Main cast: Courtney Hope (Amber), Ruta Gedmintas (Suzy), Joshua Bowman (Peter), Jamie Blackley (Ray), Oliver Hawes (Eric), George Oliver (Runt), Saxon Trainor (Veronica), Perdita Weeks (Fiona), and Bruce Payne (Bernard)
Director: Patrik Syversen
Now this is a somewhat interesting take on the same old “vampire kills beautiful young people” story. For about half an hour into the movie, I am given an insight into the group of fresh meat that will soon become vampire chow. Amber is a young lady who experiences strange hallucination-like episodes now and then. Having to care for an ill mother and stuck in a dead-end butcher job, she desperately wants to leave her small town to start life anew somewhere else. She finally gets to leave, with her friends coming along for the ride, along to have their vehicle break down along the way.
They eventually get a lift with truck driver Bernard, and you know, it’s such a good idea to get into the back of the truck where they are completely sealed in by a heavy door. Unsurprisingly, they end up being dumped into what seems like a junkyard, which doubles as a hunting ground for vampires-in-training under the care of Veronica. Time to run, boys and girls…
Prowl is an odd movie. It doesn’t know what it wants to be, but I have to give it some credit for daring to try to make me care for the main characters only to get them out of the scene in rapid succession. The movie tries to do more than to just up the body count, and I can appreciate that. The actors here are easy on the eyes, and they also manage to deliver some decent acting to make their characters seem deeper than the usual horror movie stereotypes.
However, this movie starts to go downhill once the truck door opens, as, let’s face it, there are only a handful of potential casualties here. With the movie doing away with more than half of them so quickly, it degenerates into a long and tedious chase sequence, culminating in a twist that would have been more at home in a pilot of a TV series. Now that I think of it, this movie would have worked much better as a pilot of a TV series, because then the open-ended ending wouldn’t make think, “Wait, so that’s it? What did I just watch again?”
Prowl is a potentially good vampire flick that somehow manages to miss the good spot regardless of its valiant efforts.
