Loading...

THE MOPANI COLLECTION
Hunting Africas Big Game, First Season

DVD, running time 1 hour and 36 min.

We have said it before; the quality of big-game hunting DVDs keeps on improving and while there is plenty of flotsam out there, more and more gems appear on our shores so the consumer is facing an ever better selection of products that makes one quickly forget the sorry films of yesteryear.

This movie has all the right ingredients. The recipe is as follows; take one season of raw footage from the Omay Area in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe. Cut the footage into a fast paced package and trim away the boring interludes. Remove the endless yak fests. Keep the 13 elephant hunts, 6 hippos shoots and 7 buffalo kills, and finally add one blood curdling, dead serious leopard attack. Mix, add the music, and burn on a DVD. Presto, a fine movie that will satisfy even the most critical connoisseurs.

There are a total of 30 big-game hunts on this DVD, and the action is at a constant but pleasant pace, not slow and boring but not so fast that you are jerked from one kill to another and have not a clue what is going on. Often there are two cameramen in the field offering multiple angles and when the animals come in a determined charge, as does one wounded elephant, the camera holds remarkably steady. This is even truer in the leopard attack, which is the best footage of any leopard charging and then biting and clawing a hunter we have ever seen on film. In addition an excellent set of graphics during the replay shows that (a) most shots at a charging leopard are misses and (b) the speed of the attack is only a mille-second slower than a bolt of lightening, if that!

Filmed by Roy Aylward this is an excellent movie. We have not seen any products from Roy before, but we hope he holds his promise, made on the cover of the DVD, to produce another movie in the coming year.

Note: all DVDs sold by Safari Press are for the worldwide standard and will play on any DVD player in the world.