The Prey (1983)

I’m usually the oldest in whatever horror crowd I’m around. Most of them say they experienced the slasher phenomenon during the VHS era. I've been around long enough to have seen the movies in theaters.

By the time home video came around, I was kind of tired of slasher movies. I was finally able to see Italian horror, films from the sixties and seventies, and everydamnother thing my heart desired. I kept up the the Fridays and the Nightmares, but I wasn’t renting a lot of the cheap older titles.

I’m trying to catch up and see all the ones I missed. Honestly, the ones that fell between the cracks mostly deserve to stay down there. I unearth a gem now and then, but it’s mostly really bad movies I’d have been better off without seeing.

The Prey is one I never saw on its original run. I can’t imagine why it didn’t open in two thousand theaters.

This one’s cheap, crude, and clumsy. Your basic group of disposable young adults go into the woods to be slaughtered by another deformed killer. The kids are devoid of personality or any defining characteristics. To say the dialogue is inane is a massive understatement.

But we don’t come to these movies for in-depth conversations or scintillating characters, do we? We’re there for the gore.

The Prey delivers the goods, even if the effects are bargain basement amateurism. Even that can be entertaining, and I did chuckle a few times while watching The Prey. I was surprised to see John Carl Buechler’s name in the credits as special effects makeup creator. Buechler was never really a favorite, but the work in The Prey is weaker than anything I’ve ever seen by the man.

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of wildlife scenes. In fact, 2024’s In a Violent Nature almost seems like a remake of The Prey. Only In a Violent Nature is roughly a million times better than The Prey.

The sumptuous wildlife shots in In a Violent Nature carry weight. The filmmakers are demonstrating the fine line between savagery and civilization. It’s evocative and beautiful. Plus, In a Violent Nature’s gore is stunning. The movie contains some of the most explicit, gruesome, and horrifying death scenes I’ve ever beheld.

The awkwardly edited nature scenes in The Prey only seem like padding to bring the movie to feature length.

This one’s hard to recommend except to those who like the worst of the worst in slasher cinema. That describes me, so I did get an iota of enjoyment out of the movie. My curiosity, at least, is satisfied, even if my desire to find great movies wasn’t.

I was about to slap a low 2 out of 10 rating in my movie journal, but the final scenes raised the bar at least a whole point. There are a few genuinely atmospheric moments and the very end is like something out of a Richard Laymon novel. It’s more disturbing and transgressive than most anything I’ve seen from the old days of slasherdom.

If you’ve gotta see ‘em all, you’ve gotta see ‘em all. By all means watch The Prey if you are a slasher completist. It’s not as bad as Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone, that’s for sure. It’s also a more satisfying experience than Fred Olen Ray’s Scalps. Scant praise, I know, but we who live for this stuff take what we can and count our blessings.

Written by Mark Sieber