Considering the three films are very similar in tone, content and atmosphere - even disregarding the fact that two of them share the same director in the gloriously misanthropic Norman J. Warren, a man for whom the term 'the cinema of cruelty' could have been coined - it seems grossly unfair that everyone of a certain age remembers watching Xtro (1983) on video and almost as many people remember going along to their local fleapit to see Inseminoid (1980), yet hardly anyone has even heard of Prey (1977), a quirky-as-you-like low-budget melange of softcore lesbian couplings, reluctant cross-dressing, off-kilter character study, wonky science-fiction malarkey and good old-fashioned blood-belching flesh-munching shock horror. This is doubly odd, seeing as it was released on video on the marvellous Vampix label (whose employees included Starburst's Alan Jones) of Death Weekend fame, and it narrowly missed ending up on the Department of Public Prosecution's shit-list of seventy-two so-called 'video nasties', but thanks to a couple of above-average DVD releases (most recently from Odeon, who released it as a rude-to-say-no twofer with Warren's earlier Satan's Slave) and the occasional screening on the Horror Channel, Prey is slowly but surely gathering a devoted cult following - and it's taken long enough, because if ever a film had 'cult classic' stamped all over it from day one, it's this one.
Consider this. A film that went into production before the screenplay was even completed, was shot in just over ten days on the backlot of Shepperton Studios, and whose main location was 'the old house' that the Who's drummer, Keith Moon, had once planned to make his home after his bandmates bought a share in that doughty British institution. Doesn't grab you? Well, consider the cast - Barry Stokes of Ups and Downs of a Handyman fame. Sally Faulkner of Vampyres fame. Glory Annen making a strong debut showing, shortly before she won the hearts of randy film buffs the world over with her scene-stealing turns in Felicity and Warren's saucy sci-fi comedy Spaced Out. Then there's the script - a genuinely whacked-out, predictably uneven grab bag of schizophrenic hysterics, misplaced kindness, fish-out-of-water misunderstandings, raw screaming hatred and punter-pleasing plasma-drenched histrionics that also manages to cram in side-swipes at health food nuts, man-loathing militant lesbians and Radio One DJs. I haven't even mentioned Ivor Slaney's score yet, suffice to say that the phrase 'once heard, never forgotten' barely does it justice.
The plot is simplicity itself. Kator, an extra-terrestrial visitor, arrives somewhere in England and has to assume human form in order to carry out some unspecified research mission. He promptly slaughters the grouchy male half of a necking couple in a parked car, only to assume the identity of the dead man and bump off his girlfriend too. The scene shifts to a nearby isolated house, where a lesbian couple go about their daily business. Jessica - cascading locks, cute smile, floaty summer dresses - is clearly the submissive feminine one (even though it's her house), and Josephine - tracksuit top, severe haircut, permanent scowl - is not only the dominant butch one, she's obviously a few bricks short of a full load. They stumble across Kator (who now calls himself Anders Anderson) and invite him back to their place, where he quickly wins their approval by single-handedly capturing the fox that killed their chickens. After a celebration that finds Kator / Anders dolled up like a transvestite Action Man at the behest of his hosts, a game of hide and seek (yes, there's padding - it's a low budget horror flick, what did you expect?) and a near-drowning in a stagnant river (all captured in gut-crunching slow motion and backed by Slaney's uniquely disorientating score), Josephine pitches one fit too many and Jessica announces her intention to leave and take Anders / Kator with her. That's when, to borrow a piece of appropriate urban slang, 'shit gets real' and Kator's mission is finally revealed. Considering the film's occasionally stately pace and dream-like atmosphere, it would have been the mother of all letdowns had the pay-off not been an absolute doozy, but thankfully Prey manages to cram a whole fistful of surprises, twists and sudden shocks into its last reel. The final line of dialogue, and the visuals that accompany it, are particularly spine-chilling.
Norman J. Warren is one of those film-makers you either 'get' or you don't. Considering that, by all accounts, he's a remarkably affable man, described elsewhere on the net as resembling a good-looking supply teacher, the best films of his career - the batch of low-budget oddities he made during the late seventies - are notable for their absolute refusal to allow the audience a happy ending. Even Spaced Out, a light-hearted sci-fi sex comedy, ends with four of the main characters perishing in a jarringly abrupt spacecraft explosion. There's a genuine, seething misanthropy bubbling under the surface in his films, a frisson similar to the so-called 'paperback nasties' of James Herbert and Guy N. Smith (and later Shaun Hutson) that were being published around the same time. Relationships are festering, open sores. Hopes and dreams lead to nothing. If nothing else, Warren's films sit neatly alongside those of his fellow Brit-horror rabble rouser Pete Walker (Frightmare, Schizo) as potent reminders of the more unsettling side of the let-it-all-hang-out seventies when the country's post-war optimism and the feelgood vibes of the sixties were washed away by economic uncertainty, social divisions, political chicanery, strikes, scandal, hooligans and terrorism. Unlike Walker, however, Warren chose to clothe his more provocative works in the distracting robes of fantasy - Satan's Slave is essentially a Hammer Horror with a contemporary setting and more graphic violence (including a still-impressive eyeball impaling), Prey unfolds like a fever dream (and it must be said that Stokes' alien make-up, whilst functional, remains slightly laughable), Terror never pretended to be anything other than Dario Argento's Suspiria relocated to the home counties and Inseminoid's disarmingly cut-price vision of outer space was shot mostly in Chiselhurst Caves and a collection of sets that looked like leftovers from Blake's Seven and the Goodies. The nagging but inescapable sense that Warren was over-reaching himself eventually brings him closer to such US schlock-masters as Fred Olen Ray than any of his British peers and contemporaries, but the world of home-grown horror would definitely be a poorer place without him.
In summing up, then, Prey is not without its faults - the slow pacing will most likely put the multiplex off within the first fifteen minutes - and the odd allusions to artiness are increasingly sacrificed on the blood-and-breasts altar of B-film exploitation, but it's so much more than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, it works simply because it's so unusual - and considering it arrived three quarters of the way through a decade when the majority of domestic cinema product consisted of the (enormously profitable) pedestrian vulgarity of the home-grown sex comedy, that was a pretty ballsy move on the part of its makers.
