Though Blumhouse's The Hunt was met with its fair share of controversy, the story's bones come from one of the most frequently adapted stories in literature. Published in 1924, Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game" about a big-game hunter who finds himself tracked and pursued like an animal by a Russian aristocrat has provided ample fodder for countless re-imaginings since the earliest days of film.

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The Hunt captured the ideological divisions of our time with its casting of red-staters as the prey to a cabal of liberal elites, but the basic story has emerged with different political—or totally apolitical—implications in every decade of cinema. Below are ten of the most notable.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

The very first filmed version of Connell's story is a favorite of many. Starring Joel McCrea, Leslie Banks, and King Kong leads Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, the film also featured Kong talent behind the camera in producers Ernest B. Schoedsack and

Merian C. Cooper. In fact, The Most Dangerous Game even made use of that film's jungle sets. Frequently cited as one of the most accurate and coherent versions of the story, it ranks among the finest examples of Pre-Code horror filmmaking.

A Game of Death (1945)

The cruel madman in Connell's original story is famously Russian, but the character got the first of many sociopolitically-motivated updates in Robert Wise's A Game of Death. A remake by RKO of their own film, A Game of Death came just at the tail end of World War II and made the film's central man-hunter German to capitalize on anti-Nazi furor in the U.S.

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Unfortunately, this is the only thing the film has going for it, feeling like a pale imitation of the studio's 1932 instant classic. It's so unremarkably similar that it even re-uses outtakes from that film to pad out its running time.

Run for the Sun (1956)

The story gets a technicolor spit shine in Ray Boulting's Run for the Sun. This loose adaptation stars Richard Widmark and Jane Greer as a journalist and author on the run from a British traitor (Trevor Howard) and his Nazi counterpart (Peter van Eyck) through a Mexican jungle. Though it's an enjoyable enough romp, it loses the piquant social commentary of the source material, making it a fairly forgettable technicolor adventure story.

Bloodlust! (1961)

It was always just a matter of time before the B-movie mavens got their hands on a popular tale, and Bloodlust! marks the first of many such adaptations. The gratuitous exclamation point affixed to the seedy title lets viewers know what they're getting here: two handsome couples (June Kenney and Robert Reed, Joan Lora, and Eugene Persson) are vacationing on a secluded island when the captain of their ship passes out drunk.

Young, beautiful, and stupid, the quartet decides to wander off into the jungle before the captain can warn them not to. They wander into the open clutches of the maniacal Dr. Balleau (Wilton Graff), a former sniper who mounts his human victims in his study as trophies. Critics at the time approached Bloodlust! with pinched noses, revolted by its low-brow abundance of judo-throws, vats of acid, and crackpot psychology. Unfortunately for modern viewers, it's a dull movie with little in the way of thrills of either the heady or more lascivious sort.

The Woman Hunt (1972)

Schlockmeister and "pope of pop cinema" Roger Corman served up his own adaptation of "The Most Dangerous Game" with this 1972 shocker. Encouraged by the success of his cult classic women in prison film The Big Doll House the year prior, Corman approached star and fellow producer John Ashley about filming a take on Connell's story originally to be titled Women for Sale.

Starring Ashley, Sid Haig, and Ken Metcalfe as three mercenaries who kidnap women and ship them off to an island where upper-class males hunt them for sport, The Woman Hunt is a really tough watch in the post-#Metoo era.

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

Unlike some of the more misogynistic sleaze on offer by exploitation filmmakers in the previous two entries, Ken Dixon's Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity is titillating cheese at its best. This patently ludicrous softcore extravaganza stars Elizabeth Kaitan and Cindy Beal as Daria and Tisa—two nubile, bikini-clad prisoners on the lam after a daring escape from a gulag. After crash-landing on a nearby planet, the women become the guests of Zed (Don Scribner), a hunter who—wouldn't you know it—has a taste for the killing and stuffing of bodacious space babes.

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Though it wouldn't win glowing write-ups from feminist scholars, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity is the sort of mostly-harmless dreck that one would find on late-night cable (and was actually criticized on the U.S. Senate floor for that very reason). Though it lacks the intelligence of the story it takes loose inspiration from, the fact that it empowers Daria and Tisa to kick ass and look hot doing it makes it a deliriously joyful enterprise to wash down the bile of The Woman Hunt.

Hard Target (1993)

Hong Kong action master John Woo's best remembered stateside effort is likely Face/Off, but his American debut was Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle Hard Target, which also bears the surprising distinction of being the first Hollywood film made by a Chinese director.

Van Damme stars at the ludicrously named Chance Boudreaux, a merchant seaman who teams up with a woman named Natasha (Yancy Butler) who is searching for her missing father. The duo eventually discovers that he's perished at the hands of Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), two monstrous businessmen who arrange recreational hunting parties targeting homeless men. A cult classic more for its stunning action scenes than its sharp commentary, Hard Target was still the first adaptation of "The Most Dangerous Game" in decades to even flirt with social messaging.

Surviving The Game (1994)

Unlike Hard Target, with which it also shares a few plot similarities, Ernest R. Dickerson's Surviving the Game makes the mistake of laying its message on too thick. Ice-T plays Jack Mason, a homeless man who's saved from a suicide attempt by a soup kitchen staffer (Walter Cole) who puts him in contact with a businessman named Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer). Burns graciously offers Mason a job as a hunting guide. After heading out into the wilderness with his charges, however, he discovers that he, himself is the prey.

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Also featuring Gary Busey, F. Murray Abraham, and John C. McGinley, Surviving the Game is an uncomfortable and sophomoric takedown of American race relations that's, unfortunately, skin deep.

The Pest (1997)

This ludicrous comedy is notable for an early performance by John Leguizamo and very little else. The funnyman stars as a Puerto Rican con artist named Pestario Rivera Garcia Picante Salsa Vargas (yeesh) who agrees to play the human target for a racist German hunter named Gustav Shank (double yeesh). After being mistaken for an athlete, the pest is brought before Shank, who decides to hunt him anyway because of how irritating he is. Luckily for the extremely hard-up Pestario, he'll get a $50,000 reward should he survive.

Jeffrey Jones brings a welcome sense of dry humor to the role of Shank which helps cut Leguizamo's Bugs Bunny on steroids antics. In truth, it's not all that unpleasant a watch, but its racist humor is painfully dated (everything from Jews to Asians catch shrapnel) and it bears negligible resemblance to the short story it's based on.

The Eliminator (2004)

A direct-to-video action film built around a UFC champion from the heyday of such things, The Eliminator stars Bas Rutten as a former LAPD cop who, after a high-stakes powerboat race gone wrong, finds himself hunted. Also starring Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of The Galaxy) the film is a technically limited and fairly dull affair, though it is interesting how it anticipated things to come.

Sandwiched between Battle Royale (2000) and The Hunger Games (2012)—two films indebted to "The Most Dangerous Game," though perhaps not consciously—The Eliminator's survivors-bet-upon-like-race-horses plotline feels almost precognitive.

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