Colin Eggleston, “Innocent Prey” (1983)
Maybe the problem is her southern Texan drawl or the overly bouffant permed hair but Cathy (P J Soles) does seem to attract weird men who want to kill her rather than get down on bended knee, put a ring on her finger and pledge to protect her. Well, one fellow, Joe (Kit Taylor) actually did go through that routine but only to get his hands on the insurance money paid to Cathy after her parents died in an accident. Accosted by two businessmen who warn him that they know of his fraudulent activity and are on his trail, Joe goes out after work, picks up a prostitute (Deborah Voorhees) and takes her to a motel where they have sex. Joe then proceeds to kill her in the bathroom. Unbeknownst to Joe though, wife Cathy has seen his car (after dropping her Australian friend Gwen off at the airport) at the motel and spies on him through – as it turns out – the bathroom window while he was killing the prostitute. Cathy calls the police and they come to the couple’s house to set a trap for Joe – but not before he threatens to kill Cathy herself.
The police bundle Joe off into prison but in the great tradition of Australian horror exploitation flicks, Joe promptly escapes and goes back home to finish off Cathy. Again, the police arrest Joe (but not before three of their finest meet their maker) and put him into an asylum. On the advice of a fatherly senior police officer (Martin Balsam), Cathy escapes to Australia to stay with friend Gwen in rented digs near Sydney Harbour. She comes under the attention of young millionaire landlord Phillip (John Warnock) who is a social misfit and spends all his time in his apartment voyeuristically watching his tenants on TV through security cameras hidden throughout his family mansion. Phillip observes Cathy befriending a divorced man, Rick (Grigor Taylor), and his estimation of Cathy as initially a pure and wronged woman quickly falls to that of a slut who must be punished for her sins – just as he punished his mother for being a loose woman by sending her to the grave.
On top of this malarkey, which owes more than just a debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in characters, plotting, the prominence of the bathroom and the shower, and a theme of escape to a new life (only to have one’s old life intrude and force one to face consequences), Joe escapes the asylum, covers his tracks and flies to Australia to … well, finish an uncompleted job.
While the action is based in Dallas, “Innocent Prey” is creepy and seriously gory enough, with real tension in a modern 1970s house made sinister by good use of lighting and shadows; but once the action flies out to Phillip’s mansion in Sydney, the plot becomes more hokey and improbable with most murders occurring off-screen. Viewers are left to guess as to how Phillip takes care of Gwen (Susan Stenmark) and Joe. Several scenes (notably the climactic one where Phillip threatens Cathy) could have been lifted right out of “Psycho” – after all, Balsam himself was lifted out of that film (he played the detective Arbuckle) and into this Psycho-wannabe number. The action seems to slow down as well. At least Phillip’s mansion is a very spacious and attractive house, full of light and featuring doors with stained glass patterns.
At least Eggleston furnishes his male characters with motives for wanting or wanting to kill Cathy – even Rick may be a closet psycho-killer in the making – but viewers never find out why Cathy attracts such men: Soles can’t seem to make Cathy a character for viewers to sympathise with though she does try hard. Part of the problem is the film’s dialogue which makes Cathy appear stupid, even callous; surely she should know that the police protecting her from Joe would never play jokes on her? – and her conversations with Rick, which Phillip listens in on, can easily be construed as nasty towards people who are different from others because of some disability. Unfortunately for Soles, Kit Taylor and John Warnock easily steal the film as the respective unhinged psycho-killers: once killing women gets into his head, Joe just can’t seem to stop; and Phillip (in a performance of virtuoso hammy acting by Warnock) smoothly transforms from gauche social misfit into a velvet-tongued psychopath capable of electrifying murder.
With a lead female character who is very much helpless throughout and completely reliant on men who turn out to be dangerous, often in outrageously silly ways, in an improbable story-line straight out of soap opera universe with too many unbelievable twists and turns, “Innocent Prey” remains firmly in lightweight slasher genre territory. The film refers rather too much to character stereotypes and plot tropes from “Psycho” to stand on its own. After the tight scenes set in Dallas, the film becomes more distracted and loses momentum in parts. After the last scene, which suggests that poor old Cathy is locked into a vicious cosmic cycle, viewers really don’t care what happens next to Cathy or who she latches onto next.