Prey for the Dying

Professional pornographers at Digital Playground prove to be amateurs at the horror genre in "Prey for the Dying". Poaching in someone else's genre territory is perhaps a good idea to attract a new audience, but not with these dismal results.

Cornball premise (no script credit, of course) has six porn stars all dressed up (for no particular reason) spending Halloween Eve in Lou Cifer's haunted house, Lou being busty Jayden Jaymes. She has a cashier's check for $1,000,000 made out to each of them with the proviso that they can't leave and must remain alive till dawn to collect; otherwise survivors will split the 6 mill.

I thought this would lead to infighting and "Lord of the Flies" degenerating into selfish violence among the motley six, but that would have been an albeit corny literary development of the theme. No, instead all we get is poorly staged and atrociously photographed/framed horror footage of monsters, including non-sex guest star Sovereign Syre and various crew members, attacking the protagonists gorily, but unimaginatively. It ain't scary and it is so poorly done one longs for the juvenile creativity of backyard video neophytes who crank out no-budget horror videos by the thousand.

Bulk of the running time is devoted to 5 XXX sex scenes, which are inserted with barely any build-up. My favorite is a completely extraneous one starring Chloe Amour, who just shows up at the house with her cop boyfriend to hump and then they are attacked by a clown ghoul after the money shot.

The starring six wander around aimlessly in pairs in order to be knocked off by the monsters in desultory fashion. Their sex scenes are boring including a requisite lesbian scene, featuring Karlie Montana and Stevie Shae. The stupid film ends abruptly without resolution even of the wager, as our hostess Jaymes merely tells the audience "See you all next Halloween". Count me out for any sequel, Jayden. Clearly the hacks who shot this have no interest in anything but explicit sex, and the fate of the non-characters isn't even an afterthought.

Ineptness on every level includes the camera suddenly wobbling and going off kilter near the end of Chloe's sex scene (left in the print) and one of the later murders framed and shot so one can't see what's happening -either on purpose or more likely just sloppiness.