Quick reviews: Prey and Wolf Creek

Michael Crighton's Prey:  An enjoyable page-turning pot-boiler, written in movie-vision, but with a cast of annoying jerks and psychos and a narrator so achingly dumb you want to slap him.  Cute denouement, occasional moments of menace, but it all felt like a short story stretched out too long (which fits: good film scripts are about the length of a short).  Main criticism (apart from the character stupidity):  How many times can this man re-write Frankenstein before Mary Shelley's ghost breaks his writing arm? 

Wolf Creek: One of those "you took a wrong turning, kids" horror movies.  Nicely built nastiness but no real tension - even the chase scenes just play themselves out.  That and the unusually rich characterisation of the baddie may be because it's based on a real-world story; reinforced by the handycam cinematography and realistic dialogue.  I found myself thinking more in line with the bad guy than the kids, though:  If I were a dehumanised old bugger alone in a vast space, would anything stop me from realising my most atavistic and nasty urges?  That question made the film stick, much more than the actual story being played out, and for me gives this movie the edge over pure torture-porn like the Saw series.  +1 for the Mad Max homage engine-revving; +1 for the head on a stick.