The Prey (1984)
Nomination Year: 1993
SYNOPSIS: A group of college kids go on a weekend camping trip and are picked off one-by-one by a deranged monster. Fairly humdrum horror movie stuff. Unfortunately, they ran a little short on material. To do a major release, they needed 90 minutes of film and they only had about 45 minutes of material. They could have used this opportunity to do some real character development and make us care about the deaths of the heroes. Of course, they didn't. Instead, they added several long, boring sequences that had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot of the film (such as five minutes of a very minor character playing the banjo). This is one of those movies where the writer, director, producer, and most of the cast have the same last name (with the inexplicable exception of Jackie Coogan).
Greg Pearson
Smithee Award Nominations
| "Wanna Run That By Me Again?" |
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The Wide-Mouthed Frog In one of the many shenanigans that the writers went through to fill time, the intrepid park ranger (the alleged "hero" of the piece) spends five minutes telling an unseen audience a long, involved, and distinctly unfunny joke about a wide-mouthed frog. It goes something like this: "Once there was a wide-mouthed frog who hatched some babies, and she didn't know what to feed them. So she set out to ask the other animals what they fed their babies. First she came to a cow..." And here the ranger opens his mouth wide, to signify the wide-mouthed frog speaking, "'I'm the wide-mouthed frog, and I've just had some babies! What do you feed YOUR babies?' The cow said, 'I feed my babies grass.' The WMF thinks about this, then moves along. She comes upon a horse. [Open Mouth] 'I'm the wide-mouthed frog, and I've just had some babies! What do you feed YOUR babies?' The horse says, 'I feed my babies hay.' She moves along until she comes to an alligator. Once again, [wide mouth]: 'I'm the wide-mouthed frog, and I've just had some babies. What do you feed YOUR babies?' The alligator says, 'I feed my babies wide-mouthed frogs.'" Here, the ranger pantomimes the frog closing her mouth and squeaking through pinched lips, "'Don't see many of those around here, do you?'"
Okay, so they tried to inject some humor into the film and failed. But when he finally finishes, just to compound the idiocy, the camera pulls back to show that he was telling the joke to...a solitary deer. The deer stares at him for a moment in disbelief, then turns and runs off into the woods.
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| Worst Special Effect |
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Only a Dummy Would Fall for This The second-to-last victim steps in a classic rope trap and gets slammed against a tree trunk. Only problem is: you can easily see that the "flying body" is a dummy, and that it's covered with blood BEFORE it hits the tree.
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| Worst Cover Copy |
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"It's Human, and It's Borrowed an Axe!" The box shows a drawing of a metal-armored creature that looks suspiciously
like the monster from Predator. Below this, the tagline screams: "The Prey: It's not human and it's got an axe."
OK, first of all, the only resemblance the monster in the film has to the creature on the cover is that they both have four limbs and a head. Not that the heads actually look anything alike. Jackie "Uncle Fester" Coogan also explains during the film that the "monster" is actually a gypsy kid who, when horribly disfigured in a fire as a baby and left for dead, managed somehow to survive to adulthood by living like an animal in the woods. Hmm, so that
would make it....human. Granted, it killed its first victim with an axe (which
it took from the victim's campsite, so it wasn't even really its axe), but
apparently didn't much like it, because it went on to kill every other
character in the movie by other methods (except Jackie Coogan, who didn't have a big enough part to die).
So, to recap: Doesn't look like that, is human, only uses the axe once.
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| Crummiest Ending |
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Running Time, 366:18:20:36 The "monster" has killed the heroic park ranger and all the kids except for the last, a girl. He looms menacingly above her. She screams. Cut to peaceful nature scenes, the likes of which we've become used to over the course of the film. Summer scenes. Dum-de-dum. Fall scenes. Dum-de-dum. Winter scenes. Finally, it dawns on you! They're trying to show the passage of great amounts of time -- at what seems like a 1:1 ratio. When the Spring scenes arrive again, those audience members who are still awake see only the mouth of a cave. Then...a baby cries. The End.
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| Worst Picture |
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Why Don't We Play That "Sounds of Junior High" Tape While We Eat? There's an idyllic scene of the young folks having dinner around the campfire, overdubbed with something I've experienced only rarely: Stock Audio. Conversations continue when nobody's mouth is moving, cutlery clinks when nobody's eating. It sounds like they turned on a tape recorder in a school cafeteria and used that as the soundtrack. To make matters worse, the scene is rife with a WHOLE LOT of that gratuitous nature footage, every few seconds. You start to wonder if the film's about the animals or the people. Then you start to wish it were about the animals.
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Cream Cheese and Cucumber on Toasted Gypsy Jackie Coogan plays the only other park ranger we see in the film. His job seems to involve nothing but sitting behind the desk in the ranger station and mooching cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches out of his partner's lunch. Here, he tells the entire sordid tale of the gypsy kid and the fire. He does so while staring off into space -- I suppose it was meant to make him appear nostalgic and wistful, as if he's remembering tragic events of long ago, but it comes off more as Jackie Coogan just wanting his damn scene to end so he can collect his money.
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© 1992-2024 Bryan D. Cassidy and Greg Pearson. All Rights Reserved.
Edwin Scott Brown
