David A. Prior

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Alabama-based film-maker David A. Prior is a self-taught director, writer and producer of over 30 B-movies.

Prior made his directorial debut in 1983 with a slasher flick in which a gaggle of hick jocks holds a seance and unwittingly releases the ghost of a killer who sledgehammers his victims to death (aptly entitled, Sledgehammer).

But it wasn't until his second feature film- 1986's Aerobicide- that Prior began to really display his Ed-Woodenly bizarre sense of storytelling. The summary blurb for instance, proudly boasts "Beautiful young girls in skintight leotards exercising at Rhonda's workout club are meeting a bloody end at the hands of a pin wielding maniac."

Like Ed Wood, Prior's sense of absurdism is combined with a cheapness aesthetic that makes it almost impossible to determine whether or not he realizes how unlikely his stories are, how arbitrarily his characters' behavior is or how absent of subtext every line of dialogue sounds.

Also like Wood, Prior has a ceaseless work ethic. He is the only director in Hollywood history to make 10 full length feature films in one year.^{[citation needed]}. However, quantity often calls for small sacrifices in quality; for instance in the credits for 1987's Vietnam Sci Fi flick Night Wars, actor Chet Hood's character, Johnny, is listed as ‘Jhonny’.

Many of Prior's films feature the director's brother, Ted Prior and as Prior's body of work piled up, he also began hiring falling stars and has-been actors who had seen better days. From the late 1980's to the present, the likes of Dan Haggerty, Lance Henriksen, Joe Don Baker, Jan-Michael Vincent, Traci Lords, Tony Curtis, Bo Hopkins, Charlene Tilton, David Keith, Pamela Anderson, Stacy Keach, Charles Napier, David Carradine, Glenn Ford, Powers Booth, Cameron Mitchell, Troy Donahue, Joe Spinell, and several others have all found themselves swirling around in various Prior endeavors.

Along with scripting his own featutes, Prior also ghostwrites scripts for others and came up with the Codename: Silencer storyline for Japanese director Talun Hsu's 1995 feature Body Count, which starred Brigitte Nielsen. He has also often collaborated with David Winters, making numerous films for the cult-adored Action International Pictures (AIP) films.

In the early 1990's, Prior moved gradually away from sledgehammer and pin weilding lunatics and began a long-standing love affair with the battleground genre, eventually expanding his reach into mystery, horror, science fiction, crime-drama and even a 6 hour video series (All the King's Men) on Elvis Presley.

After a nearly ten-year hiatus, in 2006, Prior returned to directing with Zombie Wars followed in 2007 by Lost at War.

David A. Prior Feature Films include (in order of production):