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The Naked Prey holds up well as an exciting adventure film, and Wilde’s strive for authenticity as a filmmaker adds its longevity. Curious gaffes like a very visible car driving in the distance or the sometimes forced stock animal footage does little to diminish the mounting tension.¹

Glamorous leading man turned idiosyncratic auteur Cornel Wilde created in the sixties and seventies a handful of gritty, violent explorations of the nature of man, none more memorable than The Naked Prey. In the early nineteenth century, after an ivory-hunting safari offends an African tribe, the colonialists are captured and hideously tortured.²

As film scholar Stephen Prince notes on the disc’s excellent commentary track, Wilde has been unfairly overlooked in the annals of Hollywood history. If the current caretakers of the studio that made “The Naked Prey” aren’t even aware of its existence, let another company give the film its proper due on DVD.³

A major influence on Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there’s little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man’s animal nature, he isn’t crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.⁴

As a director, Wilde wrings significant drama and tension from this scenario in purely primal terms. That is, The Naked Prey works on the level of simple survival; there is no backstory for Wilde’s character or convoluted narrative dramatics to support the action.⁵