Now available on DVD
Cast:
Ruta Gedmintas as Suzy
Joshua Bowman as Peter
Perdita Weeks as Fiona
Jamie Blackley as Ray
Courtney Hope as Amber
Saxon Trainor as Veronica
Bruce Payne as Bernard
Directed by Patrik Syversen
Review:
Previously best known for his 1970’s-style rural massacre film Manhunt (curiously not yet released in America), Norwegian director Patrick Syversen set his sights on the vampire subgenre with Prowl, one of the first releases in the new After Dark Originals lineup.
On their way to Chicago, a group of stranded motorists hitch a ride in the back of a big-rig truck and end up trapped in an abandoned slaughterhouse where they are hunted by a pack of bloodthirsty creatures. As the group is very quickly whittled down to sole survivors Amber and Suzy, Amber discovers she has some superhuman physical abilities that mirror those of her attackers. Could she be somehow connected to these monsters? The film’s original title Strays might give you some idea.
The film features some slick, dark cinematography by Havard Andre Byrkjeland, who shot a couple of director Syversen’s short films as well as his first feature Manhunt, but the quality of the photography during the attack scenes is undercut by a very common problem seen in a multitude of films: rapid-fire editing.
While, unfortunately, this is a pervasive technique seen in both horror films and action films, the filmmakers who employ it don’t seem to understand the following basic principle: why invest the time and energy on choreography and intense acting performances if the sequence is ultimately going to be reduced to an incomprehensible blur of motion?
This approach, which for me ruins Neil Marshall’s not dissimilar film The Descent, cripples what is Prowl‘s best sequence. As the group of passengers exits the truck and investigates their surroundings, they are attacked by the creatures for the first time. The creatures leap at them, swoop down on them from above and pull them up walls while biting them (reminiscent of the first attack on the Marines in James Cameron’s Aliens). The fast editing robs this scene of its potential savage power and hides what I’m sure was some incredibly impressive stunt work, especially considering the film’s low budget.
Bottom line: If the viewer can’t tell what going on in a given scene, what’s the point?
Also working against the film is its abrupt ending, obviously intended to set up a sequel but doing nothing to bring this particular story to any kind of effective close, especially in light of the revelation of Amber’s true identity.
Prowl scores some points for its vampire creatures’ abilities to scale walls and execute huge leaps (hardly revolutionary, some say overdone, but it’s a good fit here). Physically they are a combination of the Reapers in Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade 2 and the vampires in David Slade’s 30 Days of Night, but the film misses a real opportunity to add something fresh to their overall look.
On the acting front, a couple of performances stand out in different ways. Courtney Hope turns in a game performance as the female lead Amber and is definitely equal to the physical challenges of the film. Saxon Trainor, on the other hand, is miscast as the “vampire queen” character Veronica and totally misses the mark. A unique screen presence like Alice Krige or Deborah Unger would have been needed to pull off this character’s clearly intended mix of threatening aura and maternal instinct.
While watching the brief “making of” segment on the DVD, the filmmakers talk about the vampire creatures being descended from ancient predatory birds and the fact that a life or death situation will reveal someone’s true nature as a “stray”.
Because these interesting ideas are, at best, only vaguely present in the film, the “making ofâ suggests that a deeper look at these ideas was never written in the screenplay, written but cut from the screenplay or intended for a sequel.
This is very detrimental to Prowl in that the film could’ve benefited from a real attempt to create its own mythology. Instead, the film only hints at it, ends before really doing anything with it and then briefly tries to explain it in a short documentary supplement. All this adds to the ultimately unsatisfying, underdeveloped feel of Prowl.
Unfortunately, Prowl is a film that went ahead with a screenplay that had a good idea at its core but it simply wasn’t ready.
