Sandy Collora
Hunter Prey

LA RECENSIONE

Those were the years when I always wanted to be the Ferrari, my friends raced with newer and more colorful marbles but I stuck to that half-red, half-transparent plastic ball with the picture of Alboreto's car in the middle. Nostalgic from the very start.
In the summer evenings, it was wonderful because you could stay up late and watch movies with mom and dad. And it was on a summer night, 200 meters from the most beautiful marble track I've ever played on, that my father put his hand on my shoulder and said: today is the day you become a man. He told me to sit with him on the couch and wait. I waited, the slanted letters scrolled across the screen, and then there was the light. Two hours later, I was a young Jedi, I knew that Star Wars was the greatest movie ever, that at carnival I would dress as an Imperial guard, and that laser beams were the ultimate weapon my GI Joes were looking for.

Hunter Prey is not Star Wars, let's say it right away; however, it fully mirrors its aesthetics in costumes, weapons, the spaceship, and the universe it moves in. But watch out: Hunter Prey is shot on a shoestring budget on a 200-square-meter plot and has several limitations. Starting with the environment in which it takes place: desert, desert, desert, and, much to the joy of the dung beetle, desert.
Hunter Prey is so much nostalgia dressed up as a manhunt: a spaceship transporting four idiots and a prisoner crucial to the outcomes of some war (which we can well ignore) crashes like an overripe pear on a totally deserted planet. The prisoner escapes, and the four idiots follow him trying to recapture him. Little happens in the movie, lots of scenes with space armor, alien races walking on the sand, high-tech radios for communication, black monitors with green writing... It is a showcase of sci-fi clichés that support a completely non-existent story.
And it's beautiful.

Because Sandy Collora doesn't need a story and doesn't need million-dollar budgets, just the bare minimum and his nerdy culture. The short Batman Dead End, his calling card when he presented it at the San Diego Comic Con in 2003, is there to prove it. What do you mean "What's Batman Dead End?"? My dear child, it's Batman fighting with Predator!
You already like Collora, don't you? I knew I'd win you over easily.
This Hunter Prey certainly won't be the best movie you've ever seen, there's little action, few duels, the popcorn pops more for the citations than for the ideas... But it is Cinema with a capital C (and there's also a twist that isn't a twist but is still pretty impactful). A work started out of a desire to make cinema and not just money.

Once upon a time there was experimental cinema, today there is nostalgic cinema. You have to adapt and enjoy what you have available, just like Collora does.