Crew
Director/Screenplay – David A. Prior, Producer – Peter Yuval, Photography – Stephen A. Blake, Music – Tim Heintz, Tim James & Steve McClintock, Special Effects – United Film Works. Production Company – Action International Pictures.
Cast
Ted Prior (Mike Danton), David Campbell (Colonel John Hogan), Cameron Mitchell (Jaimy’s Father), Dawn Abraham (Sybil), Suzzane Tara (Jaimy Danton), William Zipp (Jack Cooper), Troy Donahue (Don Michaelson), Fritz Mathews (Lieutenant Thornton)
Plot
Colonel John Hogan is engaged in training an army of mercenaries in the wilds south of Los Angeles. To train his men, he abducts people off the street and uses them as target practice for his recruits to hunt. The latest target they snatch is Mike Danton just as he is putting the trash out. Danton is released to be hunted but promptly turns around and kills all of the recruits sent against him. Hogan realises that Danton is a soldier he trained and brings his entire force in to hunt and eliminate him.
David A. Prior (1955-2015) was a director who made a lot of action films, thirty-three in all, usually of a paramilitary bent. He has also made a number of other genre films, including Killer Workout (1986), The Lost Platoon (1989), Future Force (1989), Future Zone (1990), Mardi Gras for the Devil (1993), Mutant Species (1995), Hostile Environment (2000), Lost at War (2007), Zombie Wars (2007) and Night Claws (2013). All have been released directly to video.
Deadly Prey is a variant on Richard Connell’s classic story The Most Dangerous Game (1924). The story concerns a Russian aristocrat who enjoys hunting human game on his island and a man forced to survive with only his bare hands where he succeeds in turning the tables despite. The classic film version was The Most Dangerous Game (1932) with Leslie Banks as Zaroff and Joel McCrea and Fay Wray on the run. This was remade several times – I have a full listing of these here in my essay Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games – and there are a large number of unofficial variants. Deadly Prey came at a point when The Most Dangerous Game scenario was finding a new home in the Action Film with the likes of Avenging Force (1986), Death Ring (1993), Forced to Kill (1993), Hard Target (1993), Surviving the Game (1994), 10+01 (2003), The Eliminator (2004) and The Condemned (2007).
Deadly Prey was made not long after the huge hit of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which created the myth of superheroic ordinary man, a well-trained soldier capable of defeating an entire army with only his two hands. The film here basically consists of a Rambo figure thrown into a Most Dangerous Game scenario, unleashed in the wild and defeating an entire army, building sophisticated improvised booby traps and surviving on his own skills (something that involves eating rats at one point). The video cover makes the Rambo connection direct with the tagline “In Vietnam he was the best … He still is!” even though Ted Prior’s character is never identified as being a Vietnam Veteran in the film.
There are times that Deadly Prey often borders on the totally ridiculous. As the Rambo-alike hero, Ted Prior, director David A. Prior’s brother, convinces you he has nothing much going on between his ears – not that that stopped a bunch of other action stars of the era such as Stallone, Van Damme or Dolph Lundgren, who all took inchoate mindless brutality to a new level. What is rather funny is watching Ted spend at least half the film fighting an entire army while wearing nothing except a pair of white boxer shorts, all clearly to display his undeniably well buffed physique.
It is fun watching Ted Prior running around in his underwear defeating an entire army, including shooting down helicopters, blowing up tanks, and despatching dozens of men with his bare hands. It is also rather amusing during the latter sections where he succeeds in building dozens of booby traps in the jungle that would in any real setting require days for one man to set up.
Perhaps the funniest scene is when Prior confronts Fritz Mathews, the soldier that just shot his girlfriend, and shoots his arm off and then beats him to death with it. The finale has Prior confronting David Campbell, the head of the games, ordering him to strip off his shirt and shoes and then start running, while the last shot is a freeze frame as Prior tilts his head to sky in an animal-like roar, the hunted become the hunter.
David and Ted Prior later made a sequel with Deadliest Prey (2013).
Trailer here
Full film available here