A warrior (Christopher Rygh) mounts the heads of the monsters he has killed on the wall of his meagre home.

To recover from his monster fights, the warrior uses jars of noxious liquid to heal his wounds after each of battle…

…but when a window shutter knocks over a jar and some of the restorative liquid seeps onto the head of the latest creature he has killed… the monster’s head becomes reanimated, and so the warrior must hunt it down.

THE HEAD HUNTER (aka VIKING VENGEANCE) was directed, co-written, produced and edited by Jordan (THANKSKILLING) Downey, who cleverly came up with a story that could be done on a low budget: basically there’s one character (plus a girl playing the daughter in some flashbacks) and a bunch of heads (we are never shown the monster fights themselves).

Some of the background secondary heads on the warrior’s wall are barely more realistic than latex halloween masks, but most of the creature heads are decently-made considering the budget.

Some sword and sorcery fans find this film too small scale. After all, the story does revolve around just one warrior fighting monsters in battles that remain off camera. But I enjoyed this tightly-budgeted movie and I think the warrior’s armour looks pretty damn cool.

At one point the project was named THE HEAD. Artist Christopher Shy, from Studio Ronin, created a couple of wonderful posters which used that particular title…

The bottom line is that I would certainly like to see Downey get the chance to direct a bigger-scale fantasy-horror flick.

Okay, one more look at one of the decapitated creature heads…

Finally, here’s a gorgeous alternative movie poster created by illustrator Vance Kelly. Wow! This really makes me hope the filmmakers one day get to make a larger-scale, more expansive film about the Head Hunter’s fantasy world…