Prey (1977)

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) As far as low-budget horror films of the 1970s go, Prey definitely has a lot more going on than you’d expect. Yes, it does remain a shoddily shot, amateurishly edited, incomprehensibly written video nasty. On the other hand, it gleefully goes digging into psychosexual dynamics, as it features a couple of antagonistic lesbians whose isolated existence (in a vast country house) is disrupted by a tall mute stranger who ends up being a flesh-eating alien on a mission to investigate whether humans can make a tasty treat. Much of Prey thus has a strong symbolic component, what with the lesbian characters being threatened by a male intrusion. For such a dirt-cheap film, it carries some unexpected baggage that may make the entire thing less painful to take in. Still, let’s not kid ourselves: the film, as presented, is a tough watch—not just because of the gory violence and nihilistic ending, but the crude nature of the images and the shoestring production. (Fittingly, director Norman J. Warren would go on to make the higher-budgeted but much more reprehensible Inseminoid.) Still, I got much more out of Prey than I expected, and that does count for something.