...und der Tod wartet schon

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.

Everything everyone has said already pretty much rings true when it comes to 'The Prey'. Endless nature footage, bad acting - Aside from these elements, this is a watchable film for slasher fans that in some cases, is considered a cult classic.

Jackson Bostwick and Jackie Coogan play pretty well off each other. There's also a three minute banjo solo that shows off Bostwick's skill behind the instrument. Not too bad if I do say so myself.

The last ten minutes of the 'film' are its saving grace. The ending still haunts me to this day. This can also sport a short lived plus in that an early John Carl Bucheler does the special effects. Some may know him from films like 'Troll' and 'Friday the 13th part 7 - He directed both these films) All in all, this isn't a movie everyone will find something redeeming in. In fact, on a Hollywood level, this can rank right up there with one of the businesses most amateurish efforts, but for that handful (yet very loyal) of slasher movie fans in the world, even the bad acting and atrocious nature footage can be forgiven.

Healthy horny idiots go camping in the woods (I know, an alien scenario for a slasher film!) The woods they go to were the location of a bloodbath decades earlier as someone from a gypsy camp was falsely accused of rape. The townsfolk burnt down the gypsy settlement but one of the younger members of the travellers escaped albeit with massive amounts of burns. The present day campers get the feeling that someone is watching them and then start to be dispatched by You Know Who.

The Prey was made in 1980 but not released in the States until 1983. Edwin Brown was directing porn movies before he decided to branch out into horror. And it shows! The sex scenes in this movie are a lot more raunchy than in other slasher movies. Theres a longer version of this film called the 'Gypsy Cut' which contains a full prologue regarding the gypsy characters. This sequence is VERY sexual and feels like the funny parts of porn movies that you see before sexual organs get an airing. This includes the kind of flat acting that you could only see in pornography.

The film feels like it wants to establish the fact that it's a Hillbillies vs City Folk movie and even has a character playing a banjo!

But whilst this is a blatant Friday the 13th rip-off theres enough here to hold your interest. The kills are very effective (courtesy of special effects guru John Carl Buechler), the cinematography is stunning (even if scenes shot in a forest are pretty hard not to portray as beautiful. Check out the scale of some of the shots and how the humans are sometimes shown as minuscule in comparison to the woods. Also, check out the abseiling scene). Theres also a very unexpected ending that shows that Ol' Scarface has other plans for the Final Girl rather than killing her. This reminded me of the backstory to the mutant family in the masterpiece, The Hills Have Eyes. The kill of the Final Girl's friend before this is also very left-field and takes the audience by surprise (no, I'm not going to disclose what it is!)

Check out the Arrow Films Blu ray. Both cuts are on there along with a gorgeous transfer and plenty of extras.

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.

N.B. This review is of the 80 minute American theatrical cut.

Three young couples - Greg (Philip Wenckus) and Gail (Gayle Gannes), Skip (Robert Wald) and Bobbie (Lori Lethin), and Joel (Steve Bond) and Nancy (Debbie Thureson) - head into the hills for a camping weekend. Before you can say "Ki ki ki, ma ma ma", they're being offed by a deformed maniac (Carel Struycken) with virtually no backstory (at least in the version that I saw).

Hey, it's '80s slasher time again, which in this case means a dearth of originality, from the bare bones plot, to the cookie cutter characters, to the uninspired music, to the predictable direction (killer POV shots aplenty). That said, this one does have something rather special up its sleeve: it also serves as a wildlife documentary, depicting the many varieties of fauna indigenous to the San Jacinto Mountains in Riverside County, California. While the film's three young couples wait to be sliced and diced by the lunatic roaming the area, we're treated to footage of **deep breath** a millipede, a bear, a frog, a raccoon, a centipede, a woodpecker, a snake (eating a mouse), an eagle, a salamander, a tarantula, an owl, termites, and ants, with shots of a deer, a lizard, birds of prey and butterflies intercut with the slaughter. Great work, wildlife photographer Gary Gero!

As for the those staple slasher ingredients, nudity and violence, here's a quick rundown of what you can expect from The Prey when not admiring fowl and beast...

Nudity: brief toplessness from Gayle Gannes, side boob from the lovely Debbie Thureson while she sunbathes, and nada from Lori Lethin. A rather poor show overall.

Violence (gore courtesy of John Carl Buechler): a neck stump spurting blood, suffocation by sleeping bag, a bloody throat gouging, a head twisted backwards, a body plummeting down a cliff, death by booby trap (victim thrown against a tree, messing up the face and twisting a leg), and a crushed neck. Fun when it happens.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for the utterly pointless but strangely enjoyable musical interlude, park ranger Mark O'Brien (Jackson Bostwick) playing a tune on his banjo for no other reason than to show that Bostwick can play the banjo.