* out of ***** The full title for this movie should be "National Geographic Presents The Prey,'" because, with all the shots of lizards, centipedes, snakes, spiders, frogs, etc., this could be shown on the Discovery channel. Talk about filler! This has a running time of barely 80 minutes, but if you take away the prolonged scenes of insects and reptiles and dull kids chatting idly around the campfire and forest rangers eating sandwiches and telling jokes to animals, you're left with maybe five or ten minutes of actual story (and I use that term loosely.) It's so damn boring! Carel Struycken (`Lurch' from the Adams Family movies) is a giant, badly burned killer who lives in the mountains, but he isn't even shown until the last five minutes or so. Some boring kids go camping and -- yawn -- Lurch picks them off one by one. There are long, awkward scenes of former MGM, classic film star Jackie Coogan, as forest ranger Lester Tile, making silly faces as he eats a cucumber and cream cheese sandwich. Some of the more notable lines in the `script' are, `Good chow' and `Tell me something -- do people really eat those things?' (referring to the cucumber sandwich). There's minimal violence, minimal suspense, minimal naked horseplay and minimal excitement. The tag line on the video box reads: `It's not human, and it's got an ax!' but, it probably shoulda read: `It's not good, and it got made!'
Lowlight: In a cinematic first, the other forest ranger (Mark O'Brien, I think) tells a (long) joke about a wide-mouth frog to a deer. Actually, this is one of the best scenes in the movie -- the punchline made me laugh.
