding them, he learns they were all conveniently either killed during the war or crippled beyond belief, so he seeks forms of reparations like raping the widow of one soldier, and confronting a blond crippled soldier who begs for his life. “Sex Hunter” is filled with many confusing moments and very lame character motives, especially when the finale brings us a head scratching blood bath that feels like the writer’s attempts to simply end the film and move on with the story no matter how unusual it may feel on film.Along with newly translated and removable subtitles, there’s the original trailer for the movie, and dense, richly detailed film liner notes from Film Scholar Jasper Sharp, as well as a small fold out of the original poster for “Sex Hunter.” It’s a disappointing, tedious, and mean spirited bit of surreal revenge cinema that goes nowhere, lacks a complex and interesting protagonist, and ultimately feels as if it’s running through the motions dramatically.