Sorry, this movie sucks

Really Surprised!

Absolutely Fantastic

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is Cornel Wilde's best film. It is a feast for those who look for Aristotle's Six Parts of Drama in a movie: 1. The plot is simple and understandable--a chase movie wherein everything seems lethal. Wilde plays a safari guide whose boss, a nasty, little, fraction of an Englishman, runs into a group of tribesman, and the fractional man manages to so insult the tribesmen that they return as a war party. They capture, then butcher the safari, and Wilde gets to be wild game.2. The characters are static (we never learn much), but there's real sympathy for both Wilde's character and the men trying to kill him (just look at the grief and anger exhibited when the hunters are picked off by Wilde or nature or each other or just plain bad luck). 3. The Naked Prey is a very intellectual movie, wrapped in a bloody loincloth. Because we don't know Wilde's history, nor do we understand the Africans' languages, we have to write our own scripts in our heads; it's a deeply thoughtful method of engaging the audience on a intellectual level.4. We hear pain and terror and glee in the voices and the words of the many characters. Wilde says a few words here and there; we identify him as American. The tribesmen hunting him, in an undecipherable language to Western ears, speak to each other in a completely understandable language, all because we have been frustrated and horrified and grief-stricken, too. The "diction" of the movie is up to the audience to create.5. Director Wilde uses three methods to evoke emotions from the audience with "music," whatever hits the ears of the audience, outside of diction. The first is by never being quiet--there always seems to be about a hundred different screams, hoots, clicks, and hollers from nature. Throw in the torment of scene changes going absolutely black and still--catch your breath because I'm going to swap you upside the head again when the light comes up--and you begin to feel some of the Wilde character's panic when he wakes up, aching from lack of food and water, exhausted from the hunt, and getting sick from all the little things that he's ingesting that will wear him out. The second is the juxtaposition of sight and emotion. We see Wilde get lucky killing one of his tormentors. We hate the monstrous sub-humanity of their gleeful desire to kill him, and we are set up to hate them when they take great relish in coming up with exciting ways to torture the hunting party at the start. Then we see one of the hunters find another young man, run through with a spear, and he screams in pain, sobbing while his brain tries to accept how quickly his friend has left this world. We instantly feel for this young man. It's startling how fast we change sides. Wilde does this again and again. Take sides. Show the emotions of both the killers and the killed, and it leaves the audience reeling and confused. Finally, Wilde gives us a thoroughly claustrophobic experience because he mixes the music of the tribesmen and the sounds of nature. They're almost interchangeable. It's smothering in its scariness.6. From the first moments of the hunt, with elephants being slaughtered, to Cornel Wilde's character scanning the horizon, close up and wide-angle, to the gleeful murder of the hunting party, to the mind-boggling vistas and close up beauty of the African scenery (and more than a few visual gross-outs and gag-inducers), the audience's eyes are locked on to the "spectacle" of the movie. It is visual super-glue. You can't stop looking at this train wreck of a chase. You want to look away, but you simply cannot.Which brings me back to my saying that of the three Wilde-directed movies, this is the most pleasing. There's trickery in Sword of Lancelot and Beach Red--he tries to come up with new tricks to wow the audience, and he has some success. In Naked Prey, the tricks blend together to give the audience a innovative and evocative experience. The Naked Prey really is in my top 25.It's that good.

A common theme among my reviews is the fact that the movie going public after the release of The African Queen and King Solomon's Mines was not satisfied with studio jungle sets, they wanted the real Africa. Well no one ever gave them the real Africa quite like Cornel Wilde did in The Naked Prey.That it was shot in Africa is a given, in fact it was shot in the former Union of South Africa, Bechuanaland, and Southern Rhodesia, two out of the three final gasps of white colonialism on the continent. And the cinematography is spectacular in color and quite graphic about the beauty and brutality of the jungle.The story as it is is set in Africa of the 1850s before the European had penetrated much beyond the coastal areas. Wilde plays a safari guide and tries to talk a thickheaded and obstinate man heading the safari to part with a few trade goods. What this nitwit does is insult the chief. Such an act of lese majeste is not tolerated and the tribe swoops down on the safari with a vengeance and kills all of them in some truly terrifying ways. Wilde however is given a break, a small head start as he's sent out buck naked into the jungle and pursued by the tribe.Wilde who has the experience in the jungle proves to be quite capable and ingenious at foiling the warriors after him. In many ways The Naked Prey is the ultimate survival film. For those curious Wilde does not stay naked, he finds some animal skins to protect the privates.With minimal and I mean minimal dialog Wilde turns in a great performance, in many ways similar to Spencer Tracy in The Old Man And The Sea, but with a lot more action.The Naked Prey is one of the best African location films ever done and it's a timeless classic.

Being a very big fan of Apocalypto I eventually (my brother actually did) stumbled upon The Naked Prey. A flick that Apocalypto shares many similar ideas with. I'm sure there have been films between the two and possibly a film that came before The Naked Prey that tackles similar premises and/or ideas. But nevertheless, I jumped at the chance to check out The Naked Prey as soon as I got the chance. And I'm glad I did.The Nakey Prey is about a unique individual; an ivory hunter with a heart of gold. Our lead character, known as The Man, is working together with a drunken money hungry fool to collect ivory, aka kill elephants. By the way, you do see Elephants die, so that's a downer. Anyways, not long into the film the Man and his traveling team of hunters and helpers are wrangled up and tortured and some, killed. This is when the story of Apocalypto comes into play. The Man is now set loose for our Pursuers to use as game. But obviously things don't go as planned. It's pretty simple, but is one of my favorite premises for an action/adventure film. I love it, and if you do too, then you should also check this flick out.The film is basically silent throughout, as our lead barely talks once he's on the run. You hear the pursuing bushmen speak to one another but, the movie isn't subtitled so you're not in the know of what they're actually saying. Though, it doesn't take a genius to understand what they're saying to one another though. It's all done very well. The pursuers and our lead all play their parts as good as you basically want them to, and there's even a bit of sly humor thrown in.My only "gripes" to the film is sometimes there is a lull in pace. I would have loved some more intense chases, which there are a couple, but not enough for this bum. And I also thought the scenes of all types of animals fighting with one another was slightly over done. It just felt like the movie was trying to get deep too often. At points I was also wondering if they were going to show every dangerous animal that lived in Africa. No hippos, unfortunately. But this is a minor gripe, as a animal buff it was cool seeing rare footage of animals.So if you dig Apocalpyto, chase flicks, solid classic adventure films, this is one flick that you should seek out. Definitely worth it. It's also worth it to see the car in the background driving in the middle of the bush.

Way back in 1932---around the same time that Director Ernest B. Schoedsack was involved in production of the original classic "King Kong"----he also made another classic film entitled "The Most Dangerous Game (MDG)." Based on a famous story by Richard Connell, MDG tells the tale of a megalomaniac hunter who lives on a remote island. Ships would regularly end up wrecked on reefs near the island. Their passengers and crew would be rescued by our hunter----enjoy his sophisticated hospitality for a time---and then end up as prey as our crazy hunter indulges in his very perverse "sport." MDG starred a very young Joel McCrea and two members of the original "King Kong" cast----Fay (I never met a scream that I didn't like!) Wray and Robert Armstrong. At 63 minutes in length, MDG is the model of an exciting and compact thriller film.Since the basic idea of someone being forced into the totally unexpected role of an innocent victim hunted down with the intention of becoming another's trophy kill is pretty powerful-----it has been remade into numerous films ("Game of Death," "Run for the Sun," etc.).The plot device is essentially the same one that Cornel Wilde employed in his variation on MDG entitled "The Naked Prey" released some 34 years after the original film. Wilde makes his movie interesting by having a big game hunter becoming the hunted, and changing the megalomaniac hunter into a band of African tribesmen determined to chase down the Wilde character and do him in.Wilde also indulges his film with numerous symbolic devices and sub-plot lines---but remains true to the basic premise of MDG. Survival is a battle of wits between the hunter(s) and the hunted, and only the most resourceful of preys can make it alive to the end of the tale.Viewers who like "The Naked Prey" ought to seek out MDG to recognize yet again the practice often used by Warner Brothers in the 1930s: if the original film tells a good story, it is worth remaking----and remaking----and remaking......