Extremely disappointed that one of his films has animal abuse.

It's not a cult though.

Which reminds me: gotta take some steaks out of the freezer...

Hollywood film sets have been monitored for humane animal treatment since the 1940s. But this was filmed in Hungary and Italy. The motion picture industry standards were different there.

In any case, the actual, non-simulated animal violence and death in this film was most distasteful, included purely for shock "entertainment" value.

People do care about how animals are used on movie sets. Actual, non-simulated animal slaughter never would have been sanctioned in a Hollywood feature film of that time. It would have been done with special effects instead. This was filmed in Europe, where such industry standards apparently had not yet been put into place. It's true that one Hollywood movie of that era, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, had an actual scene of chickens getting killed. But from interviews it's pretty clear that they knew they were doing something that they weren't supposed to, and purposely did this on the down-low, away from the eyes of industry watchdogs.

The issue with this film is not just that sport hunting was merely *depicted*. The issue is that they filmed actual, non-simulated footage of real animals being shot to death, purely for the production of this movie. It would have been extremely unlikely for this to happen in a Hollywood film, since in the US there has been close monitoring of animal activity on movie productions since the 1940s. The filmmakers got away with this because Europe did not yet have those particular industry standards for motion picture production.