Reptileenbu
Did you people see the same film I saw?
ChicDragon
It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Red-Barracuda
Hunters become the hunted when they head out into the woods to track down a beast that has been killing the local deer population. A family who own a once successful pesticide company soon realise that it may very well be the side-effects of one of their chemicals that has led to the emergence of giant mutant wild boars. Prey is another film which makes up part of the cycle of French horror movies which have invigorated the genre since the new millennium. This one goes down a less expected creature-feature route, with the fairly routine idea of a man-made natural disaster being the root cause of the rampaging monsters. There is a fine balance between the family drama and creature feature horror here, with the characters creating as much threat to one and other as the giant pigs. The result is a fairly standard bit of horror in all honesty. This is a sub-genre which is quite well-worn and there isn't anything particularly new brought to the table with this one. That said, it is still a decent enough entry if you like this sort of thing.
morrison-dylan-fan
Since the Italian film industry's "genre" film makers have sadly pretty much disappeared from view since the early 1990's (with Dario Argento perhaps being the only exception to it),I started to become very intrigued,when recently reading that since the mid 2000's a gradually building New Wave of Horror films has been taking place in France.As I started to do more research into this new movement,I began to get very excited in taking a look at this new exciting era of Euro Horror movies.Checking on Amazon,I was thrilled to find a pretty recent French Horror film being sold at a very good price,which led me to deciding that I would at last take a look at the brand new Grand Guignol.The plot:Being dragged along by his pregnant girlfriend to finally pay a visit to her wealthy family,Nathan instantly starts to feel a strong sense of being viewed as "not worthy" when his girlfriends family try to act as if he does not exist whilst they discuss about a disturbing number of strange dead animals that have been turning up near the family-owned pesticides plant.Desperate to find out what is causing the deaths of the animals,the family start to gather up all of their guns so that they can investigate the near by woods.Just as the family are about to set off,Nathan's girlfriend tells them all that they should take Nathan along so that he can begin to "bond" with her family.Grudingly accepting her idea,the girls family and Nathan begin to head for the woods,where they will make a shocking discovery about what their pesticide plant has done to the now covered in darkness woods.View on the film:Looking at the simplistic,but well executed screenplay by Antoine Blossier (who also directed) and Erich Vogel one of the main things that I noticed about the films tense plot was that it seemed to be a wonderful Horror-spin take on SCi-Fi films such as Pitch Black and Predator,as the team of intelligent,highly trained hunters enter an unknown looking wilderness fully armed,only to discover that the things they are facing are far more cunning and worthless than they ever could have began to imagined.With the Sci-Fi riffs Blossier and Vogel also include tremendous small character moments that really help to make each one very individual,such as Nathan (played by a great intense and charming Gregoire Colin) always being shown as someone,who even when trying to survive an attack from a psychotic pig (!) is still determined to get out of this nightmare that he has found himself in and go back home, to show his girlfriend that he will be able to handle the new pressures that are about to arrive.Along with the screenplay,Antoine's blood-drenched brilliant directing also gives a thrilling balance between the Sci-Fi riffs, (a nice,horrific scene of the mutated pigs attacking the hunters in an overgrown fields being like a group of over fed Velociraptor's from Jurassic Park)and a strong claustrophobic feel,with the oddly elegant scenes of Nathan hiding under some freshly dead animal corpses in an attempt not to be "smelled out" being shot with only minimal lighting which really helps to give the terrific, strong feeling that Nathan is about to find himself in a coffin made of dead,mutated pigs.Final View on the film:A great Horror with Sci-Fi riffs that is also a tremendous intro to The New Wave of French Horror.
GUENOT PHILIPPE
I expected a little more from this horror movie. I never miss a french one, never. This feature is actually half drama, half horror, with a subplot between the characters I did not expect in such a film. But this is not uninteresting at all, on the contrary. It gives something more to the movie, and the characters are more involved in the story than in a usual horror flick. This topic reminds me of course Russel Mulcahy's RAZORBACK and also John Frankenheimler's PROPHECY, where we see the dangerous "side effects" that some criminal chemical industries can make to the surrounding wild life and country side.Just one thing: there are some lengths and so so sequences you have seen a billion times before in other movies. I won't say it's boring but...HmmmThe ending is OK, very "french" and far from the so predictable American ones...
Brian Harris (wildsidecinema)
I know this film has received quite a bit of press and discussion on the Wildside forums but for some reason I was at a loss for what this film was about when I first rented it. As it progressed, I got the picture rather quick as Prey doesn't take long at all to jump into the thick of things. It's no surprise (or spoiler) that Prey's killer pigs aren't normal but I probably should warn creature feature fans that these particular piggies aren't of the deformed variety. They do, however, appear to be real deal FX creations (which they reveal sparingly) instead of CG though and that really helped me remain within the film.The actors all performed admirably but their characters were, in my opinion, rather bland and lacked personality. Not only did they come off flat but their motivations will be disappointingly apparent to astute viewers, leading to a predictability that siphons away some of the impact of the finale. I found myself losing interest in the fates of the characters, even the remotely likable ones, of which there weren't many. There's certainly more than enough tension to hold your attention though and it never lets up, not even for a minute.Prey is a decent thriller with some gruesome sequences of woodland carnage but it's nothing I could see myself watching again or even purchasing for my personal collection. When it comes to killer pig flicks, it is infinitely superior exercise in suspense than a film like Pig Hunt, which was completely gonzo, but the ecological disaster concept is stale and the entire film lacks replay value for me. Still…not a bad film so give it a shot, you may enjoy it.
