Hunter Prey & Glen Cook Reviewed

Sandy Collora, who directed the fantastic fan film Batman: Dead End, has a cool looking feature-length movie coming out in the near future: Hunter Prey. The trailer is being hosted exclusively by io9, so I’d suggest clicking over there for a sneak peek.


Here’s the “Mission” of the movie:

Hunter Prey centers around a group of elite intergalactic commandos that have crash-landed on a harsh and unknown planet while transporting an alien prisoner. Now they must track down and recapture the escaped creature, and their orders are to bring it in ALIVE.


The soldiers begin to question their orders while finding themselves at a severe disadvantage, not being able to harm the prisoner. The team starts getting picked off, one by one, by their dangerous adversary, until the odds become even.

With one soldier remaining, he's faced with a decision. Does he risk his life playing the creature's game or does he disobey his orders and kill it. The realization he comes to, after finding out why his superiors want the prisoner alive and why the alien is trying to escape, starts to change the way he thinks not only about his situation, but himself, as he finds out who's really hunting whom?

After seeing Batman: Dead End, and World's Finest I’m really looking forward to this movie. From the trailer, the movie has a good look and feel, and has potential to be a thrill ride of a film along the lines of Pitch Black which I liked a lot and is easily Vin Diesel's best film outside of Boiler Room, which is sort of a back-handed compliment. A Roger Zelazny novel I read a few years ago also evokes some of the same feel - Eye of the Cat - in that both involve intergalactic bounty hunters and a story that has an action feel with more beneath the surface.

Collora's been designing monsters in Hollywood with cool people like Rick Baker and Stan Winston Studios for a while. So yeah, this movie has a lot of potential to be fun and entertaining.

Since it is Tuesday here at the 'o Stuff, that means it is book review time. Glen Cook is most famous for his Black Company saga, but before that, he wrote of a messiah-figure coming to power in a windswept desert. This series, of course, is The Dread Empire saga and a couple of years ago, I read the first NightShade Books omnibus of the first three novels A Cruel Wind. Late last year, I was happy to receive A Fortress in Shadow for review. I posted the review last night:

As prequels, the novels work extremely well for people who read the initial trilogy, either in single book format or the lovely NightShade edition A Cruel Wind. On its own terms, these two novels tell the cohesive story of a world of mounting forces and conflicting beliefs. Though the story that unfolds between the covers of this volume is entertaining, it really is set up for grander events, more sweeping character arcs and might serve as only a teaser for people yearning for more of the same.