Just like this week’s killer, B-Movie Enema is peepin’ and sneakin’ up on all you dressed in our best, most spookiest World War II fatigues.

But I’m only here to deliver a rose and a new review! Welcome back, my dear Enemaniacs. This week, I’m finally reviewing one I’ve wanted to do for quite some time – 1981’s The Prowler from Joseph Zito. The Prowler is probably most remembered for those great Tom Savini kills. While the movie didn’t get great reviews upon release, as well as not making a profit off its meager $1 million budget, the movie does have a cult following. Again, I would assume it’s the Tom Savini gore effects, but there are a few more things to consider.

One of those things I’ll talk about later, but I think there is a guy behind the camera who helped get this to cult status, Joseph Zito. Zito is known for genre schlock. Zito’s first film was 1975’s Abduction, and he followed that with 1979’s Bloodrage. Both are considered those extremely sleazy types of exploitation horror. That served him well for his next two movies, the one we’re going to be diving into in much more detail shortly, and 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the entry many consider to be the best in the franchise.

What’s kind of funny is that The Final Chapter would be the last horror film he’d make.

Instead, Zito would make another film in 1984 and then follow that up with a film in 1985, both for the same studio and both featuring the same leading man. First, in 1984, he made the Rambo ripoff Missing in Action. Then, in 1985, he cranked out the ludicrously fun Invasion U.S.A. Both starred Chuck Norris and were released by Cannon Films. Both were at the height of their respective powers in the mid-1980s. Zito would have another video store and cable TV hit with 1988’s Red Scorpion starring Dolph Lundgren and distributed by Troma. Afterwards, Zito only made two more movies, 2000’s Delta Force One: The Lost Patrol and 2003’s Power Play. He’s not directed another movie since. It would seem to me, though, that the run of movies he made in the 80s made him something of a cult director and each of those films cult classics in the slasher subgenre of horror and action.

Back to Savini, of all the things this guy has done, he considers his work on The Prowler to be the best work of his career. His effects were so elaborate and detailed, production scheduling was built AROUND the effects and shots needed to capture them. Each effects shot required an entire day for setup. IMDb stated in the Trivia section for this movie that Savini accidentally dyed actress Cindy Weintraub’s skin bright red while working on makeup effects. It would take three days for it to eventually disappear from her skin.

So, spoiler alert before we get into this movie… I have very complicated feelings about this movie. I remember watching this as part of that glorious 26 or so hour Joe Bob Briggs marathon when he started up The Last Drive-In. I remembered not really liking this movie a whole lot. I think I could see the issues critics had with the movie upon its original release. I felt it was both too nonsensical and boring. That… that’s a really bad combo for a movie to have. I do know I liked the effects work from Savini. I also loved the setting. This movie is often compared to My Bloody Valentine for how both exist in small towns, which is very indicative of the geography of those towns and the residents who live within them. I love the seaside setting. I’m kind of a sucker for movies like this or Dead & Buried. There is just something about seaside towns that has a haziness and a tranquility about them. Then, when used for a horror film, have that scary thing just beneath the surface of that tranquility.

So… Yes, I’m doing this review to give this movie another shot. I hope to like it more than the last time. So, with that, let’s gear the fuck up in our WWII army fatigues and… mask? What kind of mask is that? It’s not a gas mask. Is… is it a medical officer’s mask? Is it keeping his face toasty, or does it serve some other purpose other than making the dude look scary? Eh… Whatever, let’s prowl The Prowler, shall we?

The movie begins with some newsreel footage of an ocean liner with a literal boatload of soldiers coming home from World War II and the victory overseas in Europe. Then we see a letter written to one of the soldiers the year before, with the guy’s best gal writing to tell him she’s decided to move on. The woman’s name is Rosemary Chatham, and her Dear John letter was dated March 12, 1944. We now move 14 months into the future to June 28, 1945. Rosemary is at a graduation dance with her new boyfriend, Roy.

Roy finds the dance super lame and suggests they go up to the point for some neckin’. Roy is kind of a jerkass. He snaps at a guy who so much as lightly touches Rosemary. He teases Rosemary by asking if she’s afraid her father will find out she left to go to Lover’s Lane. He also boasts about how much more money his parents have than another guy’s. While Roy and Rosemary stop at the makeout spot, another woman inside asks if someone has seen her date. As the couple make out, someone sneaks up on them, cutting the lights on the gazebo they are sitting in, and reveals he has a pitchfork that he plans to use not for hay but for stabbin’! After killing the couple, the murderer leaves a single red rose in Rosemary’s open hand.

Exactly 35 years later, on June 28, 1980, Avalon Bay, California, is preparing for the next iteration of their annual Graduation Ball. This is the first time since 1945 that Avalon Bay has had the celebration. Major Chatham, Rosemary’s father, forbade the town from having the dance after finding his daughter and her boyfriend dead. We meet our primary leads, college senior Pam and her boyfriend, Deputy Sheriff Mark. She’s a bit concerned about a story that has come out of another town up the road about a guy who robbed a joint, cut up a kid, and took his car. Mark is not quite as worried.

Mark is going to be the head cheese in terms of the law for the next several days. The Sheriff, George, is heading out on his annual fishing trip. Our other victims… er… I mean, characters are Pam’s friends, Lisa and Sherry, and Sherry’s boyfriend Carl. While they all get ready for the dance to celebrate their graduation from college, someone else is getting ready too. This unknown additional player in this story is dressed in army fatigues and combat boots. Maybe not exactly what I would call formal dance appropriate, but it is slasher killer perfection.

We get a classic slasher fakeout in the form of Pam and the others leaving for the dance while Sherry stays in the shower for an incredible amount of time. Seriously, how her tits are still so perky when the fakeout reveals itself to be Carl is astonishing. Those things should look like two giant shriveled avocados. But what it does reveal is what Carl says: the door was unlocked. That means that the killer also has access to the house. Sure enough, he takes his first (second? third?) victim of the film – Carl. This kill is awesome. He shoves the bayonet blade from a rifle right through the top of Carl’s head and out the bottom of his chin. Carl’s eyes even go white as they, apparently, roll all the way back in his head.

That’s some peak Savini.

The killer now has unchallenged access to Sherry. I mean… Carl was totally useless in stopping the killer. So I guess you can say he was already unchallenged that early in this whole murder plot. What’s more, Sherry is not going to be on her guard either because she knows Carl is coming back to join her in the shower. Of course, it’s the killer who shows up and pitchforks the fuck out of her bits just below her other bits.

Damn, that’s already two of Pam’s friends down, but then again, this movie is already past the 23-minute mark, too. I will say this movie is incredibly paced. This movie is kind of one of those movies that has no fat and no real story to get in the way of the plot, if you know what I mean. There’s a dance. There are sexy girls. There are guys who want to get with those sexy girls. There is a killer who does not want the kids to have fun times. Not much meat on the bone to gum up the works.

Now, we do need a little bit of conflict here with our protagonists. Pam has been worried all day and night that her boyfriend Mark is going to be 1) in danger from the guy who stabbed that dude up in Columbus and stole a car, and 2) not be able to make it to the dance she and her friends organized so they can share a dance. When he does show up to cash in on that dance, Pam’s drunken friend Lisa, who is also a bit of an exhibitionist at minimum, and, at maximum, an outright slut, intercepts Mark and forces him to dance with her. This pisses Pam off royally. That’s made worse when Mark comes over to talk to Pam at the punch bowl, but Lisa, again quite drunk, runs up, bumps into Mark, and causes the punch to spill onto Pam’s dress.

I can already hear you asking, “But, Geoff, this is meat on a bone! I thought you said there wasn’t anything like this in this movie!” Well, ha ha, reader! This is all to get Pam to change her dress. So, in order to do so, she has to go back to the dorm where her other friends were just attacked and brutally murdered.

But also, kinda fuck Mark for not telling Lisa to beat cheeks so he can go see the girl he really likes? That’s fuckin’ lame. What else can I expect from pigs? Fuckin’ ACAB, right?

Considering this is a slasher movie, understand that the killer in this movie is totally uninterested in fleeing the scene of his brutal murders. Pam doesn’t know that Sherry is dead in the shower. She tries closing the bathroom door so she doesn’t have to see those pruned out titties of her friend. However, the Prowler is in the bathroom, leaving behind a rose on Sherry’s face as per his usual calling card. Pam gets into a different dress and plans to leave for the dance again, but is soon pursued by the Prowler. As she flees, she’s grabbed on the arm by the wheelchair-bound Major Chatham (played by Lawrence Tierney). She struggles to get away from him, but eventually runs right into Mark.

After checking around, Pam asks Mark to check the dorms because Sherry and Carl are together in there. Finding the door locked and hearing the shower running, he assumes all is good, even though we know their dead bodies are in the shower stall. When Mark gets back, he decides they should go to Major Chatham’s place and find out what the old man was doing outside and grabbing onto Pam like he did.

When they get to the Major’s house, no one answers the door, and they can’t seem to find anyone inside as they look around. The Prowler, though, is inside stalking about. In one of the rooms, Pam finds a portrait of the slain Rosemary. Mark’s like, “Yeah, that’s cool but so boooooooring. I’m gonna go upstairs and look around. Hope ya don’t get killed!”

If I’m being overly generous, I could say that this very long sequence of Pam and Mark going through the Major’s house is pretty decent visual storytelling. Instead of someone telling us all about Major Chatham’s wasted life since he lost his daughter 35 years earlier, we’re kind of seeing visual clues about his deep loss. He keeps a bunch of keepsakes of his daughter. There’s a rose left in the yearbook, just like what was left in her hand when she was killed. There’s an entire story for the school paper about the murders and the still-unsolved nature of the crime. That’s if I’m being generous. In fairness, though, this is a VERY long scene. Like I said, there is very little meat on this bone for being an 88-minute movie. That whole section of the movie from the time Pam ran into the Prowler to running away to running into Mark to Mark searching the ground and the dorm to Mark and Pam searching the Major’s house… That probably elevated this movie’s runtime to feature length. I find the stuff vaguely interesting because it is good visual storytelling, but goddamn, I can understand if people find this section boring.

Mark believes who chased her was likely the guy who attacked the guy in Columbus earlier in the day. They return to the dance to advise that everyone stay put and not leave the dance for their safety. What we see, on a visual level (again, some good visual work here), is that Lisa exited the dance hall just as Pam and Mark entered to let the chaperone for the dance know that they need people to shelter in place. Lisa went to the pool to swim and likely expected Paul to join her, but he’s too busy puking up the booze the two of them had before the dance. So she’s out there alone, and guess what happens… The Prowler strikes.

The chaperone, Allison, goes outside to find Lisa and bring her back inside. She spots the blood in the pool and tries to run back inside, but the Prowler grabs her and stabs her in the throat. Lisa’s boyfriend, Paul, gets arrested by Mark for disturbing the peace at the dance when he attempted to go out to the pool to be with Lisa. As they plot their next move to figure out who is prowling around, a local shop owner lodges a complaint about some kids goofing off and creating a ruckus in the cemetery. As Mark pokes around the cemetery, he finds an open grave where Lisa’s body has been deposited.

There are a couple of things about this. First, this was a real open grave in a real cemetery. The film was shot in a small town in New Jersey that also had an active cemetery… Er… I mean, yes, active in the sense that it was currently operating, not active in the sense of zombies and ghosts and shit. But yeah, the next day there was going to be a real funeral so the cemetery had an already open grave that could be used for this scene. Second, this is the first time our main characters were aware that the Prowler isn’t just prowling and being a pervert, but is actually killing people. It’s also heavily implied, a la Halloween, that the tombstone belongs to Rosemary.

Mark tries to call the lodge where Sheriff George is staying, but the request to get him and come to the phone is ignored and treated without any kind of urgency. The guy at the desk of the lodge’s office doesn’t even check to see if George is in his cabin. So he lies to Mark and just says he ain’t there. This is actually a brilliant element to this movie. More on that in a bit.

After not being able to get in touch with the sheriff, Mark then opts to call the state police for assistance. From that call, Mark learns that the guy who did the robbery and stabbed the guy in Columbus was arrested several hours ago. He can’t be Avalon Bay’s prowler. Pam also figured out that Lisa was dumped in what was Rosemary’s grave. She comes to the conclusion that the same person who killed Rosemary and Roy had to have killed Lisa. So, Mark and Pam return to Major Chatham’s house for another looksee.

While exploring the house once again, Mark is knocked out by the Prowler. Downstairs, Pam finds something hanging in the fireplace. She messes around a bit in the chimney and out falls the decayed corpse of Rosemary. You see, that’s where her body is, so that Lisa can have her coffin and grave. When Pam runs to find Mark, only to run right into the Prowler. The Prowler offers her a rose and says, “I’m ready for our date, Rose.”

The Prowler chases Pam throughout the Major’s house with his pitchfork. In one of the rooms now covered because it is no longer in use by the old man, Pam hides under a bed. The Prowler comes in and starts wrecking the place Tommy Wiseau-style. Yes, I should probably say Charles Foster Kane-style, but this is B-Movie Enema after all.

Alright, so apparently, the people of Avalon Bay do not fuck about. All this time, they have been organizing a posse. I have to assume it’s because of those damn kids having fun, but maybe it’s because they caught wind of the Prowler and decided to take the law into their own hands. A guy named Otto, a slow-witted resident of the town, and someone we’ve only seen a couple of times before this moment, barges into a room where the Prowler was planning on killing Pam and shoots him. Believing the Prowler to be dealt with, he pops up and shoots Otto back with a sawed-off shotgun that I guess he just had on him this whole time. I bet he would have been even more effective as a killer if he used that thing.

Pam fights with the wounded Prowler. She stabs him with his own pitchfork. While struggling to breathe from his multiple wounds now, he removes his mask to reveal he is Sheriff George (played by Farley Granger, who was in my favorite Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train). In a struggle over his own shotgun, Pam is able to put it up to his head where she pulls the trigger, and we get a Savini explody head!

The next morning, Mark pulls up to Pam’s dorm, and she gets out to go back to her room while he deals with some business to put all this to rest. She goes up to her room only to find that, hey, the shower is still running. First thought that would run through my head would be how long it would take to get hot water back to take a shower that I am sure to need after the night I just had, but whatever. Anyway, she goes into the bathroom to discover the bodies of Sherry and Carl.

Just because a movie needs a solid jump scare to end the movie on, Carl’s body jolts back to life to grab Pam before dying again.

Also, that’s exactly my expression and look in my eyes when I pony up to the counter at McDonald’s once the McRib returns.

Alright, so check it out… I can say I at least appreciate the movie a little more than the last time I saw it, but I don’t know if I like it any more than I did. While there isn’t anything aesthetically wrong with this movie, the movie looks good, it flows very quickly, it has that early 80s slasher feel that feels more like My Bloody Valentine than Friday the 13th, there are a lot of problems with the story as a whole.

Alright, so here are the two major issues I have about this movie. First, they cast Lawrence Tierney to play a stroke-addled, wheelchair-bound Major Chatham. He’s Rosemary’s father. He’s a major player in the first half of this movie. He’s the one who refuses to allow the town to do their dance thing after his daughter was murdered. It’s like that kid who quits the game and takes his baseball home with him. He is seen TWICE in this movie. Neither time does he have actual dialogue. It’s heavily discussed how he suffered multiple strokes, so he can’t speak. He grabs Pam when she is chased by the Prowler. Why? This moment reveals that he cannot be the Prowler. He’s old, fat, and wheelchair-bound. He also can’t speak. You might notice I didn’t talk about the first time we saw him in this movie. All that was was him spying on two of Pam’s friends and Lisa flashing him. But we spend no less than, I dunno, like, 450 minutes in his house. Both times Pam and Mark go to his house to look around to figure out what role he’s playing in whatever is going on were very long sequences.

But, then again… Why go to his place after all? If we only see him twice in the movie, and we think there might be a prowler coming from a whole other area… Why would you need to search his place? Because he happened to be outside and grabbed Pam when she ran by after being chased by someone she doesn’t think has anything to do with old man Chatham? That doesn’t make a lick of sense, does it? He wasn’t even at home either time she and Mark checked out his place! So all of that stuff was a nothing burger.

The other problem is set up nicely but lands poorly. I love how Mark called to try to find Sheriff George at the place he’s staying while on his fishing trip, and the front desk guy is a fucking lazy idiot. The scene plays out in a way that does not definitively tell us whether the sheriff is the killer or not. The front desk guy just didn’t give a fuck. He tells Mark George is not in his room, but we know he didn’t check. So it leaves a question mark over George in terms of being a suspect.

But here’s the problem, and how this landed with a wet fart. Why is he the killer? Normally, we get some sort of explanation behind why, for example, Pamela Voorhees is out here killin’ fools. Not here! We don’t even know if George was the guy who killed the lovers earlier in the movie. I guess he could be the guy Rosemary wrote her Dear John letter to. The identity was not revealed at the beginning of the movie. So, without that, without an explanation of why George Fraser is the killer, or if he had any connection to Major Chatham, we have NO IDEA what his motives are. Am… Am I wrong? There is no explanation here, right? I guess we have to assume he was the killer at the beginning, and he was likely Rosemary’s ex-boyfriend?

But regardless of what that answer is, you see the problem here? There was no connective tissue between George, Rosemary, and Major Chatham. If we have to come up with that ourselves, then what is the point of the movie itself? Why even have that bit at the beginning? Why not just have a killer going around killing college grads at a dance? This is why I don’t really like this movie, despite it looking good and having good Tom Savini effects.

But I don’t think I have anything more to say about The Prowler. It’s time to move on to next week. What I have for next week is definitely different than the last couple of movies reviewed. No synthesized genetic organisms or infantry-clad killers. It’s babes and more babes as we party hardy for the 1987 comedy The Allnighter starring the diminutive member of the all-girl rock band The Bangles, Susanna Hoffs!

Until next week, I need to go pick up my date for the graduation dance!