In short: The Prey (1984)

A group of – alas tent-less as well as brainless – campers make their way to a place called North Point. There, after long, long, long, long, long scenes of doing nothing and an even longer campfire tale flashback abomination, the traditional lone slasher starts killing them off.

Edwin Brown’s The Prey exists in at least two different cuts, as taken from Japanese or US home video. The US version has generally a bit more blood and even longer(!) scenes, but a much more digestible campfire sequence, whereas the Japanese is generally a bit shorter, but has a campfire tale flashback about “gypsies” and the people who burn them including several (!) longish sex scenes that is so long and so pointless, falling asleep or thoughts of strangling the filmmakers (or both) may happen to you too. However, whichever version you find – perhaps even the fan composite that is even more boring than both of the others because it is the longest possible version, including every single drab second any film in existence has ever contained – you will possibly find that it’s just too damn long in any shape you encounter it.

For the film’s most terrible as well as most bizarre feature is how not a single scene here is ever not too long. Well, quite a few of the scenes don’t have much of a function for the plot, so they are too long whichever way you look at them. That’s not my point here, however. Rather, the filmmakers seem absolutely unable to ever have a scene end, prolonging everything further by a love for parallel cutting that would usually be used to increase suspense, but never manages this here because cutting between pointless scenes where nothing is happening, as well as various close-ups of animals (so many of them, so many!) is not how suspense works on planet Earth. Actually, it is rather fascinating, for the filmmakers clearly have heard about suspense and have a vague theoretical idea of how to build it, but they seem never to have seen a film by, say Hitchcock, or John Carpenter, for that matter, to just copy. Instead, the couple of more standard suspense set-ups here are ruined by just going on too damn long, or forever.

The sex scenes here are a bit more involved than you’ll usually find in a slasher, going on so intensely and (surprise!) so long, I was basically waiting for the money shot. As it happens, most of the rest of Brown’s filmography consists of porn, so this area was clearly where his interests were.


Of course, you can look at The Prey from a different perspective and actually admire the depth of its boredom, the sheer bloody-mindedness that results in all that intercutting between equally boring scenes, the (“meaningful”) shots of oh so many animals, the perfectly unsexy sex scenes, the generally ineffective kills, and so on, and so forth. It can’t be easy to make a film that is quite as bad at being a slasher movie while still keeping most – there’s no actual final girl here – of its consistent parts, either.