Okay. This was good fun, for the most part. We open in 1945, as the boys have returned home from WWII and there's a graduation dance at a local girls' college. One of the coeds, Rosemary, wrote her GI a "Dear John" letter and is at the dance with her new fella, a rich townie. They sneak away from the dance to go neck at a gazebo - where they get pitchforked (not a euphemism) by a masked and uniformed soldier. In the "present day" (1981), the college is gearing up for its first graduation dance since that ill-fated 1945 one; local opposition had shut down the festivities in the wake of the murders. While these coeds primp and giggle and feather their hair, getting ready for the dance, an unknown individual also gets ready - in WWII combat gear.
Our heroine is Pam, a good girl who doesn't drink or have sex with her boyfriend(?), Deputy Mark - and his Cillian Murphy-esque cheekbones - who has been left in charge of the town while the sheriff goes on his annual fishing trip. That's suspicious. So who will "the prowler" be: the absentee sheriff, the twitchy 40 year old stockboy at the town's general store, the wheelchair-bound millionaire ...? The dance gets under way and so do the murders. It is up to Pam and Mark to survive the night.
The Prowler doesn't have a super high body count for an [early] 80s slasher: I counted seven victims. The kills are really well-done practical effects - the camera does not shy away as the pitchfork and bayonet do their thing. The pacing could have been improved: it's like they didn't have enough story to fill their ninety minutes so there's quite a lot of Pam and Mark (and his cheekbones) wandering around in dark hallways. I give this one a big thumbs-up, though - and there's even an exploding head, which is always a good time.
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