#318: The Prowler
Release Date: June 26th, 1981
Format: 16mm (The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA)
Written by: Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold
Directed by: Joseph Zito
1.5 Stars
The Prowler has two good scenes.
The first one is inconsequential to the plot and totally different than anything else in this rather ho-hum slasher about a elderly WWII vet (supposedly) on a murderous rampage. The scene involves a young police officer, Mark (Christopher Goutman), calling the lodge where the town’s Sheriff (Farley Granger) is staying for vacation, to inform him that he needs to get back to town because there is a killer on the loose. The front desk worker (Bill Nunnery) at the lodge is a large man who is much more interested in his game of solitaire than he is in helping some cop on the phone. We watch the fat man lie and weasel his way out of working, making up sound effects like he’s leaving the office to inform the Sheriff, when really he’s just sitting there chewing tobacco and moving his cards around. Director Joseph Zito lets the scene quietly play out, cross-cutting between the desperate Sheriff and the lazy lodge attendant. It’s really funny, and it had the audience at the Frida (there for a mystery triple-feature of 1981 slasher films on 16mm) in stitches. Maybe Zito should have been a comedy director instead of helming second-rate horror and action flicks.
The second good scene in The Prowler is the final one. Here Zito and writers Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold finally resign themselves to camp and outright thievery. There’s a Scooby-Doo unmasking of the villain, a head is exploded with a shotgun (special effects by legendary Tom Savini), and the filmmakers even tack on a Brian De Palma-style shock ending, complete with a Carrie-esque, Pino Donnagio aping score. It’s violent, it’s derivative, it’s tacky. It’s fun.
The rest of the movie is a bit of a bore, unfortunately, and that’s a fatal error for the slasher genre. Be anything but boring. Be unimaginative, be amateur-ish, be repugnant or silly or unoriginal. Just don’t be boring.
Zito simply cannot maintain tension, either narratively or visually. Like his characters wandering around from one dark room to another, the film just wanders around too, hoping it will find some sense of suspense or visual interest for the audience. It doesn’t for the most part, and Zito can’t control the physical space of the setting. It’s supposed to be on Catalina Island (I think), but it looks nothing like California. There’s an odd building that is supposed to be a school, a large student dormitory, and some big old Victorian houses. Some characters have odd Southern accents for some reasons.
The film doesn’t utilize these disparate parts to do anything interesting. We just go from place to place in the dark, looking for a guy in a leather suit that’s killing teenagers with a pitchfork for some reason.
By the time we get to the surprise unmasking of the killer, it’s kind of just, ‘Oh, him? But why? Whatever. Cue the next 16mm will ya?’
