'The Prey' (1983) - Edwin Brown.

Ululations from the mystic voids of VHS hell! After owning the dubious-looking Bootleg of 'The Prey'for many years, it was with tremendously acute, 'pre-entering the Gladiatorial ring excitement' that I watched the immaculately insane Blu-ray presentation of  Edwin Brown's fitfully sanguineous, generously stock footage slathered, sinfully slept on slasher freakshow. Directed with a rare heartfelt, wide-brained finesse, colourfully suggestive of a William Girdler or fellow free-thinking, outdoorsy, independent celluloid centurion Don Dohler. Including the outstandingly impecunious visuals, it is the films multifarious confabulations of the envelope thrustingly twisted screenplay wherein 'The Prey' begins to teasingly tear away, eyes slavering, lips blathering into the uncharted realms of becoming a terrifically transcendent, terror taunting, trouser-tentingly tawdry triumph! The winsome dénouement is as elusive as Jayne Mansfield's bust in 'The Girl Can't help it' (1958), the boisterously unfiltered ensemble acting is no less refined than Nick Zedd's infamously sedate 'They eat Scum (1979), and the uniquely perpendicular plot hares through all three unprecedentedly singular acts like a deadly Martian virus!

The Prey's outlandish originality is a blisteringly boundless, nipple-twistingly exquisite delight, so exhilarating is the luminously lunatic premise I am led, quite literally, with madly-staring brain to think that SF grand master Philip Jose Farmer had a filigree hand in the scintillatingly inspired scripting! It's so frequently fearless, so deliberately demented, 'The Prey' got deadly dramatic locomotion like a peyote-crazed prairie centipede. Windswept, and wickedly wonky, 80s slashers are rarely so exhilaratingly eccentric as this mayhemic mountaintop massacre!  So, outside the wildly subjective rantings of a forlorn mentalist such as I, is the galdarn fright-flick any good? Any Good? Can honey-voiced Bobbie Gentry sing a sad, sad song? Did Philip K Dick dream of electric screams? Did long-forgotten riff-mongers Muzza Chunka make the very best decision by calling their groovy album 'Fishy Pants'? Hellz Indeedy Yes!!!!! Stalwart Horror avatars Arrow Video certainly did our ceaselessly thirsty 80s slasher glands a most righteous, Dudley Do-Right with this, their gore-iously glistering, full-spec Blu-ray release of 'The Prey' (1979) And that's about all the insane speaking you'll ever need on this all too rarely celebrated, cinematically chronic Slasher disasterpiece!

'The Burning', 'Friday the 13th' and 'Howard The Duck' all came many years after Edwin Scott Brown's trail-mixing, backwoods sick-making classic, 'The Hills Have eyes' and 'Von Ryan's Express' came long before 'The Prey', and, that, amigos, is something I will have to deal with in my own sweet time. There are myriad salient epiphanies in a young chap's life, the melancholy moment he puts down his Airfix Focke-Wulf Fw 191, turns to regard the temptingly sticky Evo Stick, and takes his very first life-altering huff of that mind-cloaking chemical puff, and, in a no less evangelical manner, 'The Prey' may well enrapture your sedentary life for the 97 mins you expose your think-matrix to the calamitous circuitous celluloid confection that is 'The Prey', Shot in 1979, released theatrically in 1984, and handsomely remastered in 2019, I sincerely feel that The Prey's extended maturation process can be appreciated in much the same way as a flavoursome 18-year-old single malt whiskey, or an especially odoriferous French cheese!