The Prey

The last time I was in Phnom Penh I came home with 32 stitches and a four-inch-long scar on my back that looks like a particularly nasty tributary of the Mekong River if you squint real hard. So I guess I got off lucky compared to nearly all of the characters in Jimmy Henderson’s (2017 Fantastic Fest favorite Jailbreak) viciously entertaining actioner The Prey. Never mind that it’s a blatant riff off of the pre-code 1932 classic The Most Dangerous Game, a sub-niche filmmaking genre unto itself that includes Hard Target, John Woo’s first U.S.-lensed project (featuring one of Lance Henriksen’s best performances and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s menacing mullet), Surviving the Game, and Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Ozploitation whackjob Turkey Shoot.

While surveilling an international gambling ring in the Cambodian capital, Beijing-based Interpol cop Xin (Shangwei) gets caught up in a raid by the local police and ends up in a grotty jungle prison overseen by a sadistic, scenery-chewing warden, aka The Warden (Thai actor Pansringarm of Only God Forgives). Unbeknownst to him, Xin’s equipped with a tracking device-cum-fancy-pants wristwatch that alerts his superiors in the Chinese Capital. Help is on the way, but not before The Warden and a wealthy trio of literal manhunters take Xin and a few other burly inmates out into the triple-canopy Cambodian jungle for a sporting round of .50 cal gun ’n’ run fun.

And that’s about it, plot-wise, although The Prey is saved from genre genericism by credible performances from Shangwei, an affably evil Pansringarm, and “Ti” (Boonyai), a yaa baa—Thai methamphetamine—smoking psycho with a RPG and a tendency to hallucinate at the worst possible times. Cinematographer Lucas Gath does a terrific job immersing the viewer in the wilds of Cambodia’s own “green hell” and there’s more than enough kung-fu versus bokator (Cambodia’s Angkor-born, close quarters martial art) bone-breaking brawling to satisfy even the hardest of hardcore genre fans.

It’s also immensely gratifying to see Cambodian cinema on the rise after Pol Pot obliterated art of any kind along with one-third of his country’s population during the 10-plus years of horrifically literal atrocity exhibitionism after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. The Prey has gore galore to be sure, but now it’s finally back on the screen where it belongs.