Joseph Zito
Starring Vicky Dawson, Farley Granger, Lawrence Tierney and Christopher Goutman
We're going back to the future with this one. Nowadays, horror movies are about any and everything but what this movie represents - gritty, non-stylish, non-polished and decidedly non-professional pure slasher. One of the many, many, many films to come out of the early '80s slasher boom, The Prowler is a movie that is considered a cult classic by some and a forgotten entry in the period by others. My opinion falls somewhere in the middle. I certainly didn't hate it, but at the same time, I've always been a little perplexed how there are a lot of people out there who hold this up as some kind of minor slasher classic.
To be sure, if you look up "slasher" in the dictionary, this movie would be a pretty good example. You've got the past evil, the teaser reel murder scene, increasingly gory stuff thrown throughout the proceedings, a few hot chicks to gawk at, a masked killer. That should about cover it. Where this movie goes a slightly different route is going with a genuine whodunnit ending, something that slasher predecessors Halloween (where we knew that Michael Myers was the big bad going into the rounds of mayhem) and Friday the 13th (come on, how much of a mystery was this movie? We didn't even MEET Mrs. Voorhees until the third act) didn't have. More on that later.
Anyway, let's start with the past evil. The movie starts off at the conclusion of World War II with a young woman named Rosemary writing a letter to her soldier beau and stating that she can't wait for him anymore. And I think you know where this is going. Rosemary and her new boyfriend are summarily murdered at the town's Graduation Dance, and thus concludes the introduction. Flash forward 35 years, where the same town is holding its first Graduation Dance (capitalized because the movie's signs do the same thing) since the tragedy.
The movie's main characters are introduced at this point. Your central protagonist is college newspaper writer Pam MacDonald. Pam is played by Vicky Dawson, who does a decent enough job in the Jamie Lee Curtis role. There is an ever-so-slight romantic subplot as Pam goes the through the minefield of emotions (/tomatoes for bad metaphor) with Deputy Mark London (Christopher Goutman), a decent-enough guy who happens to have the misfortune of being pulled away to dance by the movie's requisite slut character. This is somewhere in the top 20 things that horror film characters should never indulge in. In between, we meet a few other folks connected to the dance, most of them consisting of Pam's various college acquaintances.
This is about time where the murdering begins, and it's this section of the movie that shines the most brightly. The makeup in this flick was done by Tom Savini who I've already yacked about endlessly, and not to beat a redundant horse, but he always does a fantastic job. Savini himself that the makeup FX on this film were his personal favorite batch, and while I disagree, it's very good, sick, visceral stuff. The highlight is undoubtedly the dude who gets a bayonet directly through the top of his head, the camera lingering and lingering and lingering until his eyes roll back up inside his head, blood dripping out of the bottom of his jaw all the while. Since the flick's opening murders weren't graphic at all, this really catches the viewer off guard and works well.
The mystery aspect of the movie is handled in a lukewarm fashion by director Jospeh Zito, the guy who also helmed Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (a.k.a. the greatest slasher movie ever made). There's an obvious red herring in the form of Major Chatham (Laurence Tierney of Reservoir Dogs and approximately 9,000 other "gruff old bastard" roles), who is revealed to have a pretty substantial connection to the murders of 1945. Suffice to say, it's a pretty safe bet that this dude is not, in fact, the man in the Army fatigues being the impetus behind all the creative murdering. Thanks to one scene in this movie (and I'll leave it up to you, loyal reader, to discern just what the scene is), the murderer in this movie is telegraphed from a mile away, giving this movie a Roy Burns-style laugh factor that it probably didn't intend to have.
Thus it is with The Prowler. It's not original in the slightest, but I'm a big proponent of the idea that movies at large and horror movies in particular don't have to break 89 levels of new ground in order to be resonant and effective as long as they are done well. This movie works on visceral and gross-out level, and has some intermittent sections where the character of Pam MacDonald manages to catch your eye and grab some emotion. Unfortunately, there are LONG sections that drag in this movie. Like, worse than Al Pacino's scenes in Gigli level of dragging. Couple that with the fact that aside from the murders there just ain't a whole lot of memorable stuff that happens in this movie and the flick is middling at best.
Love the ending, however.
** out of ****. Get it on the cheap if you're a big slasher fan, pass otherwise.
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