Monster Movie Monday: Prey (2016)
Review Overview
Featured creature
8Gore and shocks
8Jet-black humour
8Matthew Turner | On 27, Sep 2021
Director: Dick Maas
Cast: Sophie van Winden, Julian Looman, Mark Frost, Rienus Krul
Certificate: 16+
In the mood for a creature feature? Amazon Prime has a veritable menagerie of monster movies, so we’re working our way through them, one killer beastie at a time. Welcome to Monster Movie Mondays.
Written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas, this highly enjoyable creature feature takes its simple premise – an escaped, bloodthirsty lion loose on the streets of Amsterdam – and exploits it for maximum entertainment. Maas has built an entire career on genre thrills (his previous films include Amsterdamned, The Lift and Saint) and he brings his considerable experience to bear here, ensuring that there’s something fun happening in every scene.
The plot gets off to a great start, as a girl, her boyfriend and her entire family are eaten by an unseen wild animal at their farm in the Dutch countryside. Said family also includes a small child, in an early promise to the audience that this creature isn’t messing about and won’t be swayed by cuteness when it comes to eating people.
When the bodies are discovered, the exasperated Police Commissioner (Theo Pont) does the logical thing and calls in big animal vet Lizzy (Sophie van Winden), who correctly identifies the teeth and claw marks on the family remains as having come from an escaped lion. Soon, the lion is chomping its way through the streets of Amsterdam, forcing Lizzy to put in a call to her ex-boyfriend, British big game hunter Jack (Mark Frost), who’s now a wheelchair-bound alcoholic, because a lion ate his leg.
Given that no actual lions appear to have been used in the production, the creature effects – a combination of animatronics and CGI – are surprisingly convincing. All too often, CGI creatures look horribly fake, but that’s not the case here – the lion’s movements feel realistic and have an actual sense of weight to them. And if the lion’s face doesn’t look quite right (it’s likely the reason there are no actual lions is a deliberate lack of contrast), it at least allows for a measure of personality, even if that personality is just hungry, angry or both.
Either way, the lion is consistently good value. For one thing, it has great timing, with an unerring instinct for eating people at the perfect moment or making a sudden appearance for shock value. It also has an engaging range of killing techniques – aside from the usual bite-of-the-head, it also has a winning way with its claws that can basically be summarised as “swipe, red, dead”.
True to form, Maas packs the film with a number of darkly funny moments. Highlights include some idiots coming to a hilariously gory end and an entire, gloriously inept SWAT team accidentally taking each other out, despite the lion being nowhere near them.
Maas knows his way around the nuts and bolts of the genre, ensuring you’re never too far away from a sneak attack, a jump scare, a gore moment (the gloopy red stuff effects are nicely handled throughout), a chase scene (there are two good ones) or a fun fake-out. He also pulls off a terrific central set piece, whereby the lion eats everyone on a tram. On that note, this is the sort of film where even the plot holes are fun – for example, just how did the lion get on the tram in the first place without being seen? Skills, that’s how. Lion skills.
Sophie van Winden and Mark Frost acquit themselves well and there’s strong support from Julian Looman as Lizzy’s would-be boyfriend, TV journalist (and player) Dave. On top of that, there’s a nicely offbeat dynamic between Lizzy and Jack, with Maas eschewing the expected love triangle/jealousy angle in favour of something more interesting, even if it does occasionally get a little sexist, eg. Jack asking Lizzy if he can see her naked one more time before he gets eaten and Lizzy appearing to comply, until he says he was joking.
Without giving too much away, the film climaxes with a thrilling finale and then delivers an applause-worthy final twist that serves a key purpose in terms of audience satisfaction. In short, Prey gives you everything you could possibly want from a film about an escaped lion, and then a little bit more for good measure.
As a side note, Amazon Prime Video in the UK only has the dubbed version of Prey, which is especially weird, because a large part of the dialogue is in English and they’ve even dubbed that. On the plus side, Simon Shocket, the actor dubbing Mark Frost (whose dialogue is all in English) has at least taken care to sound as much like Frost as possible.