The Prowler

As I continue to see the lesser-known movies from the slasher heyday that I missed, I'm constantly confronted by the fact that these don't have the profile of Friday The 13th or Child's Play or their other well-known contemporaries for a reason: they're not as good. The Prowler, at least, tries to buck some of the conventions that were already coalescing, and calcifying the genre at the same time. Where many slasher movies had already perfected the "prologue kill, 45-50 of padding, 20 minutes of killing off the cast, and the rest of the movie is the final girl chase", The Prowler eschews that. The final girl is put in jeopardy less than 30 minutes in, and the kills are drip-fed through the movie's entire runtime, which also contributes to the movie never having a slow part. The police are neither passive and useless, or idiotic victims-in-waiting; the deputy, a primary character, here is actively trying to get a handle on the situation. And the kills, with effects and make-up by gore legend Tom Savini, are especially brutal here, not only in the manner in which people are dispatched, but the ugliness of it. Two kills -- a bayonet through the top of the skull down, and a pitchfork to the torso -- are drawn out, so you feel the suffering and the life drain out of the victims. It's uncomfortable in the right way, and it makes the movie's gore stand out against the lethal efficiency of Jason, Michael, Cropsy, and others. This is where my compliments end. Perhaps more than others, characters have to hold the idiot ball for the plot to move forward. There's a scene after someone is killed in a pool where someone else goes to check on the now-dead college student. This teacher is three feet away from the pool, it's on her right, and it's dark. Does the teacher look in the pool? NO. In fact, quite unnaturally, she looks everywhere BUT to the right, staying focused on her left or straight ahead, somehow resisting both the urge to turn her head to the right AND ignoring peripheral vision. Another scene later on, when the cop and the final girl are leaving the police station, he tries to drop her off at the graduation dance to be safe while he checks out the place where they think the killer might be. He tries to reason with her, but she gets snippy and says he's "playing sheriff", which, since the sheriff is out of town, THAT'S EXACTLY HIS JOB, MA'AM. HE IS THE ACTING SHERIFF. And then she gets back in the car, and he just shrugs and takes her with him! SHE'S A CIVILLIAN, YOU JACKASS! Red herrings are brought up and dropped, but there isn't a shred of suspense, because we know about a character that disappeared early on. One red herring is a guy confined to a wheelchair, which, come on, we may be watching a slasher but we're not THAT stupid, movie. The editing is confusing, giving you no indication of where people are in relation to one another; are they in the same yard? The same house? The same ZIP code?!? WE CAN'T DRAW THE MAP FOR YOU, MOVIE, THAT'S YOUR JOB! There's a scene where two college students go off to the basement to have sex; someone peeps on them, but it isn't the titular killer. These two are never seen again, as in, the script never returns to them. And for being motivated by being spurned by an ex in a Dear John letter, The Prowler sure kills indiscriminately. Outside of the prologue kill, he offs ONE couple. The final girl does nothing but run until the final struggle. And the angle of the killer being a former soldier is merely a vehicle to provide the meager motive. Nothing is done with it whatsoever beyond that. Oh, and there's a pointless last-scene chair-jumper. I mean, if Friday could rip off Carrie, why not every movie? BECAUSE IT STARTS BECOMING EXPECTED AND STOPS BEING SCARY THAT'S WHY. There's a decent movie hiding in The Prowler. It has the right pacing, fantastic gore effects, a different setting, older characters, and police that aren't rock-stupid or ineffectual. But the mediocre script, and editing with no respect for the space-time continuum, drag down what could've been one of the better non-franchise slashers. Instead, it's where it is in the slasher movie pantheon because it couldn't do what it took to get out of that level.