Critics reviews

Originally scripted with a Wyoming setting, this survivalist yarn would work in any similarly harsh environment, and its ultimate transplantation to southern Africa raises lots of tacit questions about colonialism and exploitation, even if they're mostly not verbally addressed. Indeed, the trailer's voiceover spells out an anti-colonialist message far more explicitly than does the main feature, surely one of the least talky American films since the talkies were introduced four decades earlier.

At its core—and the film is basically all core—The Naked Prey is a cynical, savage film of humanity at its barest, putting the allegedly civilized man on the same leveled playing field—here the wide, wild African grasslands—as the spear-carrying primitive. It's an idea we've seen dramatized many times since, to the point of cliché perhaps, but in terms of American cinema in the mid sixties, Wilde was on to something different: an image of infinite loneliness.