The makers of Prey want you to know early that the blood-thirsty killer lions they're about to trot out mean business by showing footage, of the stock kind, of a group of them taking down a zebra. What follows is a movie that's not quite the outright creature feature you might be expecting but I can guarantee you it's certainly tons better than director Darrell James Roodt's last foray into the horror genre, the painful Casper Van Dien/Coolio effort, Dracula 3000.

American engineer Tom Newman (Peter Weller) arrives in Africa so he can help the locals to build a dam bringing along his teenage daughter Jessica (Carly Schroeder), younger son David (Connor Dowds), and their new-ish stepmother Amy (Bridget Moynahan). In between bouts of Amy and the pissy Jessica clashing over just about everything they decide to go on a tour of the African wilderness while dad is busy working. It's not long after they head-out that things go horribly wrong when their guide is bloodily killed by a gang of lions and they find themselves trapped in their Jeep with nowhere to go.

In the middle of nowhere with no real food or water, our trio has to try and stay alive long enough for dad to try and find them. And with the help of expert tracker Crawford (Jamie Bartlett) he hopes to do just that. In the meantime, the script by Roodt, Beau Bauman, and Jeff Wadlow tosses in some decently staged lion stalking scenes (though the POV shots are suspect), has a getaway attempt that ends in a minor crash, and even throws in some poachers to give the proceedings a few more victims.

Weller gets stuck in the role of playing the constantly brow-furrowed father figure who's determined to save them and I found most of his scenes to be pretty throwaway. He doesn't show any of the bad-assery he did in Robocop, when fighting a persistent and malicious rat in Of Unknown Origin, or even Leviathan. Which isn't a huge deal since Moynahan makes Amy into a solid authority figure type constantly watching out for the kids and trying to come up with her own plans to keep them alive. I also thought the decision to stage a lot of the suspense scenes in bright sunlight to be a brave move with some mild pay-off even though the effects of blending the trained lions with the actors are somewhat mediocre. And, suffice it to say, if you're looking for a lot of footage of African wildlife, Roodt has you covered in that area as well.

Prey doesn't really do a ton with its premise, is similar to the 1981 flick Savage Harvest (where Tom Skerritt and family are attacked by a pride of lions while in Kenya), and feels like a low-scale version of Stephen King's Cujo but I still found it to be fairly watchable. It doesn't try to go for camp and generally takes itself seriously which is both a benefit and a fault since playing it so straight makes the tone of the film feel overly dry and there's not enough of the outrageous "lions chomping on humans" silliness fans of the nature run amuck sub-genre have come to expect. (Chris Hartley, 6/16/09)

Directed By: Darrell James Roodt.
Written By: Darrell James Roodt, Beau Bauman, Jeff Wadlow.

Starring: Bridget Moynahan, Peter Weller, Carly Schroeder, Jamie Bartlett.