Ever
since Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue
Male hit the shelves, filmmakers and authors have been clamoring to tell
their own version of the story of a lone figure who becomes the target of a
manhunt while managing to vanquish his adversaries with the greatest of
ease. Perhaps the most notable example
of this kind of one-man-war-machine subgenre in fiction is David Morrell’s
novel First Blood which went on to
spawn a hit five-film action movie series starring Sylvester Stallone.
Retold
countless times over the years in a wide variety of movies including Man Hunt, a televised adaptation of Rogue Male and in the 2003 William
Friedkin film The Hunted, it’s a familiar
tale of a military crisis involving a General trying to capture and subdue the
man he trained to be the ultimate killing machine. Earlier this year even, we saw what might be
the final entry in the hit Rambo series.
Somewhere
in between the respectable cinematic takes on the Rogue Male story is writer-director David A. Prior’s sublimely
inept and sleazy straight-to-video action trashterpiece Deadly Prey. Starring David’s
brother Ted Prior in the leading role, Deadly
Prey more or less regurgitates the Rogue
Male story with a fraction of the budget of the Rambo films and a wealth of unintentional hilarity to boot. The difference here is the role of the Colonel isn’t a good man trying to contain a loose cannon but a violent and
murderous sociopath who violates so many ethical rules in trying to capture the
superhuman Marine on the loose his atrocities committed become increasingly
difficult to take seriously.
Part
of what makes Deadly Prey such a hoot
is the earnestness of what is more or less a do-it-yourself actioner in the
same league as, say, Jim Van Bebber’s Deadbeat
at Dawn. You can tell David and Ted
Prior set out to make a halfway decent action movie and their sincerity only
amplifies the hilarity of this thing. Considered
by many to be a quintessential example of a movie “so bad its good”, the film
went on to become a Rifftrax favorite as well as Red Letter Media’s Best of the Worst film review
series.
Around
the mid-2010s, home video distributor Olive Films paired up with Slasher Video
and released a PAL Beta SP videotape transfer of the film on blu-ray,
effectively capturing the fuzzy and cheap looking imagery in all its
ingloriousness. Seen now, Deadly Prey is the kind of film you have
to go into knowing it’s a microbudget knockoff of far better movies with a
homegrown quality you can only ever find in straight-to-video fare. If nothing else, Deadly Prey also functions as a kind of time capsule of a bygone
era of low budget filmmaking rarely ever seen anymore. One thing is for sure…they don’t make them
like they used to!
--Andrew Kotwicki
