![]() ![]() It's just such a party of big game buffoons that we meet at the start of The Naked Prey, a 1965 pulp adventure story from director and lead actor Cornel Wilde. For me the most shocking thing about the whole affair was the realisation that rich white idiots are still to this day trotting off to Africa to kill wild animals for their own amusement. It's a sad fact that the key reason this killing prompted international uproar is that this visually distinctive lion had been anthropomorphised by giving it a cute name so that tourists would come to think of it more as a pet than a beast. It's a pastime that recently found its way into the news when an American dentist named James Walter Palmer shot and killed a lion named Cecil, who was a popular resident of the Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe. ![]() More than once I've seen this practice described as a sport, which I might just buy into were the animals fully aware of the hunters' intentions and some balance was provided by either giving the creatures rifles and teaching them to shoot or arming the hunters with only shields and knives. The bigger and more magnificent the beast, the more these worthless toads wanted its head on the wall of their country estate. And there was little these creatures enjoyed more than trotting off to darkest Africa, as it was once insensitively labelled, and shooting the crap out of the local wildlife. Usually, although by no means exclusively male, these humanoid creatures were the product of a bygone time when international travel for the purpose of leisure was the almost exclusive province of the obscenely wealthy. Once upon a time, the Big Game Hunter was a popular figure in literature and film. Cornel Wilde stars in and directs THE NAKED PREY, a smarter than it first looks tale from 1965 of a white safari guide who is hunted by a group of tribesman that his group have offended, given a typically impressive HD makeover on the Blu-ray in this new Masters of Cinema release. ![]()
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