Day 23: The Prey

"It's not human. And it has an axe!" How can you resist a tag line like that? I couldn't. I first stumbled upon this film on a bootleg dvd table at a horror convention. I ended up buying a Halloween 6:Producers Cut bootleg (Terrible decision, it's awful and now I own an official release on Bluray). But The Prey caught my eye and I've been on it's trail ever since. Now that I've seen it, it's not great. But not bad either. When you are disappointed by highly anticipated movies as often as I am, even something as sub par as this comes off as very satisfying.

A group of teenagers head to the woods for some camping fun. They're having a great time with their scary campfire stories, sex, and swimming. But unbeknownst to them, they're obviously be watched by something unseen in the woods. This mysterious figure begins killing off the teens one by one.

The Prey could have ended in approximately 45 minutes. The producers must have thought that they needed to fill some major space, since almost half of the movie is stock footage of wildlife. This is a common trademark of backwoods slasher movies, but it's unfortunate here since the actual movie is actually quite good (by genre standards). There are even parts where things are meaninglessly in slow motion. I'm honestly convinced that it was all just to stretch the movie out since there wasn't enough material to fill an hour and 20 minutes. Couldn't they have just added more disposable teen characters and filled time with their death scenes?

Speaking of death scenes, this film has a couple of goodies. Nothing is outstanding, but most of the kills are either gory enough or something a bit different from the norm. You don't see too many tripwire trap kills in these early 80's slashers. So you can only imagine my delight seeing a young lady get scooped up by a rope and have her face smashed by swinging into a tree. There is also a really impressive scene where a guy's throat is ripped wide open. I dig it!

The Prey has cool makeup effects, nice kills, an awesome horror score, some decent jump scares, and characters so dumb that you can't wait for them to die. It's just such a damn shame that you have to endure what I can only assume is a combined 35 minutes of stock footage to get through it all. I'd say it's worth it just to see it just once. There really is a lost gem hidden between all the snakes, bears, insects, and owls.

Body Count:8

Side Note: This is a spoiler. The producers must be extremely prejudiced against burn victims. So much so that they consider them not human anymore. Yeah, it's sort of a ripoff of The Burning. Damn tag lines...