The score is made up of African tribal chants and songs, giving us the sense that Man is intruding into a fully formed society, possibly endangering it in spite of his professed good intentions. But the “thousands” are African tribespeople speaking an unsubtitled dialect, and our hero by no means has the moral high ground. The structure and production value belong to the old Hollywood epic tradition, with its glorious wide-angle location shots and its cast of thousands in the first and last acts (Man spends the majority of Act 2 in solitude).
#THE NAKED PREY MOVIE#
(I assume he would also have written “Now I have a spear, ho ho ho” on the dead man’s chest had he not been pressed for time.) He flees and spends the next few days trying to avoid death at the hands of his pursuers or the treacherous landscape as he makes his way back to a British fort miles away.įor a movie made in the mid-1960s, The Naked Prey feels shockingly modern. He dodges the first tribesman’s spear and kills him with it, equipping himself with the dead man’s knives, shoes, and loincloth. The Man is left for last the tribesmen strip him naked and give him a head start before they take turns coming after him.
#THE NAKED PREY SERIES#
In return, the tribe hunts the safari group down and executes them in a series of upsetting ways, including being covered in clay and roasted alive on a spit. Against Man’s advice, the safari’s arrogant financier insults a group of tribesmen and refuses to pay them for passage through their territory. But the film that unfolded was far more complex.Ĭornel Wilde (who also directed and produced the film) stars as the unnamed Man leading a safari through what is now Zimbabwe during the era of British colonialism. The brief narration at the beginning of the film explains that in the harsh landscape of southern Africa, “man… became like the beasts, and their way of life was his.” I was a bit concerned that we’d just had the moral of the film served to us on a platter before the story could begin. Coming from him, this is a ringing endorsement. Sitting down to watch The Naked Prey last night, all I knew about it was that it scared the bejesus out of my boyfriend when he saw it as a kid.
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