There are a few types of movie that will never go out of style. Zombie horrors, romantic thrillers with inappropriate age gaps between the leads, dire comedies where attractive twenty-somethings pretending to be teenagers have lots of sex, and monster movies where a band of hardened soldiers travel to a part of the world that the US considers uncivilized and are picked off one by one by a CGI monstrosity.
The Prey: Legend of the Karnoctus is another of the latter, and a new trailer provides us with a good idea of what we can expect from it. The story sees a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan searching for the Taliban like it’s 2006, only to become trapped in a cave wherein resides an unstoppable monster that begins stalking the grunts and killing them in bloody messes, until it’s down to aging badass Vega (Danny Trejo) to take out the creature once and for all.
Yes, it’s all very Predator, and if you mentally swap out the Middle Eastern mountains with the jungles of Central America the similarities are even more apparent. Nevertheless, it’s always fun to see Trejo in a leading role, and his presence will doubtless emphasize the film’s DTV stylings.
As for the titular creature, a cursory consultation with Google reveals it to be an invention of the movie and not a pre-existing myth requiring further research so I can pretend I know what I’m talking about. Only a few brief flashes of it are visible in the trailer, where it resembles something along the lines of a rabid baboon, but revealed in its full glory it will hopefully be more of a nightmarish presence. The title’s colon and subtitle referring to it were probably added after someone in marketing realized that merely The Prey would not exactly make for the most SEO-friendly of titles, and so required an addition to make it stand out when people are searching for it.
The Prey: Legend of the Karnoctus looks like a familiar assortment of the kind of questionable CGI and dimly-lit monster action for which Syfy is renowned, but will nevertheless be an undemanding romp of blood, screaming and terror.