When the camera makes a slow pan up his almost naked body-as if he were a Greek god in cut-offs-we know those paramilitary clowns are in trouble. Everything changes once his sweatshirt comes off, though. Thornton certainly doesn’t realize what he’s getting into when he snatches Danton (in broad daylight, in front of house, surrounded by witnesses). At the start, Mike Danton seems like an average bum, not wanting to leave his sweet waterbed to take the trash out for his wife. The movie doesn’t tip its hat right from the beginning. Yes, you have to make hard decisions when you’ve been stuck in the wilderness for, um, a day. Surprising amount of meat on a mouse, by the way. He cuts the mouse into the choicest bits and cooks them on a tiny stick. I don’t mean just skewering the whole thing over the fire like a barbarian. He is such a dedicated survivalist that he eats worms (for real) and knows how to cook a mouse on a spit. Not only does he dig a pit to hide in within seconds, he also fashions a camouflaged bamboo covering to use for ambushes. He lies on a bare branch two feet over everyone’s head pretending to be a chunky pink python. He wraps a single vine around his torso to disappear into the thick Californian jungle. In addition to his killing prowess, the movie shows off Danton’s keen survival skills. It would have been a much shorter movie if he began that way, but then we wouldn’t get to see him push a mound of rocks down a cliff onto his enemies like he was Wile E. Near the end, he breaks down and uses a gun, which, as it turns out, is much more efficient than a spear. His improvisational kills are the best, hoisting a guy and snapping his back against a tree, impaling a dude with a twig, stuffing a grenade down some poor schmuck’s pants. He likes his knife, so there are multiple stabbings, but he also uses it for whittling spears (rather than picking up one of the dozens of assault rifles dropped by his victims). When he’s not killing someone, he’s preparing to kill someone, and the movie excels in coming up with new ways for Danton to kill people. The theme: Ted Prior is awesome.Ī musclebound slab with a voice akin to a low frequency seismic vibration, Ted Prior’s Danton is a man of action. What it lacks in, well, everything resembling quality, it makes up for in pure enthusiasm and dedication to its theme. Ostensibly, it has a The Most Dangerous Game premise (see also: Turkey Shoot, Surviving the Game), but the plot is really only an excuse to kill as many nameless bad guys as possible. Take the most mindless action flick you can imagine, remove all the nuance and plausibility, and you have Deadly Prey. Soon they find that the hunters have become…well, you know where this is going.įull disclosure: Deadly Prey is a rock stupid movie. However, they make a serious (and wildly coincidental) error when Thornton snatches Mike Danton (Ted Prior), the deadliest Special Forces operative Hogan ever trained. Thornton (Fritz Matthews), pick up random saps off the street and set them loose in the woods for his men to hunt down. His favorite war game is having his right- hand thug, Lt. Hogan (David Campbell) is training an army of mercenaries for vague and undefined reasons. The movie’s plot goes like this: the Nefarious Col. The 1987, low-budget action extravaganza Deadly Prey is one such movie. I’m always looking for an undiscovered, lunkheaded gem, and every once in a while I find a movie that exceeds my expectations, a movie that is so loaded with absurdity it is like an embarrassment of riches, or, more accurately, an embarrassment of embarrassments. Where some laugh at the stupidity, I also laugh at the stupidity, but in a more endearing way. Where some see incompetence, I see quirk. As you know (or will understand after reading this sentence), I love a ridiculous movie.
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