Prey

Alien lands on earth and takes on human form only to end-up being a pawn in the lives of a bickering lesbian couple.

The premise of Alien Prey alone will give one a glimpse into the off-beat weirdness that is this strange low budget sci-fi/horror show. Among the crazy offerings you've got animal-men attacking people, an alien in drag, some howlingly bad dialog, a party for a dead fox - its difficult not to find this a tongue-in-cheek effort. Also this bizarre flick has enough sleaze for any exploitation fan thanks to some drawn-out sex scenes. This is all capped off with a surprisingly violent (and bloody) finale and one pleasingly nihilistic ending.

The direction isn't bad and the filming locales are nice. The cast's performances are just erratic enough to add even more weirdness to the film. Sally Faulkner throws out a perfectly 'bitchy' vibe only matched by Barry Stokes' deliciously odd 'stowic' performance as the alien - who you just might be rooting for in the end.

Alien Prey is simply a hoot for cult fans. There's definitely no other film like it and whether you laugh or groan you're bound to be entertained regardless!

*** out of ****

Wow.

This one came out of nowhere. I'm just watching my way through some Z-grade movies, enjoying cheesy science fiction, laughing at half-baked plots, and struggling to get through some real duds. Then I get to PREY. This one stands out from the rest. Not because it's sexploitation (already got a bit of that in HUNDRA) but because it lures you in with one plot but then sucker punches you with another once you get settled. PREY is two-fold, with a pair of plot threads running parallel over the course of the movie. The first, most obvious, and primarily advertised is that of the alien. The movie opens with the landing of an alien ship in the English countryside. The alien quickly murders a man and assumes his identity, wandering into the forest until he comes to an isolated cabin and our second plot line. Living in this cabin are a pair of lesbian lovers, Josephine (Sally Faulkner) and Jessica (Glory Annen). Right from the start, something seems off about these two. Josephine in particular seems angered by the presence of this mystery man and seethes with a hatred for men in general. Jessica is the more naïve of the couple, kind-hearted and caring. Her first reaction to this stranger on their property is to give him shelter and see to whatever wound is causing his limp. Tensions mount as Josephine struggles to turn Jessica against the man, who has assumed the name Anders Anderson (Barry Stokes), while Anderson tends to his own shady business.

You see, the movie starts out as a sort of body-snatchers thriller. We get the alien landing and then it stumbles across an attempted date rape in the middle of the woods; it rips the man's throat out and transforms to assume his identity before proceeding to crush his date to death with its bare hands. All right, cool. We're off to a fun start and there's even some gore effects when he kills the dude. Then we move on to the cabin and…hold on…now the movie is about a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with an older woman. Keep in mind, when we first meet the alien it rips a man's throat out and yet, still, Josephine comes across as the most evil character in the movie. She's spiteful and passive aggressive; she's mentally and emotionally abusive to Jessica, keeping her trapped on this little farmstead. Josephine fills Jessica's head with venomous lies, telling her that they have to stay in their hidden little cabin because the evil villagers don't approve of their lesbian lifestyle. Whether that's true or not is never seen, as we rarely wander far from the cabin. And Josephine is hateful of any sort of outside interference. We constantly hear of a man name Stanley, a friend who apparently used to come along once in a while before the movie but has since ceased contact with them. Jessica misses him but Josephine insists she's wasting her time prattling on about him.

So we've got an alien presence and an abusive relationship, but that's not all PREY has to offer. This movie is insane and the more you think about it, the crazier it gets. Keep in mind, the women have no idea Anderson is an alien. They assume from his bizarre behavior that he's just mentally disabled in some fashion. They invite this odd stranger into their home and, at one point, have a little party where they inexplicably dress him up in women's clothing, make up and all. OK, he's an alien and has no idea what's going on, but to these women he's just a mentally confused stranger they can slather in lipstick. It gets crazier. At one point, Anderson ends up thrashing in a lake because he can't swim. In the wide shot, he is very obviously in water that can't be more than six inches deep. And he's just splashing around in a panic. Then Josephine and Jessica jump in to save him and all three wind up thrashing in this shallow water in slow motion while the soundtrack pounds away. Mind you, this water was black and seriously nasty, and there are plenty of shots where poor Glory Annen takes in a mouthful of this muck. Ugh, poor girl. And her character is just so stupid. When Jessica goes in search of clean clothes for Anderson, she happens across a trunk in Josephine's room containing bloody clothes and an enormous switchblade. Just a big ol' box of evidence that Josephine has killed. Yet another reason this relationship needs to be aborted, but Jessica forgets immediately and goes back about her daily routine.

PREY is nuts and for that I give it a recommend. It's a science fiction movie about a cat monster from space (Anderson's normal form is that of a cat person) mixed with a suspense thriller about a young woman trapped in a dangerous relationship with a psychopath; two separate plots tossed in a blender and served as a cheesy, sci-fi sexploitation stew.

A quick peek at the IMDb trivia section teaches us that "Prey" was shot in only ten days and that most of the script actually had to be improvised during shooting. These usually aren't very good signs, especially not when the director already holds the reputation of delivering movies with a low level of quality. Norman J. Warren's other films (like "Inseminoid" and "Satan's Slave") are fun but extremely unoriginal, mainly revolving on graphic bloodshed and copious amounts gratuitous sleaze. "Prey" is exactly like that, but now he totally didn't even bother to come up with a script. The result is a bizarre and often laughable film that makes no sense whatsoever, but the whole ineptness is irresistibly charming nevertheless. The story goes like this: An alien, who goes by the name of Keator, arrives in rural England with a mission to research possible new food sources to save his whole species, but the poor sucker never makes it further than the isolated mansion of two crazed lesbians. He ends up living with them; they dress him up in women's clothing like he's their third lesbian toy-girl and together they hunt down a fox. When the poor animal is eventually dead, they celebrate it with a giant party, which is just a little over-the-top if you ask me. In the meantime, Keator – whose human name is Anders Anderson (!) – develops a more or less intimate relationship with the youngest lesbian and she slowly falls for him. For you see, she's not a real lesbian but just an insecure girl and the other is a scary dominatrix that literally forces the young girl to be her lover. It's a mad world, indeed. The whole middle-section of "Prey" is rather tedious and uneventful, and only hilariously cheesy & inept dialogs keep it tolerable to sit through. Then the climax is extremely gross and bloody with a sudden massacre. Surely the sick puppies and avid admirers of 70's exploitation will appreciate the graphic bloodshed of the finale, but it comes ridiculously abrupt, like Warren suddenly got tired of his film and wanted to end it, and it totally misfits the rest of the film's tone. "Prey" is a pretty bad but curiously intriguing 70's trash-film, inclusively intended for fans of this type of cinema.

You know the big house in the Omen (1976), the secluded stately pile in the English countryside where Ambassador Thorn and his wife intended to raise young Damien before they found out the hard way that he was the Anti-Christ? Well, that big old house was on the grounds of the now-defunct Shepperton Studios, and when cult director Norman J. Warren (fresh from a surprise hit with the slow- burning shocker Satan's Slave) found out it was free for ten days in 1977, he gathered a tiny group of actors (who wore their own clothes on camera) and technicians, and set about making a feature film in little over a week with a largely improvised piecemeal script. Actually, the story behind the making of Prey is a little more complicated than that, but this potted version of events simply underlines the freewheeling, anything-goes state of British cinema in the seventies, when apparently anyone with a few quid to spare and nerves of steel could shoot a film on loose change and have it playing in the Odeons and ABCs alongside the latest blockbusters from America in a matter of weeks. The fact that a turf accountant is mentioned in the credits for Prey tells you all you need to know, really.

There's not much of a plot here - a half-man, half-canine alien called Kator / Anders lands in the British countryside on a fact- finding mission and is adopted by a lesbian couple - one slightly butch and prone to possessive hysterics, the other more feminine and submissive. Things very quickly go awry as it becomes clear that Anders / Kator isn't all he seems, chickens are killed, policeman investigating the gruesome disappearance of a motorist are butchered, a fox is found half-eaten, and it's only a matter of time before the awful truth comes out. You've probably guessed the twist already, which is understandable because the title kind of gives it away, but not only are the man-dog-alien thing's alien brethren going to kill us all, but eat us as well. Yikes!

Norman J. Warren has been referred to in some quarters as the nearest British cinema's ever come to its very own Fred Olen Ray, but that pat description manages to belittle both parties. Warren was a knowledgeable craftsman and canny director, capable of performing minor miracles on the tightest of budgets, and stands nicely alongside his closest contemporary Pete Walker as one of the true 'wide boys' of seventies exploitation. If Walker offered the public unsentimental tales, however, Warren could be downright misanthropic, presenting a very dim view of humanity with his endlessly shrill and argumentative characters, skew-whiff pocket universes where an attempted rape, a bloody murder or a Suspiria- referencing set-piece lurked around every corner, and happy endings were for wimps and ten-year-old girls. He may have looked like a personable supply teacher, but there's a solid core of pitch-black nastiness at the heart of Warren's best films, and Prey is no exception. Relationships are open wounds, conversations are punctuated by recriminations and hysterics, blood (and vomit) pours off the screen and nobody emerges with any real credit. Throw in some hilariously awkward transvestism, skid row special effects, a commendably gloomy atmosphere of infinite foreboding and you've got a unique, if undeniably flawed little oddity that should please anyone with a taste for the forgotten avenues of schlock horror.

A note on the performances, in particular Barry Stokes's turn as the androgynous, almost catatonic alien. Having previously hammed it up in no-budget sex comedies (something he'd do again in the Warren- directed 1979 soft-core science fiction spoof Spaced Out), Stokes proves here that he's just as comfortable with the opposite side of the exploitation coin, and he's hauntingly effective in his role. Sally Faulkner is memorable, if occasionally a touch overpowering, as the dominant half of the partnership, and the late Glory Annen (who would be reunited with Stokes in Spaced Out two years later) should, by rights, have become a legitimate film star - she certainly had the charisma, the acting chops and the looks for it, but it seems she never got the right breaks. Ivor Slaney provides the pulsating electronic score which is appropriately other-worldly and disconcerting, particularly during the genuinely nauseating scene where the three leads thrash around in a heavily polluted river in glorious slow motion - to be honest, in spite of the plentiful blood and viscera on show in certain other scenes, that's the part of Prey most likely to turn the average viewer's stomach.

I like this film. I like it a lot. I like it because it makes me incredibly nostalgic for a period in British cinema that has long since passed. The 1970's. A time when irreverent and irrelevant schlock like this could get made. I like it because it is monumentally silly yet eerily compulsive, possesses a truly odd atmosphere, and at one point it actually frightened me.

It was made in 10 days with whatever change the crew had in their back pockets. It's very entertaining.

How I wish up-and-comers would make stuff like this rather than the Tarantino and 'Trainspotting' tributes that they STILL are.

Norman 'J.' Warren, I salute you.