Month: March 2026

Somewhere amidst a monsoon of nature insert shots, filmmaker Edwin S. Brown managed to cobble together The Prey, a tedious Dead Camper drama of the sort that turned up in plentitude post Friday The 13th.

This isn’t a buried treasure or an overlooked gem. The Prey has more padding than the Philadelphia Eagles.

If you were to take a shot of whiskey each time Brown cuts away from the actors to show spiders, snakes, millipedes, ants, vultures, woodpeckers, frogs, and other woodland creatures, you will be unconscious long before the scarred giant killer (Carel Struycken, Lurch from The Addams Family) appears on the screen.

We can tell he’s there, though. His stupid heartbeat thumps wildly every few minutes. Just the heartbeat. Saves time and money on makeup (and tension).

As it stands, we get to know three vapid couples on a wilderness getaway being stalked by the mysterious survivor of a long ago forest fire.

The choices that Edwin Brown makes in order to further the plot can be blamed on the wee budget, with a chunk of change undoubtedly going to pay Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester from a different The Addams Family) in his final film role as Ranger Lester Tile, who burns up the screen eating a cucumber sandwich in one the movie’s most pivotal scenes.

For sheer artistic goofiness, Brown’s decision to feature Ranger Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostwick) playing a lengthy banjo solo and telling one of the world’s oldest (and slowest) jokes to a deer, demonstrates considerable artistic chutzpah in a rather barren entertainment landscape.

The anemic narrative actually gets pepped up when Joel (Steve Bond) shares the ancient tale of The Monkey’s Paw around the campfire. To his credit, he tells it reasonably well.

The only time The Prey gets truly horrifying is the ending, as Final Girl Nancy (Debbie Thureson) gets carried away to a cave to start a family with a huge murderous freak.

That’s some bullshit. No way she deserved that! But perhaps that’s why Edwin Brown included so many unpleasant shots of critters eating each other—it’s all part of nature’s eternal cycle of death and renewal.

Ewww. Gross.