Review: Prowl

Prowl begins the way so many horror films do - a group of attractive young adults on the road when their vehicle breaks down, leaving them to depend on the kindness of a stranger who is more than he seems. One wonders why this doesn't happen to the middle-aged as often as teens. Perhaps it's due to adults taking fewer road trips. Someone should do a study. But I digress...

Front and center for our story is Amber (Courtney Hope), a small town girl with big city dreams, making a last ditch effort to meet a potential roommate in Chicago and secure her ticket out of her one-horse town. Five of her closest friends join her on the drive, necessary because Amber has no car of her own and what sort of horror movie would this be if there were only one or two kids to kill off? So, potential boyfriend Eric (Oliver Hawes) loads up the gang in his van and heads for town. When the van breaks down, as it must surely do, they are aided by unassuming truck driver Bernard (Bruce Payne), who offers to take the kids all the way to Chicago in the back of his semi, with only a few conditions. 1) Eric has to ride up front to keep Bernard company and, 2) the kids are not allowed to open the boxes tethered to the back of the truck, which, of course, they do.

You may guess by now that the kindly Bernard has other plans for our heroes, and sure enough the whole gang gets dumped into an abandoned slaughterhouse where they become prey for shadowy figures crawling all over the walls. And this is where things get simultaneously interesting and frustrating. Interesting because you have a limited space where these characters must find a way to survive. Frustrating because, at no point, are the creatures hunting them fully explained. I don't need a horror film spoon-fed. Sometimes the oblique nature of a horror film is what makes it so frightening (see [REC]), but in this case, Prowl uses a familiar trope and give it a spin without bothering to explain this new take on a familiar villain.

Hope is good in the lead, and the actors around her range from the good to the acceptable. Payne's turn as Bernard is staged to play as the friendly samaritan-turned-captor, but it doesn't wholly work here. In fact, this movie is filled with almosts - it's almost tense, it's almost clever, it's almost good. Here there be spoilers, so you've been warned.

The biggest problem with Prowl is the script. So often, things are brought up, such as a possible relationship between Eric and Amber, and then dropped. Sure, Eric is one of the first to go, but at no point does that seem to affect Amber any more than the deaths of the rest of her friends, so why make the point to begin with? Or why does Bernard try so hard to talk the kids out of riding in his truck, when it becomes clear this is something he's done before? Why would he try to talk his way out of money? And only when he connects with Amber does he offer a ride, sealing her doom? This is a story that makes some sense while viewing, but totally falls apart upon scrutiny.

The pacing slows in the second act, too, making the film not only sub-par on the page, but a bit of a chore to watch. Writer Tim Tori and director Patrik Syversen create a lot of potential in this film, but nothing ever comes to fruition in a satisfying way. That's the most frustrating thing of all when watching indie horror - a film too good to enjoy as an exercise in awfulness and too ineffective to enjoy as a film on its own merits. One can't help but think a couple of extra passes at the script could have yielded a tighter story, but, this time around, potential is the only thing Prowl has to offer its viewers.