'Prey' (2016)


As last night was half about reading and half about watching movies, I thought I'd make today a 'two post day' and tell you all about what I read and watched. First up is the movie 'Prey', chosen because I was in the mood for a 'creature feature' last night and 'Slugs' really didn't work out when I watched it. Seriously, it was a case of having all my slightly negative thoughts, about the book, confirmed. Slugs are really slow and react badly when you pour salt over them, you can't make a whole movie about how dangerous they are, you really can't. But anyway...

After having fast forwarded my way through 'Slugs', I thought I'd give 'Prey' a go instead. It's been sat on my watch list for a while and I thought last night was the time to finally give it a go.

The plot of 'Prey' is very simple, a little too simple in fact but I'll come onto that in just a minute. The long and short of it is that there's a killer lion on the loose in Amsterdam and it's down to zoo vet Lizzy and her ex-boyfriend, hunter Jack, to track the beast down and kill it.

Simple? Like I said, a little too simple for me. You see, the thing is that you never find out where this lion originally came from (or if we did, I totally missed it). There are no zoos or circus' reporting an escaped lion; we're apparently meant to believe that one day, a lion went for a wander and kept going until he reached Amsterdam where he decided that he'd gone far enough and that he'd stay. Erm... ok? Look, you know by now the kind of films that I like to watch aren't particularly believable (if at all) but this one really got me. It's not a massive plot hole but deep enough that I would have liked to have seen it filled in. It's not a show stopper, just a bit irritating really.

Get past that though and all of a sudden, 'Prey' becomes a nice mix of comedy and horror that had me chuckling and switching between tabs, on my laptop, when things got a little too tense. And it does get really tense. The rules seem to be that if you're on the streets at the same time as the lion then you're fair game. The rules also seem to include the lion being able to hop onto a tram without anyone noticing but we'll leave that to one side for now. There are loads of chases and people being blindsided by a lion that's apparently a hell of a lot cleverer than the average guy. Although having said that, you can be excused for not expecting a lion to turn up in a playground...

'Prey' does play it for laughs as well but not at the expense of the tension that is being built up. Again, it's along the lines of the lion being a lot cleverer than the people hunting it and this make for amusing moments where the hunters swiftly become the hunted... by other hunters. You laugh and then the lion turns up and it's time to get scared again.

'Prey' clocks in at an hour and forty eight minutes and I think the bigest compliment I can pay is that I had such a good time that it really didn't seem like that long at all. If you can get past a lion being able to hop onto a tram un-noticed, at the very least, you'll probably enjoy it too.

I found 'Prey' on Amazon Prime, I don't know if it's streaming anywhere else to be honest.

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