Naman Shrestha
With Marco Deufemia occupying the director’s chair, Lifetime’s ‘Hunting Housewives’ is a mystery thriller film that focuses on the unexpected adventure of four married friends — Karla Dodds, Rebel Carron-Whitman, Joli Symons, and Sharell Bouvier. The four of them decide to take a break from their exhaustive life and busy schedules, and head for a spa retreat weekend away from their respective husbands and children. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a dangerous predicament when their plane crashes and they land in the middle of a forest.
Without having any knowledge of basic survival, the stranded housewives are forced to do everything to survive the wilderness that surrounds them. While scouring through their designer bags to find a way to survive, they soon realize that they had been set up by one of their husbands, just to teach them a lesson. Now, they must join forces and work together, keeping aside their differences, in order to get the better of the hunters out to get them. The impressive performances from a group of talented actors, including Denise Richards, NeNe Leakes, Kym Johnson Herjavec, Melyssa Ford, Mark Ghanimé, and Martin Roach, help in bringing the narrative to life, making it seem realistic due to the inclusion of themes of survival and revenge that are prevalent in real life.
Hunting Housewives is a Fictional Tale
‘Hunting Housewives’ is not inspired by a real people. The credit for the gripping story, enriched with realistic elements, must be given to the screenwriter Paula Tiberius. Throughout her writing career, Paula has worked on different kinds of projects, including ‘Goldirocks,’ ‘Snowbound for Christmas,’ ‘The Wedding Planners,’ ‘Country Roads Christmas,’ ‘Christmas on the Slopes,’ ‘All Aboard for Love,’ and ‘Christmas in Big Sky Country,’ making her a versatile and heavily creative writer.
Paula utilized her versatility and excellent penmanship to weave the enthralling yet realistic screenplay for the Lifetime thriller. Since real life is not much different from what transpires in the movie, be it the plane crash or the husbands setting up their wives for danger, it is possible that the screenwriter took some elements from actual life and sprinkled them in a dramatized manner throughout the narrative. For instance, husbands going to extreme lengths to get rid of their wives for different reasons is something that has been happening for decades.
As for the familiarity you find in ‘Hunting Housewives,’ it is due to the fact that the setting and plotlines displayed in the Lifetime film have been explored in various other movies and TV shows in the past, including the 2017 horror film ‘The Ritual’ and the 2016 crime movie ‘Lake Bodom.’ But one of the aptest examples has to be that of the 2013 Eli Roth directorial ‘The Green Inferno.’ Just like the Denise Richards starrer, the adventure horror movie also revolves around a group of people whose plane crashes and they get stranded in the Peruvian jungle, while getting hunted by a tribe of cannibals.
So, given these parallels between the two movies in question, many are bound to find familiarity in the Lifetime production. Taking into account all the above-mentioned factors, it would be safe to say that the writer might have included some aspects of reality in the plot but it doesn’t change the fact that the overall story is far from a true story.
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