The Prey

First of all let me say that I love eighties horror. I know it's cheesy, not that scary and particularly awful, but so many of the genre's best output falls under the 'so-bad-it's-good' category. Therefore I figured 'The Prey' would keep me entertained for an hour and a half. It was a long ninety minutes.

I hear the film was actually released at around eighty minutes and the missing extra footage was put in and is now more likely to be the version you watched. I wish I'd watched the shorter version. Often, when a film is good, I can't really think of too much to say about it - other than 'I enjoyed it!' However, with this one I feel I could probably write an essay reeling off everything that's wrong with it.

I know it's a low budget film and I probably shouldn't be too hard on it, but, seriously, it's a hard watch. I knew what I was in for in terms of story. Half my DVD collection is filled with masked serial killers murdering stupid teenagers. That brief plot synopsis is certainly applicable here; it's just this one doesn't work on any level.

It's about three young (overly-sexed, naturally!) couples who go camping in the mountains and fall victim to a killer. Nothing wrong with that premise, but, if you're hoping for gore - you won't find it here. It probably didn't have the budget. No matter if the characters are good, right? Wrong. They're not. I don't expect Oscar-worthy acting from a horror movie, but sometimes I figured I could probably read the actors' lines with more emotion and believability! What about the killer? Was he imaginative? Nope. Where as films like 'Friday 13th' had original and memorable killers, this one isn't even shown for 99% of the screen time. Perhaps worst (or weirdest?) of all was the fact that the film-makers felt the need to insert plenty of 'nature shots' in the film. Every scene is preceded by an unrelated shot of a deer, or racoon or something - either that or the mountain range. Then you get the wooden characters just walking. There's an old joke about the 'Lord of the Rings' movies that goes along the lines that the trilogy is just nine hours of people walking. But I don't think you've seen 'on screen walking' until you've watched 'The Prey.' There are a few pointless sub-plots which drag out for longer than they should and about a twenty minute segment roughly in the middle of the film which feels like a completely different movie of its own (it's supposed to be a sort of 'origin story' for the killer) and doesn't really add anything.

I only continued watching this movie just because I kept telling myself that it would pick up in the final act. I guess it did - if you class the 'final act' as the last five minutes of a film that clocks in at over an hour and a half. There are so many better slasher films out there. Pick one. Trust me, it'll be much more enjoyable.

* out of ***** The full title for this movie should be "National Geographic Presents ‘The Prey,'" because, with all the shots of lizards, centipedes, snakes, spiders, frogs, etc., this could be shown on the Discovery channel. Talk about filler! This has a running time of barely 80 minutes, but if you take away the prolonged scenes of insects and reptiles and dull kids chatting idly around the campfire and forest rangers eating sandwiches and telling jokes to animals, you're left with maybe five or ten minutes of actual story (and I use that term loosely.) It's so damn boring! Carel Struycken (`Lurch' from the Adams Family movies) is a giant, badly burned killer who lives in the mountains, but he isn't even shown until the last five minutes or so. Some boring kids go camping and -- yawn -- Lurch picks them off one by one. There are long, awkward scenes of former MGM, classic film star Jackie Coogan, as forest ranger Lester Tile, making silly faces as he eats a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich. Some of the more notable lines in the `script' are, `Good chow' and `Tell me something -- do people really eat those things?' (referring to the cucumber sandwich). There's minimal violence, minimal suspense, minimal naked horseplay and minimal excitement. The tag line on the video box reads: `It's not human, and it's got an ax!' but, it probably shoulda read: `It's not good, and it got made!'

Lowlight: In a cinematic first, the other forest ranger (Mark O'Brien, I think) tells a (long) joke about a wide-mouth frog to a deer. Actually, this is one of the best scenes in the movie -- the punchline made me laugh.

The prey is a knockoff of Friday the 13th but for what it is it's not bad. The kills were decent and the third act was the best part. The ending was really good. Never really seen that before in a slasher film. It's 80 minutes of popcorn fun.

I watched this film in 1992 on the suggestion of one of my friends. Since I am a big fan of 'Backwoods Horror', I decided to give it a try. The film began and I thought I was about to witness another Friday the 13th. It was after 30 minutes, when I realized that they shouldn't have released it as a slasher. Here is what it's all about.

The film begins with the stock footage of 1948 Northpoint wildfire, then it cuts straight to 1980, where we see a couple Frank & Mary enjoying their camp out. Moments later, Mary is shocked to see Frank's decapitated body and is brutally killed too. Nobody knows who did it. Then we come across 6 teenage campers Nancy, Joel, Greg, Gail, Skip and Bobbie heading to the woods. On the way, they meet forest ranger Mark, who asks them to watch out for the bears. As the teenagers go deeper and deeper in the woods, they become more isolated from the outer world. Little do they know that something horrible is lurking at an arm's length. The police department is investigating the disappearances of Frank & Mary and seeks help of the forest department. The senior forest officer Lester Tile may have clues regarding the disappearances at The Northpoint.

So did you enjoy the story? You may have, because I never included a single wildlife footage in it. This could have made millions if it were shown on Animal Planet. The plot has no unique value and the actors are some of the worst and dumbest in the stock, who fail to develop themselves during the course of run. I mean you never get empathy for them, and even after spending around 81 minutes with you, they all die strangers. The film is full of unrelated and forcibly included stock footage, whose color scheme doesn't match with the actual film. The only good footage I remember is of a snake working hard to swallow a frog. This footage underlines the movie title 'The Prey'. Watch it only if you are big fan of backwoods horror, otherwise this has nothing new to promise.

Last night, I was going to take a pill to get to sleep, but it turns out that The Prey works a thousand times better than any Advil PM. Obviously made to cash in on the Friday the 13th hysteria, The Prey features an admittedly attractive cast of 20-somethings who wander off into the woods and are picked off one by one by a charred gypsy.

There's not much rhyme or reason for anything that happens in this movie and good luck trying to remember any character names. Gail is the only memorable character simply because she has the annoying habit of checking and re-applying her makeup in pretty much every one of her scenes.

There's a fairly useless side character of a forest ranger who talks in baby voices to deer and eats cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches whenever we're not going on hikes with our leads. To make matters worse, every scene transitions to the next via overlong sequences of nature that go on forever. I'm convinced that, if you took these shots out, the movie would be 15 minutes long. I could almost believe that they ran out of money midway through and, when they got more funds, the original cast wasn't available so they decided to beef up the forest ranger scenes and nature footage just to make the film feature length (it barely qualifies at just under 80 minutes).

That said, there are some decent effects here and the music score isn't too bad. It's just a shame that, right as the film starts to take off, it ends.