IMDb plot summary: During the 1800s, a safari guide, two elephant hunters and their crew run into trouble with the natives in the South African veld when they refuse to offer gifts to the tribesmen.
Directed by Cornel Wilde. Starring Cornel Wilde, Gert van den Bergh, and Ken Gampu.
The Naked Prey is a British action/adventure drama about a man who was hunting for ivory in Africa when he and his crew are attacked by a group of local natives and he has to escape and make his way back home alone. Let me start off with a good thing first. This film looks beautiful. It really spends its time loving the animal life and the plant life and the rivers and the deserts of the country. There are moments where it feels almost like a National Geographic special -- it spends THAT much time admiring and examining the outdoors. The problem is, it's also asking us to sympathize with a European colonizer coming in and hunting another country's natural resources for profit. I kind of don't want to see him get away with it. This probably didn't strike audience back in the 1960s as being a hero you couldn't root for, but that's absolutely the case here. I appreciated having long sections where we watched the native tribes discuss their plans, with no subtitles, as it helped to humanize them a bit and not pose them ONLY as the nameless enemy, but it's definitely a story that struggles to work overall.
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Naked Prey < Ripley's Game
The Naked Prey < Fifth of July
The Naked Prey > Three Guys Named Mike
The Naked Prey < Freaky Friday (1976)
The Naked Prey > Stepsister From Planet Weird
The Naked Prey < Frankenstein (1931)
The Naked Prey > Fedora
The Naked Prey > King of the Zombies
The Naked Prey < Call Northside 777
The Naked Prey > You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
The Naked Prey < Start the Revolution Without Me
Final spot: #3011 out of 3625, or 17%.
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