Devil’s Prey

Rating

Director

Bradford May

Screenplay

C. Courtney Joyner, Randall Frakes

Length

1h 28m

Starring

Ashley Jones, Charlie O’Connell, Bryan Kirkwood, Jennifer Lyons, Elena Lyons, Rashaan Nall, Corey Page, Tim Thomerson, Patrick Bergin, Marianne Muellerleile, Jack Leal, Matt Smith, Jim Vickers

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
There are films that test your knowledge, films that test your courage, films that test your emotions and films that test your patience. Devil’s Prey attempts to test your courage, but ends up testing your patience as its inane ramblings shamble through an otherwise unobtrusive film.

Four young men and women are waiting outside of a bar for a fifth person to arrive so they can leave. David (Charlie O’Connell) is a sceptic who doesn’t want to go out for drinks. His companions include a drug dealer (Corey Page) who’s on parole, Samantha (Jennifer Lyons), a sex-starved daddy’s girl and Joe (Rashaan Nall), a drug-addicted geek with no raison d’etre; the three want to go out for more partying. Susan (Ashley Jones) is David’s love interest and works as a bartender. She joins the group, also indicating that she doesn’t want to go out. When a passer-by hands them an invitation to a rave, the three become five as they are “kidnapped” into going out in the country for this event.

After they leave the party because of a chance run-in with some locals, they encounter an injured woman and promptly find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives.

Horror films have been popular since the early days of Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, when monsters were scary, makeup-laden creatures that terrified audiences and drew them back for more. The mid-20th century suspense master Alfred Hitchcock redefined the horror genre in a way that begged attention. With psychological terror in The Birds and stylized execution in Psycho, the world of terror would never be the same. Then in the 1970s, slasher flicks became popular with many teen audiences. Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street took extreme gore and psycho killers and melded them into a lucrative series of horror films. The 1990s and the new century have brought teen psycho flicks back to popularity. When Scream debuted, it mocked the genre, but spawned a new era of horror films that have unfortunately resulted in too many weak, pretentious stories. Many blend talented actors with hackneyed plots and end in the development of acting-starved, blood-filled films that appeal to increasingly bored audiences and eventually to direct-to-video disappointing muck like Devil’s Prey.

Devil’s Prey counts on its audience’s inability to understand complex plot structures and notice poor performances. There is a certain lack of interest in each scene as we’re dragged helplessly through an endless mire of lame jokes, hokey deaths and, eventually, an unsurprising ending that screams “unnecessary.”

It seems that horror films have lost most of the flair that their predecessors displayed. Devil’s Prey is certainly no exception; from its hunky lead O’Connell to the oblivious sheriff played by Tim Thomerson, the movie hits every stereotypical roadblock while failing to ignite or even kindle the slightest bit of imagination or interest.

Review Written

October 31, 2001