Kraven the Hunter

Year 17, Day 282 - 10/9/25 - Movie #5,165

BEFORE: Funny story, I had a plan for today and the next three days because I was going to work at New York Comic-Con, which is a four-day event, today through Sunday. I've worked that event for the last 20 years (or almost 20) and I only missed one year because they screwed up my paperwork and my boss and I didn't get our usual booth. It's a crazy, exhausting event but it's also a lot of fun, and you can get hooked on the adrenaline rush of it all. Plus, I never had to pay for a ticket in all that time, because paying for the booth comes with badges for the workers, and as long as we got enough badges to cover my boss and me and our helpers, that was fine.

Now, I quit that job six months ago, but the adrenalin fix kicked in, and old habits die hard. A co-worker at the theater usually works for the event, doing crowd control and giving people directions and such. When I was under-employed, I figured I could do that too, so I signed up to work all four days, but I didn't hear anything from the company that was hiring staff until maybe three weeks ago. Someone left me a voice-mail saying they were from a recruiting company, and that kind of set off a red flag - I didn't realize at first they were recruiting for NYCC, and I've had bad experiences with recruiters, so I left a couple messages but maybe didn't try hard enough to make contact. 

My co-worker gave me the e-mail of her contact, so I tried again and landed a phone interview. Great, that will be four solid days of work in October, I can make some much-needed cash. But then my theater job booked me solid for the three days before and the four days after, so that would mean like 10 days of hard work in a row, with no breaks. And with the condition my legs are in, I'm not sure I could stand up for four days straight at the convention center - when I used to work a booth, at least I could sit down for half of the time.

So it killed me to do it, but I politely declined the crowd work at Comic-Con, what would it get me if I made $800 but it took me two weeks for my feet to recover? Suddenly four days off in the middle of a busy October seemed like a better idea, I could rest up and get ready for a busy week at the theater, and an even busier November when my new second job kicks in, too. Also, now I could hang out with a friend on Friday, relax on Saturday and take my wife out for an early birthday dinner on Sunday.

My point is, even though I'm not going to be there, it's time for New York Comic-Con - and what film turned up in the chain tonight but a Marvel Comics film. It's about one of Spider-Man's villains, and maybe it won't be the greatest movie ever made, but it's a comic-book movie, just in time for NYCC and that should mean something - and in three days, I've got another comic-book movie for the LAST day of the con. What are the odds of THAT happening? 

Roderick Hill carries over from "The Munsters". 

THE PLOT: Kraven's complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff, starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared. 

AFTER: Well, I'm already 1/3 of the way through this year's horror chain, and I maybe forgot to mention that it's really horror movies plus whatever other movies I need to help make the links and keep the chain alive, and quite often that means comic-book movies need to step in. Sure, sometimes it's documentaries that are needed, in past Octobers I used docs about both Stephen Spielberg AND Brian De Palma to make the chains I wanted, and I fell back on the fact that Spielberg directed "Jaws" and produced "Poltergeist" and De Palma directed "Body Double" and "Dressed to Kill" and "Carrie", so the docs could get grandfathered in on a technicality. Comic book movies are considered fair game, too, because they have scary villains that sometimes seem like horror movie characters. These are my rules, after all, I make them up, I decide what counts. 

But if you think back on some of the more memorable Spider-Man stories with Kraven in them, especially "Kraven's Last Hunt", they play out like comic-book horror stories. Kraven shot Spidey with a GUN and buried him in a grave, our web-slinging hero had to dig himself out of the coffin and track down Kraven, who I think ended up committing suicide after. But nobody really dies in comics, they just resurrected him or found his long-lost son to take over his persona and costume, or they time-traveled or re-booted the series or somebody cast a magic spell and made him alive again.

Anyway, there were notable Spider-Man stories with Kraven in them, but this is a Kraven story without Spider-Man in it. Why? Because it's set in the Sony Spider-Verse, which is still not the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Soon, soon, there will be a story that unites all the universes, or takes a bit of that one and mixes it with a bit of that other one, based of course on which actors still want to keep renewing their contracts, and then the X-Men and the Avengers can team up to defeat the Spider-Villains, or whatever they want to do. But for now the characters that Sony wanted to develop live in the Venom-verse, which is also the universe seen in "Madame Web" and also "Morbius" I think. It's a pretty boring place with no Spider-Man in it, but then we have the Spider-Verse movies that tell us that EVERY universe has a Spider-Man of some kind, except this one? That seems very lame. 

Look, a great hero needs a great villain to fight, and the opposite holds true, too. What good is Kraven if he's not hunting a giant man-spider? Instead they have to pit him up against another version of Spidey's Rhino villain, and another villain from the comics, the Foreigner. As stupid as this version of the Rhino is, it makes sense for the Hunter to fight an animal themed villain, it makes no sense at all to put him up against the Foreigner. Come on, the Spidey-verse has so many other animal-themed characters he could hunt down, like the Jackal or the Vulture or the Grizzly, the Lizard, the Scorpion, Doctor Octopus, the White Rabbit, the Black Cat, I could go on and on, so I will. Tarantula, the Beetle, the Puma, Kangaroo, the Man-Wolf, Vermin, Hammerhead, the Gibbon, Human Fly, Mindworm, Swarm, and the whole Serpent Society if you want to open it up to Avengers villains that Spider-Man must have faced at some point. Any of these would have been thematically better than the Foreigner, whose sole super-power is to be able to hypnotize anyone for three seconds, so he can get the drop on them. Lame. 

But Kraven's kind of at a loss here, too, because his main super-power seems to be some kind of super-parkour, like he can jump off a building and grab something on the way down to break his fall, or he can climb a mountain or a castle wall super-quick because he's great at balancing and grabbing stuff and thinking fast. Still, compared to having animal-like senses and professional level tracking skills, parkour is still hella-lame, sorry. 

It's also very confusing, Kraven is a hunter and he was raised by his father to hunt animals, but then he reached that point in life where he wanted to reject everything his father stood for (relatable) so he chose to hunt down other hunters, and then all bad men in general, except he forgot to put his father on his list of bad men. Well, once somebody points out that little contradiction to him, he's at least willing to make up for it by seeing that his father dies, I guess better late than never, right?  That's it, that's the movie, Kraven kills a bad man in a Russian prison, then he kills a bunch of poachers, then Foreigner and Rhino, then circles back to his father, which is really where he should have STARTED in the first place. But the story is full of contradictions, especially where this whole father-son relationship crosses paths with the human-animal relationship. Does Kraven love animals or hate animals? I can't really tell, he needs a much clearer manifesto or something. He only kills men who kill animals, or he only kills men who dress up like animals? Both? 

Then he puts on a costume made from the fur of a lion, so he's a complete hypocrite, I think. But he can't be a conservationist who kills poachers and also wears fur, logic won't allow that. Don't even get me started on his relationship with Calypso, because her story is even more convoluted, she's a voodoo priestess, she was trained as a psychic or tarot card reader, but also she's a lawyer, you've got to PICK ONE of these things, or two, maximum. The other thing that carries over from the comics is that Kraven's younger brother will later become a different Spider-Man villain, but it's a long way to go from being a singer who can imitate other singer's styles to being a criminal mastermind who can impersonate anyone. Bit of a stretch, but we won't ever see him become successful until the sequel to this film, which they will never ever make. 

Look, all is not lost here, because they still could make MCU movies that bring all the universes together, but right now it's a bit of a SECRET when those WARS will begin. You get it? Until then, we only get these stand-alone films that go nowhere because they aren't really given anywhere to go. It's like they can't possibly score a narrative home run, they can only make it to third base and home plate is in an entirely different stadium. For now. 

Directed by J.C. Chandor (director of "Triple Frontier" and "A Most Violent Year")

Also starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Ariana DeBose (last heard in "Wish"), Fred Hechinger (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "The Eye"), Christopher Abbott (last seen in "Poor Things"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "Unhinged"), Yuri Kolokolnikov (last seen in "6 Underground"), Levi Miller (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Tom Reed (last seen in "Unlocked"), Billy Barratt (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Diaana Babnicova, Murat Seven, Damola Adelaja, Guillaume Delaunay (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Dritan Kastrati, Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Susan Aderin, Elizabeth Appleby, Waleed Hammad, Michael Shaeffer (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Rachel Handshaw (last seen in "The Son"), Odimegwu Okoye (last seen in "Havoc" (2025)), and the voice of Masha Vasyukova.

RATING: 5 out of 10 African buffaloes (who somehow got lost and ended up in Russia?)