The Prowler has got to be one of the best 80's slasher film. The film is actually creepy and suspenseful . It picks up really quick and takes you into an exciting ride through out the night. It doesn't get boring with mindless random scenes that many other slashers fall into. It keeps you on the edge of your seat and there is always something happening. Everything from the score to the pace and to the gore, this is a real fun treat for any horror fan. While not quite as sophisticated as "Happy birthday to me" or "The house on sorority row", it definitely delivers and keeps you guessing who the killer is.

The happiness and the sanity of a W.W.II vet is destroyed when he returns home and finds his girl in the arms of another at the town's annual dance. Outraged, he kills them with a pitchfork, and the town does not hold the dance again for 35 years. When the vet hears about the dance being resurrected, it stirs up those bitter painful memories once again, so he comes back to do a little more killing...This is one of those film that have been mimicked so many times, if you haven't seen the original before the slew of re-imaginings/side-quels/homages, you may lose the overall effectiveness of the original.Much like I did.For me, it's pretty perfunctory stuff, with the added bonus of some wonderful make up by Tom Savini. But other than that, it's just a case of teen girls running down a corridor and reaching a locked door, while being prowled by the bad guy in Hellboy.The cast are fine, they do their job as you'd expect, it can be slightly tense in some places.It's my bad really for not seeing it any sooner, as I'd probably regard it a lot higher than I actually do.But I will give it something to its credit, it hasn't been remade as of yet.If you are just starting out with horror films, and you want a good old fashioned stalk n' slash horror, you'd be good to catch this as soon as possible.You'll appreciate it a lot more than I did.

This movie is a disappointment, mostly because it has such an awesome sounding concept to it. It's only something that sounds good on paper though, since the execution of it all is far from awesome, exciting or original.Just purely by watching this movie you could tell that director Joseph Zito just wasn't a very good genre director. He did an extremely poor job with handling its concept and with building up its tension. Even the killings are disappointing in this movie, while this normally would be something that still could make a movie like this worthwhile, even when the rest of the movie isn't being very good.It just does absolutely nothing with its concept. It sounds so promising; a killer, seemingly randomly killing people in a WW II outfit but an annoying and weird aspect to begin with is that the outfit isn't even WW II-looking at all and for some odd reason he uses a pitchfork as his weapon of choice. It's such an odd combination, that just doesn't make any sense and also never gets explained.That's another problem of the movie; nothing ever gets explained. Instead of creating a mystery and a whole back-story, the movie is simply being a whodunit, Scooby-Doo style, that doesn't focus at all on the why's and by the end the movie only leaves more why's. As a matter of fact, at least a Scooby-Doo episode always explain at the end why the person committed all of the monstrosities. This movie does nothing of that sort.But it does not only handles its killer poorly; also the rest of its characters remains underdeveloped. Of course this isn't being anything too uncommon for a slasher but at least most slashers feature a good and likable enough main character in it, while this movie only features a bunch of boring looking and acting people in it, you just couldn't have cared less for. Besides, it only has an handful of characters in it, so 'guessing' who the killer is shouldn't be too hard for anyone.There is being absolutely nothing about the story that ever makes this movie stand out. Just like its characters, everything else in it also remains extremely underdeveloped and the little stuff that it tries to do is being extremely formulaic all. This just is a bad, bad slasher, I'm sad to say.4/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Released in 1981, The Prowler never got the recognition of its peers. Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine and Prom Night all went on to pop culture familiarity spanning countless sequels and eventual remakes. Yet the Joseph Zito classic about a masked World War II army gear wearing slasher remains nothing more than a footnote in the annals of horror history.And that is unfortunate. For not only does The Prowler exhibit some of make-up effects artist Tom Savini's best work, but it also might just be the best slasher film released in the glory days of the early 1980's.Opening after the conclusion of World War II where a couple is brutally murdered, the film forwards 35-years to present day (1981 present day) where a group of college kids are preparing for an annual spring dance. Mysteriously, the fatigue donning killer reappears and using his weapons of choice (a bayonet and a pitchfork) he begins his night of terror that will leave the small New Jersey town soaked in adolescent blood.A slasher film is routinely graded on the graphicness or originality of its kills. And The Prowler delivers the bloody goods thanks to the aforementioned Tom Savini. A pitchfork puncturing shower scene, a pool throat slashing and the shotgun blow to the head were arguably three of the best kills of The Prowler's era – and era that included Friday the 13th sequels, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween II.The story itself is horror routine. But the execution by director Joseph Zito (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Invasion U.S.A.) is brilliantly choreographed in a thrilling and exciting film that holds up as well today as it did over 30-years ago. The Prowler was produced for $1 million but was self-distributed by Zito therefore relegating the title to the background of VHS rental video stores. But now that it is available on DVD and blu-ray, the title should be sought out by anyone who wants to be considered an authoritative voice on the genre.www.killerreviews.com