Highly Overrated But Still Good

Don't Believe the Hype

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

An alien lands on earth, takes over the body of a handsome young man & is taken in by a lesbian couple living in a large house in the English countryside. Brilliant!! Although this is a sci-fi/horror movie it is also very heavy on drama, focusing on the relationship between the three main characters. This may put some genre fans off but personally I thought it was engrossing & very well done. Plenty of nudity here, a few gory moments too. Eerie, effective soundtrack. The film does look cheap with it's low budget & apparently was filmed in only 10 days but this all adds to it's charm.

Whenever you watch a film made by British director Norman J. Warren you always know that, whatever might happen, it's probably going to be very nasty indeed. Watching his ultra low budget science fiction quickie PREY, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is an exception - and you'd be right, at least for the first seventy minutes or so. The movie is basically a three-hander with the added plot device that two of the females are lesbian lovers, giving Warren a chance to indulge in some gratuitous sex scenes - being a slice of '70s exploitation, this comes as no surprise.Warren makes good use of his secluded woodland location to create an isolated location in which the story leisurely unfolds, variously killing off minor characters (even the pet parrot) before the true horror of the story comes to the fore. The film isn't without faults - it's probably Warren's most poorly-paced movie, with all the violence and graphic horror saved for the ending rather than dotted throughout like in TERROR and INSEMINOID. Some scenes do drag, like the dinner party featuring Stokes in drag (!), or the laughably dramatic pond-drowning sequence which seems to last an age. The scenery and foreboding atmosphere, plus the human dramas inside the household, do keep it watchable throughout however.It's difficult to judge the performances of Glory Annen and Sally Faulkner, playing two matter-of-fact women going about their humdrum lives; they're not really required to act much until the finale. Faulkner, however, makes for a scarily convincing desperate woman with homicidal desires, whilst Annen takes an understated approach instead limited to only one screaming fit. Barry Stokes, on the other hand, is pretty good as the handsome but alien visitor, packing his performance with strange mannerisms, odd expressions and a stilted personality to perfectly reflect his alien persona. Ironically, it is when he reveals his true self that the effect is ruined through cheap makeup, with a plastic snout and spiky teeth, although those red reptile contact lenses are pretty creepy.The film is best remembered for the incredibly gruesome finale, in which Faulkner finds that her lover has been disembowelled and cannibalised by the alien intruder - we're talking explicit gore here, blood splattering up the walls, entrail munching and everything. It's not surprising that this scene has been heavily cut in various UK releases over the years but whichever version you do see, you'll still get the impression - a grotesque slice of stomach-churning terror that gives Fulci's cannibalism in ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS a run for its money. An even weirder British addition to the sci-fi/horror genre came in the early '80s with Harry Bramley Davenport's unique and utterly bizarre epic XTRO, with which this has much in common.

Alien lands on earth and takes on human form only to end-up being a pawn in the lives of a bickering lesbian couple.The premise of Alien Prey alone will give one a glimpse into the off-beat weirdness that is this strange low budget sci-fi/horror show. Among the crazy offerings you've got animal-men attacking people, an alien in drag, some howlingly bad dialog, a party for a dead fox - its difficult not to find this a tongue-in-cheek effort. Also this bizarre flick has enough sleaze for any exploitation fan thanks to some drawn-out sex scenes. This is all capped off with a surprisingly violent (and bloody) finale and one pleasingly nihilistic ending.The direction isn't bad and the filming locales are nice. The cast's performances are just erratic enough to add even more weirdness to the film. Sally Faulkner throws out a perfectly 'bitchy' vibe only matched by Barry Stokes' deliciously odd 'stowic' performance as the alien - who you just might be rooting for in the end.Alien Prey is simply a hoot for cult fans. There's definitely no other film like it and whether you laugh or groan you're bound to be entertained regardless! *** out of ****

A quick peek at the IMDb trivia section teaches us that "Prey" was shot in only ten days and that most of the script actually had to be improvised during shooting. These usually aren't very good signs, especially not when the director already holds the reputation of delivering movies with a low level of quality. Norman J. Warren's other films (like "Inseminoid" and "Satan's Slave") are fun but extremely unoriginal, mainly revolving on graphic bloodshed and copious amounts gratuitous sleaze. "Prey" is exactly like that, but now he totally didn't even bother to come up with a script. The result is a bizarre and often laughable film that makes no sense whatsoever, but the whole ineptness is irresistibly charming nevertheless. The story goes like this: An alien, who goes by the name of Keator, arrives in rural England with a mission to research possible new food sources to save his whole species, but the poor sucker never makes it further than the isolated mansion of two crazed lesbians. He ends up living with them; they dress him up in women's clothing like he's their third lesbian toy-girl and together they hunt down a fox. When the poor animal is eventually dead, they celebrate it with a giant party, which is just a little over-the-top if you ask me. In the meantime, Keator – whose human name is Anders Anderson (!) – develops a more or less intimate relationship with the youngest lesbian and she slowly falls for him. For you see, she's not a real lesbian but just an insecure girl and the other is a scary dominatrix that literally forces the young girl to be her lover. It's a mad world, indeed. The whole middle-section of "Prey" is rather tedious and uneventful, and only hilariously cheesy & inept dialogs keep it tolerable to sit through. Then the climax is extremely gross and bloody with a sudden massacre. Surely the sick puppies and avid admirers of 70's exploitation will appreciate the graphic bloodshed of the finale, but it comes ridiculously abrupt, like Warren suddenly got tired of his film and wanted to end it, and it totally misfits the rest of the film's tone. "Prey" is a pretty bad but curiously intriguing 70's trash-film, inclusively intended for fans of this type of cinema.