Hunter Prey is a low budget sci-fi movie made in 2010 that borrows liberally from The Chronicles of Riddick Franchise. A ship transporting a dangerous prisoner crash lands on a harsh desert planet. The survivors must overcome the elements in order to bring in their escaped prey, but who exactly is the one being hunted?
Plays many of the conventional Space Opera tropes straight, right down to the Star-Warsey music.
Hunter Prey provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Sky: A big red planet floats overhead.
- Aliens Speaking English: Averted in-universe. It just sounds like English to the audience.
- Artificial Intelligence: Clea, Centauri 7's handheld computer.
- Bounty Hunter: One drops in partway through to capture the prisoner for himself.
- Dwindling Party: There are initially four surviving guards, but only one remains by the halfway mark.
- Faceless Goons: The soldiers are this until their suits adapt them to the planet's environment.
- Gambit Roulette: First they're trying to stop the prisoner, then it turns out it was useless. THEN he grows a heart to spare their planet. Then it was revealed to be a decoy, but the bomb ship ISN'T actually launched yet.
- Insistent Terminology: The alien bounty hunter prefers to call himself a soldier of fortune. Possibly a result of translation: he clearly doesn't speak English terribly well, seeing as it's an all-but-dead language.
- Off-the-Shelf FX: The weapons used in the film are all modified NERF guns and accessories.
- The rifle is really a Recon CS-6 assault rifle.
- The pistol is a Maverick REV-6.
- The welder/cutter is a Nightfinder.
- Poor Communication Kills: Played with. Lieutenant Ulrich feigns a communication malfunction while impersonating a fully-armored Centauri 7. The responding soldiers buy it, and he quickly kills all three of them.
- The Reveal: The guards are aliens, and the escaped prisoner is a human.
- Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The blue-skinned aliens transporting the prisoner.
- Single-Biome Planet: The desert variety. Then again, they're not given much time to move beyond the desert, so it's fully possibly that the ship just crashed on one the planet's deserts.
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Spiritual Successor: It draws on some themes from Enemy Mine. Two species hostile to each other finding some common ground, and one character even mentions his new found respect for the Draks, who were the alien species in that film. - Tannhäuser Gate: The crew of the Aurora says it that it has just cleared the Tannhäuser Gate before it arrives at the planet.
