The Prey

Young campers find themselves stalked through the woods by a killer. How original.

This 1984 slasher film stars John Friedrich, Rachel Ward, and Mark Metcalf. It was written by John George, Neil Hicks and Ronald Shusett. Andrew Davis directed.

I enjoyed The Final Terror so much, I went off and watched this flick soon after. Basically the same plot, I thought it might be fun.

Nope.

This is, for lack of a better description, a standard slasher effort. You got bland boring characters, unaware they’re being hunted, and killed in a variety of ways. More Friday the 13^th than The Final Terror. Though with most of the Friday the 13^th flicks I’ve seen recently you have a bit more empathy for the victims. Here, not so much.

Worse than the over familiar situation (which can be smoothed over with style and daring) we have padding. Padding. And more padding.

You like nature scenes? Boy, do we have nature scenes!

You like pointless scenes like banjo playing far from the action and a guy telling a faun a bad joke far from the action? Got that too!

We also have one of the characters tell the exact same story twice. We also have the worse retelling of The Monkey’s Paw ever.

Makes a man kind of tired inside.

All of this to fill out a run time of an hour and nineteen minutes.

Yikers.

One last matter.

It hasn’t ever come up, not even before the reboot. However I have Special Rules about films. When a Rule is invoked, which I’m doing now, the movie loses points.

The number varies by my level of irritation. Here it’s -0.5 points. Lowest possible.

What Rule is it?

As it’s a spoiler and I believe in fair play to most all films, I putting it all the way at the bottom, past the last rating.

Hopefully it doesn’t happen too often with these brief reviews.

Last I’ll say on the matter is that while it doesn’t tick me off the way it usually does here, it still made me irritated enough to say something.

All said and done, if you have a chance to watch this, watch The Final Terror instead. Or Rituals. Or Deliverance. Anything.

Like so many movies, a little more thought and care might have made this… I dunno? Something not so meh? (1.0 Points.) Whatever. I honestly don’t care any more about this flick. (1.0 points)

Spoiler Below

Click here to jump to it.

Cullen’s Little Horror Rule

Slasher films have a nasty habit of favoring the killer over the victim. You could say that about all Horror, to a degree, but the Slasher film has this problem in general.

That’s fine.

I don’t like it when the Slasher wins.

The slasher can escape to kill another day, that’s fine. But when he clearly, clearly kills the protagonists all off? No. With the deck stacked in the killer’s favor for a full flick, this last bit is a little much.

As I said above, with enough verve you can get away with practically anything. The Prey doesn’t have that and there’s a cost.