mjtsmm2027 Well if you're of an age where you grew up watching horror films from the last 15 years or so, I would imagine that most of the early 80's slashers hold little to no interest. This was a time when after the money making successes of Friday 13th and especially Halloween, it seemed that cash registers could soar by making a low budget film. To be fair the popularity of the slasher at the time probably died out in 1981-ish, with a few exceptions, but most have seen some interest revitalised due to the die hard fans of this era. Now if you're discovering the album of 80's slashsers, you will of course come across this but my guess is you won't return it to many times. You will probably find much more of a seductive pull with much better made examples such as My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler, The Burning etc. Still this does at least follow most of the Slasher rules and so you have the typical factors at work: A prior tragedy/event which sets off the killer's motives, the campfire ghost stories, the bitchy girl who has sex and then of course is punished, tight shorts on early 20 something guys with curly hair, the final girl who has a concerned look throughout, the cameo of a former popular actor who is strengthening his pension fund. Most of these films are of course tripe but there are plenty where at least the interaction between the victims can be quite fun but here it's just not quite camp enough. Still, the very end at least contains a surprise and whilst these films always leave you with more scratching of the head questions, it is short, to the point and if you can fast forward through the far too many animal scenes, reasonably OK after a few beers.

Avinash Shukla I watched this film in 1992 on the suggestion of one of my friends. Since I am a big fan of 'Backwoods Horror', I decided to give it a try. The film began and I thought I was about to witness another Friday the 13th. It was after 30 minutes, when I realized that they shouldn't have released it as a slasher. Here is what it's all about.The film begins with the stock footage of 1948 Northpoint wildfire, then it cuts straight to 1980, where we see a couple Frank & Mary enjoying their camp out. Moments later, Mary is shocked to see Frank's decapitated body and is brutally killed too. Nobody knows who did it. Then we come across 6 teenage campers Nancy, Joel, Greg, Gail, Skip and Bobbie heading to the woods. On the way, they meet forest ranger Mark, who asks them to watch out for the bears. As the teenagers go deeper and deeper in the woods, they become more isolated from the outer world. Little do they know that something horrible is lurking at an arm's length. The police department is investigating the disappearances of Frank & Mary and seeks help of the forest department. The senior forest officer Lester Tile may have clues regarding the disappearances at The Northpoint.So did you enjoy the story? You may have, because I never included a single wildlife footage in it. This could have made millions if it were shown on Animal Planet. The plot has no unique value and the actors are some of the worst and dumbest in the stock, who fail to develop themselves during the course of run. I mean you never get empathy for them, and even after spending around 81 minutes with you, they all die strangers. The film is full of unrelated and forcibly included stock footage, whose color scheme doesn't match with the actual film. The only good footage I remember is of a snake working hard to swallow a frog. This footage underlines the movie title 'The Prey'. Watch it only if you are big fan of backwoods horror, otherwise this has nothing new to promise.

hypostylin Uhhh ... so, did they even have writers for this? Maybe I'm picky, but I like a little dialog with my movies. And, as far as slasher films go, just a sliver of character development will suffice.Unfortunately, The Prey provides neither—and if you think I'm being hyperbolic, you'll just have to see it for yourself. Scene after scene, we just get actors standing around, looking forlorn and awkward, abandoned by any sense of a script. Outside of calling out each other's names when they get separated in the woods (natch), the only instances where these people say something substantive is when one character explains the constellation Orion (clearly plagiarized from Funk & Wagnalls; scintillating slasher fare, no?) and another rehashes an old campfire tale that doesn't even have anything to do with the plot (wait, what IS the plot?) At other times, The Prey actually has the gall to film its characters with the boom mic just far away enough so that we can't exactly hear what they're saying. So we get entire scenes wherein the actors are murmuring! Deliberately! Seriously, I've seen more dialog in a silent film. It's as if the filmmakers sat down at a bar somewhere in Rancho Cucamonga in the heyday of the '80s slasher craze and one looked at the other and said, "Hey, I gotta really sweet idea for a gory decapitation gag. Let's somehow pad an entire feature around it." And ... well, they did. To be fair, The Prey probably had some sort of writer on board. I mean, somebody had to jot down the scene sequence and label the dailies. However, I am fully convinced that this film did not have an editor of any kind whatsoever. There are glaring pauses, boring tableaux, and zero sense of pacing throughout. The filmmakers don't have anything else in the "script" to film, so they fill out the running time with exhaustive taxonomies of the flora and fauna that inhabit the forest in which our wild and crazy teens are getting sliced and diced. These critters are all filmed in straightforward, noontime daylight in a completely reserved fashion and with no attempt at atmospheric photography. If it feels like a science film, that's because it is. I'm pretty sure this is all nature show stock footage—all that's missing is a stuffy narration from some National Geographic alderman.More exciting footage that was graciously spared from the cutting room floor: a scene in which two men discuss cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches, and another scene wherein a supporting character strums away on a banjo for what feels like an entire minute-and-a- half! A minute-and-a-half! That's a lot of banjoing to commit to celluloid to begin with, let alone insert into the final cut of the film! Way to go, guys! Brevity and concision are the real victims of this slaughterfest.Admittedly, the film picks up quite a bit of steam (comparatively) in the last 25 minutes, into which much of the carnage is condensed and where a rip-off of Béla Bartók's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" cuts in. Vaudeville great Jackie Coogan makes a fun appearance as a tubby, bumbly park ranger (this was his last role, if you can believe it). And there are some nice gory moments, including a splattery neck tearing and the aforementioned decapitation. The make-up used for the killer (Carel Struycken, aka "Lurch" from the Addams Family movies) is also quite effective, and makes him look like a strange hybrid of young Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. Plus, if you love wacky, straight-outta-left-field endings, you need to check out how they wrap this puppy up. You'll do a spit take, I promise.Usually, I love films that are on this level of ineptitude, but the first three-quarters of The Prey are just so interminably boring that they pretty much spoil the rest. Overall, this is a largely pallid and tedious affair, and, while it ain't all bad, it should really only be seen by debilitated slasher completists. Why do we do this to ourselves, anyway?

AngryChair Foolish hikers go camping in the Utah mountains only to run into a murderous, disfigured gypsy. The Prey is a pretty run of the mill slasher film, that mostly suffers from a lack of imagination. The victim characters are all-too-familiar idiot teens which means one doesn't really care about them, we just wonder when they will die! Not to mention it has one too many cheesy moments and is padded with endless, unnecessary nature footage. However it does have a few moments of interest to slasher fans, the occasional touch of spooky atmosphere, and a decent music score by Don Peake. Still, it's business as usual for dead-camper movies.There are much better films in this vein, but over all The Prey may be watchable enough for die-hard slasher fans. Although one might be more rewarded to watch Just Before Dawn (1981), Wrong Turn (2003), or even The Final Terror (1983) again.* 1/2 out of ****