The Prey, director Jimmy Henderson’s followup to Jailbreak, is modestly sized, reasonably engrossing, and studded with flamboyant actors who get to say things like, “You thought that hell was just a fairy tale? I’ve made it real!”
Henderson is an Italian-raised director who spent some time in the UK before heading to Cambodia to work in the rising film industry there; this is allegedly the first million-dollar movie completely made in that nation.
Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” is the loose source, and one well-milked goat. There have been about a million TV adaptations — the one with secret agent Maxwell Smart was rather good. It’s been the plot of more than a dozen films, with titles like Bloodlust! and The Suckers. As for the best version, the original 1932 adaptation, it was one more ornament to that magnificent year for horror films. Under Ernest Schoedsack’s direction — he later did the original King Kong — a shipwrecked Joel McCrea was the quarry of a decadent noble. Moreover, the pre-code version had a sexual angle The Prey lacks, thanks to the casting of the primordial scream queen Fay Wray.
In full: https://www.sfweekly.com/film/the-prey-takes-dangerous-game-to-cambodia/
