'90s Kung-Fu Movie Review: Prey of the Jaguar
- Dave
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Fresh from the DVD Dungeon roars Prey of the Jaguar, a straight-to-video martial arts movie from 1996 featuring Stacy Keach (Slave to the Cannibal God) and Linda Blair (The Exorcist). Like the best kung-fu films, David DeCoteau's Prey of the Jaguar is your standard revenge flick. Prey of the Jaguar is bolstered by the small roles played by Blair and Keach. In the tradition of Teen Wolf, this production is "a b-movie body with an a-list head." I got the impression that Keach and Blair shot their scenes in a day or two.
My wife and I ended up watching Prey of the Jaguar purely out of curiosity. It was one of the extra movies on an Echo Bridge Chuck Norris DVD multipack that I'd bought forever ago. We're huge Chuck Norris fans, especially of his Cannon Films offerings! (Check out Invasion U.S.A. and The Delta Force films.) You never know what you're getting with "filler," I mean, "bonus" movies, but in Prey of the Jaguar's case, we were pleasantly surprised. Unlike most Retro Injection movie reviews, this article contains tons of spoilers. In fact, I'm basically going to recap the film, and it won't take long! That's because Prey of the Jaguar is largely old-fashioned butt kicking, which offers me little to go into detail about. Let's be real: The story isn't really important in movies like this. I'm a kung-fu film fanatic, and I really dug Prey of the Jaguar.
That cover reminds me of:
When his impossibly-perfect family is murdered by a criminal mastermind from his past, former secret agent Derek Leigh (Maxwell Caulfield) takes out his vengeance by assuming the identity of Jaguar Man, in honor of his young son's comic book illustrations. Jaguar Man looks like a dollar store Batman.
To help with his quest of retribution, Derrick pays some visits to his friend, a former secret agent turned dealer of exotic weapons, who runs his operations under the pretense of a toy store located in a back alley. Nothing suspicious there! Derek also re-establishes his martial arts training under his former sensei. As Jaguar Man, he proceeds to bring the criminal underworld to its knees with his own brand of justice. (Read: "Killing everyone.") These exploits invoke the chagrin of The Commander (Keach), who isn't pleased that Jaguar Man is doing a more thorough job than his police force. The Commander becomes relentless in his quest to prove Jaguar Man's identity and guilt. More sympathetic to Jaguar Man's cause is The Commander's partner Cody Johnson, played by Linda Blair.
The most appealing aspect of the film to me was that it didn't take itself too seriously. The best proof of this is when Jaguar Man is looking up information on his arch enemy: The computer readout talks about how the guy doesn't even exist; he's just a character in a movie! The writer of the "bio" goes on to talk about how a second column of text has to be written, but the jokes have been exhausted. "Oh, the tedium of it all." Classic. These glimpses of the "database readouts" are brief, and the casual viewer could easily miss them. Compound the quick cuts with the fact that Prey of the Jaguar was originally released on VHS (with little option to clearly pause), and you can see why the gag was slipped in.
Prey of the Jaguar plays off well because of the low-budget feel and surprisingly-good martial arts sequences. In terms of kung-fu flicks, this ain't The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, but it's a fun ride. To solidify that Prey of the Jaguar is top-notch cinema, it's rocking a 3.8 on IMDb.
Prey of the Jaguar has been officially submitted as a request to Rifftrax, the current project of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys. I'm recommending this cheese-laden masterpiece for the popcorn flick that it is.
If you haven't fulfilled your quota of consuming violence, check out Retro Injection's anime review of Fatal Fury the Motion Picture (on VHS!), and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. And here's our list of underrated '80s horror movies, guest hosted by none other than Michael Myers. Grab some McDonald's and binge that bloodshed like Kevin McCallister!
