It’s hard to imagine now, but for a short time it seemed like the much-cherished straight-to-video movie, which had been the true heir to the low-budget B-movie/second feature/grindhouse cinema of the pre-home-entertainment era, might actually cease to exist. But thanks to Netflix, Amazon and the rest of them, there is, for the time being at least, a place for fledgling directors to hone their craft between the worlds of advertising, television and the big screen, or for the next Roger Corman or Fred Olen Ray (the latter thankfully still directing movies) to spend their days milking every cent out of their limited budgets, preferably with flair and imagination, but sometimes inevitably with utter, leaden unoriginality. And then, somewhere in between, there are movies like Thomas Sieben’s Prey.
The basic premise of Prey is well-worn, threadbare even, but still has plenty of life in it yet for a filmmaker with vision. A
group of young male friends are about to return home after a bachelor party weekend of hiking in a forest when they are stalked by an unknown assailant, who begins to pick them off one by one. As the ever-dwindling group – at its core brothers Roman (David Kross) and Albert (Hanno Koffler) – fight for survival, underlying tensions begin to surface, jeopardizing the group’s chances of survival. The lead actors are all good, the characters are barely sketched but mostly believable enough and the direction is solid. There are some arresting set pieces and just about enough tension and intrigue to keep you watching for the whole 87 minutes and, despite its shortcomings, the film is rarely dull.
Those shortcomings, though sometimes irritating, are common enough. In Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, poor old sympathetic Chief Brody has shady mafia dealings and suspected marital infidelity to deal with, as well as everything else that transpires, but for his movie adaptation, Steven Spielberg realized that, for the purposes of a couple of hours of screen drama, a killer shark is enough. It’s a lesson many filmmakers could learn. Naturally, in Prey, the group of friends being hunted by a crazed killer must talk to each other, and giving realism its due, under extreme pressure people probably do fall out with each other when common sense suggests they shouldn’t. But the longer they squabble, the more the viewer is relieved or even pleased when another of the five friends is dispatched by the stranger with the rifle.
The film does, however, look pretty good. The plus side of filming with a modest budget in a forest is that there’s a readymade set available. Despite technical shortcomings, the original Evil Dead and Friday the 13th movies both benefitted from the atmosphere and tension that a director with some visual flair can conjure simply by using their imagination when positioning the camera among the trees. On the other hand, there’s always a danger that, without that requisite imagination, the film becomes something like a tedious home movie of people out for a walk in the countryside. The Blair Witch Project is an obvious example of either the virtues or pitfalls of forest filming, depending on your point of view. A less controversial example is Leigh Scott’s Dragon (2006), which, for those with the misfortune of seeing it, feels like watching cosplayers on a sedate woodland ramble. For the most part, thankfully, Prey uses its locations well, and, with 15 minutes or so of extraneous plot taken out (see below) it could have been an excellent if somewhat minimalist chase movie.
The plot, as even its one-line summary reveals, is both derivative and predictable. But those aren’t really impediments for this kind of a film. Indeed, the best B-movies in this mold – Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986) and Spielberg’s Duel (1971) among them – take that predictability and give it the inevitability of a nightmare. Although it has some great scenes – especially based around a creepily deserted out-of-season campsite and its convenience store – Prey doesn’t do that. Instead, it loses its focus with a few unnecessary scenes and subplots. Presumably intended to give the viewer some red herrings to chase, and perhaps to relieve the otherwise dark green and leafy palette, the film is unnecessarily complicated by short flashback scenes featuring Roman and his wife-to-be, raising doubts, Benchley style, about her fidelity to our hero. There’s also some stuff about employment. Apparently, Albert has the ability to offer a job to one or more of his friends but chooses not to, or something like that. Whatever.
In the end, the important thing is that Prey is a perfectly enjoyable, competently made and watchable little film that passes the viewers’ time without feeling too much like that time is wasted. The denouement is pretty much what you’d expect, satisfying in one way while raising questions of its own, but it’s less frustrating than either The Hitcher or Duel, and thankfully, the director resisted the temptation to do the expected “surprise” twist ending. Not at all scary, not very thrilling, Prey still more or less delivers.
The post From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Prey appeared first on Spectrum Culture.