Hard Target Is Based On One Of The Most Ripped-Off Movies Ever Made
August isn't especially famous for its great movies. As months go, the eighth one on the calendar has often been a bit of a wasteland for Hollywood, as blockbusters peter off, kids have a lot less free time and money, and studio executives need to find somewhere to dump their proverbial dead bodies.
If you want a good example, you can pretty much throw a dart at any year after "Jaws" popularized the concept of summer blockbuster season. For example, let's take a look at 1993. 30 years ago, August was a month for dreck comedies like "Son of the Pink Panther," family film misfires like "Father Hood" and "Surf Ninjas," and the weird-ass "Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday."
But then again, there are exceptions to every rule. There were also a few excellent motion pictures in August 1993. The increasingly timeless classic "The Fugitive" came out that month, along with Ang Lee's incredible queer comedy "The Wedding Banquet," Steven Zaillian's practically perfect "Searching for Bobby Fischer," and one of the best damn Jean-Claude Van Damme movies there ever was ... "Hard Target." You know, the one where he punches a snake to death.
"Hard Target" was a surprise box office success, and even more surprisingly has endured as a cult action classic for three decades. But surprising or not, it didn't come from out of nowhere. The film that helped introduce John Woo — the director of legendary Hong Kong action films like "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" — to American audiences and bore cheesy fruit, but the seed was planted many decades earlier in one of the most ripped-off movies ever made.
The Most Dangerous Game
"Hard Target" stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a martial arts master marine veteran hired as a bodyguard for a young woman played by Yancy Butler, who's searching for her missing father. What they discover is that her father was killed by a private club led by a delectably evil Lance Henriksen, which has been hunting human beings for the sport of it. Pretty soon, Van Damme is standing on top of speeding motorcycles and shooting cars until they explode, like you do.
While the motorcycle part was definitely new, the DNA for "Hard Target" — and so many other movies and TV shows that it's legitimately hard to keep count — comes from a 1924 short story and a movie called "The Most Dangerous Game." The original tale was written by Richard Connell, a novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter who also co-wrote the story for Frank Capra's classic "Meet John Doe."
It's the tale of a world-famous hunter, Rainsford (Joel McCrea), who escapes a sinking ship and swims to an island where a madman, Zaroff (Leslie Banks), hunts human beings for sport. While Zaroff initially hopes Rainsford will join him as one of the hunters, Rainsford draws the line at killing humans instead of animals and instead is forced to become the hunted. Blood-curdling adventure ensues.
This is a story that shines a light on the moral hypocrisy of big game hunting, which was particularly popular at the time, and the basis for hit films like the blockbuster epic "Trader Horn," a movie with so much racism and real-life death and violence on camera that it's legitimately difficult to watch. (And "Trader Horn" was nominated for Best Picture too. Yikes.) Anyway, it's an ingenious subversion, blending old-fashioned derring-do with social commentary about classism and animal rights.
And in the decades that followed, it got ripped off constantly.
Knock/off
There's an unwritten rule that reads as follows: Let any episodic TV series go on long enough and they'll eventually do a "Most Dangerous Game" episode. You can find humans hunting humans (or sometimes aliens played by humans) in shows as disparate as "Doctor Who," "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "The Transformers," "Gilligan's Island," "Charlie's Angels," "The Monkees," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Lost in Space," "Archer," "Bonanza," "Fantasy Island," "The Incredible Hulk," "The Blacklist," "Xena: Warrior Princess," "Squirrel Parade," "Hawaii Five-O," "Batman: The Animated Series," "The Simpsons," and multiple iterations of "Star Trek." And that is in no way an exhaustive list ... and we may have made up "Squirrel Parade."
In the movie realm, you'll find knockoffs in films like "The Running Man," "Jumanji," "Surviving the Game," "Ready or Not," "The Pest," "Octopussy," "The Hunt," "Predator," "Gymkata," the criminally underseen "T.A.G. The Assassination Game," Rob Zombie's "31," that one weird subplot in Richard Donner's "Maverick," and the list goes on. There's even the subgenre of movies where people are forced to hunt each other — usually at the behest of evil rich overlords and often for the entertainment of a studio audience — like "Battle Royale," "The Hunger Games," "Series 7: The Contenders," "The Condemned," "The Belko Experiment," "Guns Akimbo," "Mean Guns," and "Death Race 2000."
Look, it's inspired quite a lot of movies and TV shows is the point we're making here.
10 things I hunt about you
While there are certainly historical antecedents for "The Most Dangerous Game," going back at least as far as the gladiator arenas, the thing that makes this particular story so shocking is that it takes place in the present day when mankind at least pretends to be "civilized." The conscious decision to hunt someone for the sheer thrill of doing it — or whatever justification the villains of these stories make up for themselves — flies in the face of all morality and ethics. And the fact that they think they can get away with it speaks volumes about who can literally get away with murder in our society, and which human beings society thinks are the most disposable.
It also doesn't hurt that, as high-concept genre premises go, it's also relatively inexpensive to pull off. John Woo may have gone absolutely wild in "Hard Target," filling the film with death-defying stunts and absurd set pieces, but if "Gilligan's Island" can do it, pretty much anyone can with enough guile and gumption.
So while we celebrate "Hard Target" for being one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's best movies and one of John Woo's best American movies (which we are phrasing that way on purpose), it's important to remember that no movie truly exists in a vacuum. And a heck of a lot of them are inspired by "The Most Dangerous Game."