Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

JoeytheBrit This was one of the early British chase films which, along with A Daring Daylight Robbery, sparked a brief craze for chase films and inspired Edwin S. Porter to make The Great Train Robbery. For my money, Daylight Robbery is probably the more exciting of the two British films (but it's a close-run thing) but A Desperate Poching Affray is far more sophisticated in terms of film-making technique. It's also an early use of realistic violence with gun-play and fist-fights throughout. No doubt it would have appealed to its working class target audience who frequented the travelling fairground exhibitions of William Haggar and his sons. This one is definitely worth a look.

bob the moo I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.Two poachers are disturbed during their heinous crimes and make a break for it, closely pursued by the police and aggrieved farmers. Similar to Daring Daylight Robbery this film is a chase sequence between criminals and police. In some ways it is not as good but in others it is more memorable. Technically and viewing-wise I preferred Daylight Robbery as it had more grit to it and flowed better. Poaching is good as well but just not as good. Where it does stand out though is in the impact it has due to the level of violence in it. I have been watching lots of silent British shorts recently and this is the first one I have seen men shot dead – it is a violent and sudden death and the film kicks the audience with several of them.I cannot imagine how the audience reacted to this but I'm guessing it was impacting in the extreme. For this and the thrill of the chase it is worth seeing.

MartinHafer While it is true that in the 1890s and 1900s that the films were often very, very short and very mundane, this did not mean that films HAD to be that way--Georges Méliès and the Pathé Brothers were making some very imaginative films with scripts, sets and lots of imagination. So, by comparison, this film comes up very, very short. The film is all too brief--with some guys catching and roughing up some poachers--and that's all!! In fact, the film is so short and uninspired that I can only see it of being much value to film historians and lovers of dull films. It just SHOULD have been better in 1903 and showed that a gap between quality films and the rest was increasing at the time.

Snow Leopard There's a lot of action in this short feature that makes it worth watching even though it is pretty unrefined. The "Desperate Poaching Affray" begins when a couple of game poachers are spotted, and then the chase is on. Quite a bit happens after that, and it packs a lot of activity into just a few minutes of running time. The emphasis is certainly on the action, as most of the actors just race around without trying too hard to make their actions seem believable. But there's no denying that you want to see how it comes out, and anyway, most of the so-called action movies made today have even lower acting quality and plausibility standards, without being nearly so efficient as this one is in terms of actual entertainment value.