But beyond all that, Mike and Hogan have already met. Mike’s father-in-law (Cameron Mitchell, from Knives of the Avenger and The Offspring) is a retired cop of the Dirty Harry persuasion, which obviously bodes ill for anyone who might try to harm any member of the family. But Mike Danton (Ted Prior, the director’s brother, to whom he turned for all his strapping, blond mullet-god needs) doesn’t just have a wife (Suzanne Tara) who’ll notice at once when he doesn’t come home from taking out the trash one morning. Thornton is driven to the crude expedient of snatching men straight off the street in broad daylight- and in suburban neighborhoods, no less, where the odds of the victims leaving a family to come looking for them approach one to one. A nearer starting date demands an accelerated training schedule, which in turn requires more frequent “foxhunts.” More foxhunts means more foxes, and that means Hogan can no longer afford to limit himself to people whom nobody would miss. Michaelson is unhappy with the pace of Hogan’s preparations, however, and the resulting hustle to meet the client’s deadline becomes the whole operation’s undoing. These hunts are led by Hogan’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Thornton ( Killer Workout’s Fritz Matthews), who is also charged with killing any trainee whose performance falls below a fairly unforgiving minimum standard. ![]() His recruits practice guerilla warfare by abducting drifters and hunting them through the wilderness around their base camp 70-some miles southeast of Los Angeles. (I’m guessing he’s at least a state senator if he holds elected office.) And as I’m sure you’ve already surmised, Hogan’s methods have grown even more unorthodox since he was drummed out of the service. We never will learn what the aim is, but the funding is coming from someone named Michaelson (Troy Donahue, of Monster on the Campus and Hard Rock Nightmare), who could equally well be a corrupt businessman, a corrupt politician, or both. Whatever really happened, Hogan is now pursuing the usual second career for retired action-movie Green Berets, assembling a mercenary army of dubious legality. He evidently doesn’t like to talk about the exact circumstances, but I gather it had something to do with the methods whereby he trained and maintained discipline among his men. The Zaroff analogue here is Colonel John Hogan (David Campbell, from Evil Altar and Speak of the Devil), a former special forces commander who resigned from the US Army in disgrace. This may be a Weightlifter with a Machine Gun movie first and foremost, but it’s also a riff on “The Hounds of Zaroff,” and you know how I am about those. Obviously that genre focus places most of Prior’s work outside my purview here, but Deadly Prey manages to sneak in through the back door. He’s still at it, too, although he’s slowed down considerably since the turn of the century. ![]() Sometimes the results were dreary and stultifying (as in Prior’s tragically mishandled boobs-and-bullets opus, The Mankillers, in which an ad-hoc commando team of female convicts take on a vicious cartel of international vice traders, and apparently bore them to death), but damned if he didn’t realize his ambitions. Rather, Prior aspired to make action movies of a sort that sound impossible given the resources he was able to command- the kind with mercenary armies, terrorist cells, military-grade firearms by the truckload, and lots and lots of explosions. Horror was not Prior’s real area of interest, though, if we may judge from his subsequent career. His debut feature, the surreal supernatural slasher Sledge Hammer, is the current record-holder for earliest known feature made from the outset for release on home video (indeed, it holds the further distinction of being actually shot on videotape). Prior is a much more significant figure than McCormick, however, for he appears to be the original direct-to-video auteur. Last time it was Bret McCormick, and now it’s Alabama’s David A. ![]() It’s been a big couple of months for me discovering unsung regional filmmakers of the direct-to-video era.
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