Bungle in the Jungle: Apocalypto and the Naked Prey

"Survival of the Fittest" is a Theme as Old as Hollywood

When Mel Gibson's latest masterpiece "Apocalypto" opened in Southern Italy and the rest of Europe, naturally I went to see it with my wife. As action films go it was o-k, but what really struck me about the film is the feeling of deju-vu I had while watching it.

For the most part I'd seen this all before -- thanks to a little gem of a film that came out way back in 1966 called "The Naked Prey" -- directed, produced and starring Cornel Wilde, one of Hollywood's more popular leading men in the 1940s and 50s -- although an actor who couldn't quite crack the A-list of Tinsel-Town.

I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old when The Naked Prey hit the theatres and it was pretty heavy stuff for my still-impressionable young mind.

In much the same way that Apocalypto deals with the themes of courage and survival, so did The Naked Prey -- but it dealt with these topics about 40 years earlier and in a way that was a lot less bloody. The parallels between Apocalypto and The Naked Prey are more then evident: Prey contains only a few lines of English dialogue, the rest being spoken in native African tongues (minus the subtitles). It is virtually a silent tour de force for Wilde.

According to www.imdb.com, the tactile element in The Naked Prey is, perhaps, one of the most singular features: Death and torture are graphic (at least for 1966). The natives -- initially seen as barbaric -- club, bake, stab, and torment their victims. Wilde --- running naked through the jungle -- must rely on his wits to survive and somehow find a way back to the English outpost on the jungle's fringe. One by one, his pursuers catch him, and fall into individual and personal combat. As they pursue and die, mourn and argue, fight and weep, they become personalized and human for the viewer.