The Prey

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.

* 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.

Six teens hike up to the Colorado mountains for a spot of rock climbing, only to fall victim to a badly burned cave-dwelling gypsy.

Dull "Friday the 13th" clone with bad acting, slack pacing and a boring use of wildlife stock footage. Picks up a bit in its second half, and caps off with a nicely atmospheric 'twist' ending, but the rest is just too amateurish to be taken seriously.

The Prey follows the tried and tested formula of a group of 20 somethings who venture into the forest to camp unaware that something lingers between the trees with evil intentions.

In this case we have a bit of a Wrong Turn (2003) vibe and absolutely no originality or standout moments at all.

One thing I can certainly say for The Prey is that certain elements are beautiful. The movie is full of what I can only assume is stock footage of forestry wildlife and though it seems like filler it really is quite exquisite.

As for the film itself it is full of mediocre deaths, generic characters and lackluster writing.

The Good:

Beautiful nature shots

Oddly dark finale

The Bad:

Paint by numbers stuff

Weak death scenes

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

I've seen enough of these films now to put me off camping for life