Direct-to-Video Pioneer DAVID A. PRIOR – The Career Restrospective

Article by Mark Longden

David A. Prior is one of those people who filled up video shelves for us back in the days of Blockbuster. If you’re a normal movie fan, chances are you passed over one of his incredibly generic sounding titles while looking for something else; if you’re a cult movie nerd, then you’ll have probably seen “Deadly Prey” and you might be interested in what happened to him and his actor brother Ted. Either way, hope you enjoy this retrospective.

When you watch the movies of David A Prior, you’re struck by the sense that, like so many famous / notorious low-budget directors (Ed Wood, Coleman Francis, Albert Pyun, a hundred others), his personal obsessions are aired out over and over again. They feel more personal than the sort of thing you’re going to see at a multiplex, and while that doesn’t make them good, it at least makes them interesting. I’ve done this as a gag a few times, but there are a few things that crop up in multiple Prior movies:

• A military base which is actually some tents in the woods
• Someone being tortured in a tent (or occasionally a tin shack)
• Violent flashbacks / nightmares about the Vietnam war
• Retreads of the plot of “The Most Dangerous Game”
• Homoerotic subtext
• Helicopter battles
• Multi-racial groups of bad guys, even when it’s supposed to be the Vietnam war
• Film-within-a-film twists

Biographical detail is a little hard to come by, but here goes. Ted moved from New Jersey to LA to try his hand at acting and modelling in 1979, and David followed soon after. The two had made movies together as kids, so when David arrived he came with scripts and tried to get them made. He put adverts in the Hollywood newspapers looking for investors, and due to his way with words, he was able to round up some money and make movies, which, thanks to the explosion in the VHS market at exactly that time, turned a profit. Eventually he met David Winters, the actor / choreographer / producer, and the two of them formed AIP, the notorious straight-to-video company that gave us so many gems. Prior was incredibly prolific, making five movies a year throughout the late 80s / early 90s. This business arrangement came to an end in the late 90s, as the VHS / DVD market was just about to start an irreversible downward slide, and he appears to have retired from movie-making until around 2007, when a rich fan approached David and began funding a new series of movies from him. He made a decent handful of new ones before his death in 2015, including a few that remained unfinished and which will probably never see the light of day.

So I’ll take you through a few of his classics and try and illustrate the big themes, or just the best and worst of his filmography. Notice, too, how generic his titles are, like he just plucked two random words out of an action-movie-cliche bag and went with whatever he found.

SLEDGEHAMMER (1983)

His first movie, made with whatever tiny investments he could find from his adverts and hustling. Shot almost entirely inside Prior’s small apartment, where they tried to make one or two rooms into many more – the sheer blankness of the backgrounds and the washed out quality of the images makes it creepier than it perhaps deserves to be.

Sledgehammer is interesting because it’s perhaps the first-ever shot on video slasher movie, for the home video market. There’s one called “Boarding House” from 1982, but that got a brief cinema run (a fine hair to split, but we’re at the bottom of the pile here). It is, of course, absolutely terrible, but it made money.

KILLZONE (1985)

The first movie to feature damaged Vietnam war veterans, and his first to feature a reality-bending twist – the prisoner-of-war camp we see at the beginning is (spoiler, I guess, but seriously, it’s over 30 years old) actually a survivalist holiday camp where people roleplay as prisoners. But they reveal this at half an hour in, which is one of those weird choices that an experienced / good filmmaker would never do.

Killzone is also the debut of several of Prior’s stock company – Fritz Matthews, David Campbell and William Zipp – and also the knowledge that low budgets meant multiple jobs for everyone. Zipp was a casting director for multiple movies and Matthews was a stunt coordinator and worked in the art department, for example. It’s also the first of many spins on “The Most Dangerous Game”, beloved of low-budget filmmakers since time immemorial.

DEADLY PREY (1987)

Prior’s most famous movie, another rip-off of “The Most Dangerous Game” by way of “Rambo”. Colonel Hogan runs a military training camp where, for some reason, the trainees hunt people through the forests and kill them. If you think about it, not a lot of military work is a large group of people chasing one person through some woods, so I’m not sure what skills this is training. Ted Prior is a special forces guy captured at random while taking his trash out, which has to be some of the all-time worst luck.

This also has Cameron Mitchell, B-movie legend and the biggest actor Prior had worked with to that date. He decided, apparently, to write most of his own dialogue, improvising a few of the bizarre monologues we’re treated to. It was Prior’s fourth movie, and still has some really odd plot choices in it – deaths of certain characters, and so on – which he corrected with the sequel but never really learned from.

JUNGLE ASSAULT (1989)

This is an extraordinarily bleak movie about the minds of traumatized Vietnam vets, masquerading as a normal bit of late 80s action video. Two men drink their lives away, ignoring the bills and living in a scummy apartment; their old CO’s daughter is kidnapped and he asks them to help get her back. They discover the only time they really feel alive is when they’re killing people.

This is my reading of it, of course, and it’s possible Prior meant nothing of the sort. This is from the middle of his most prolific period, where he was making four or five movies a year, and he apparently wrote the script for this in one evening. It is, by a distance, his darkest movie, though, and one which must have puzzled the people who accidentally rented it back in 1989.

RAW JUSTICE (1994)

Probably his best movie, with some incredibly fortunate casting – Pamela Anderson, just as “Baywatch” was forever putting her out of the reach of directors like Prior, signed on to play the part of a hooker with a heart of gold, and is surprisingly good too. It’s also got David Keith, Robert Hays, Stacy Keach and Charles Napier, which is like Ocean’s Eleven-level casting for a guy like Prior. It’s a gentle riff on “Midnight Run”, with the added bonus of seeing doughy guys like Hays and Keith mauling a mostly naked Anderson (separately, I add mercifully).

This represents the second stage in Prior’s directing career, which started around 1991. AIP, the company he worked for / co-founded with producer David Winters, was making money, so the volume of movies he made went down while the quality went up. His 1991-1997 period, while still depressingly poor to the typical movie fan, represents his high water mark – see also 1992’s “Double Threat” and 1994’s “Felony” for more examples.

NIGHT CLAWS (2012)

Prior retired around 1999 or so, and was only tempted back to movie-making after…well, I have no idea, and biographical information is hard to come by. I wish there were a good reason! A guy by the name of Fabio Soldano, who also has co-writing credit on this and other later Prior movies, appears to be the money man behind everything after 2007’s “Lost At War” (which feels more like a super-bleak traumatised war vet movie left over from the first part of his career, anyway).

“Night Claws” is about sasquatch, and is an example of people not necessarily getting better at something the more often they do it. It’s competently made, I guess, but baffling in its script choices, sets an all-time-worst record for day-for-night shots, and while I imagine it made them some money on the SyFy Channel, it’s (to put it mildly) unessential and is reminiscent of the late movies of Don Dohler. Dohler made some entertaining low-budget sci-fi monster movies in the late 70s and early 80s, and then came back for a run of cheap, ugly, miserable sci-fi monster movies that entertained no-one (also with a money-man with no appreciable talent for the movie business).

DEADLIEST PREY (2013)

Made at least in part because the people behind the “Everything Is Terrible” series thought it’d be a good idea, this is basically a remake of “Deadly Prey” with the worst plot problems (the death of his wife, the fact the villain escapes) corrected. The original central three cast members return along with Prior, but it’s very difficult to escape the feeling it’s a glorified home movie.

Prior died in 2015, with a couple of movies in post-production (I’m going to take a wild guess and say they’ll never see the light of day). Were it not for the ironic levels of fame “Deadly Prey” achieved, he’d be completely unremembered today, much like dozens of other directors of Blockbuster-shelf-filler. But, if you pan long enough, and set your expectations really low, there’s gold to be found. “Death Chase”, “Jungle Assault”, and “Raw Justice” are all decently entertaining movies; William Zipp, one of his regular actors, is under-appreciated and ought to have had a decent career for better directors, and the same could be said for Ted Prior too, who seems happy enough not to be acting any more.

If you have your own favourite genre director you’d like to see get this sort of career retrospective, please leave a comment below and if there’s enough that sounds entertaining, we’ll make it our next project. Thanks for reading!