Late teen Amber (Courtney Hope) is desperate to leave her dead-end small town, her alcoholic mother and her all-around shitty prospects behind. It's the last straw for her when her mother - of course mumbling in alcoholic stupor - confesses to her that she's been adopted.
Amber even has already found an apartment in Chicago. The problem is, she needs to give her security deposit to the guy renting her the apartment in person, because…um…there are no banks in the USA? Anyway, for various reasons, she has to ask every single one of her small-town friends for a ride. It takes some time to find someone to take her, but at that point, the whole affair has turned into a road trip - for some reason that, again, eludes me.
This being a horror movie, Amber has had quite a few foreshadowing nightmares and visions these last few days (which also make the third act twist glaringly obvious), so it comes as no surprise when the road trippers' van breaks down in the middle of a very empty Interstate. Fortunately, and after some begging, there's a friendly truck driver bound for Chicago willing to help them out. Alas, this still being a horror film, the friendly trucker is in truth the food delivery man of Chicago's vampire orphans, and unloads the teens in the obligatory empty warehouse. Empty, except for a horde of loud and fast vampires, that is. Fight for survival, and etc. and so on.
Despite plotting that takes two steps towards the painfully stupid, the difficult to believe and the clichéd, only to take one step back again, Prowl is a pretty entertaining little film. I just hope you missed our old standards of idiot plotting - the drunken truth or dare game that nearly leads to mock-lesbian shenanigans and the cell phone that doesn't function when it's used to call help, but works perfectly fine to betray a victim's hiding place to hungry vampires, because they, and a few of their friends, are out trying to bury the film in the same annoying crap that already didn't work in the last hundred films that used it.
It's actually a bit of a surprise how decidedly not terrible a film this full of badly digested dumbness can still be once its director - Norwegian Patrik Syversen gone Hollywood, in this case - lets loose with some very traditional, but also very tightly done, action-y horror scenes. It's surely no masterpiece, but Syversen manages to turn a miserable script into a watchable movie through a fine sense for pacing and a solid handling of old-fashioned suspense techniques colliding with wobbly camera and loud, loud noises.
Courtney Hope is pretty good too, acting with an easy-going charisma that helps the film over some very rough scripting patches (if having plot holes the size of cities and a horrible love for everything that's bad about horror can still be called "a rough patch"). In the film's better moments, Syversen and Hope could nearly convince me that Prowl (a film, by the way, not containing a single second of prowling) is actually sort of good.
Just imagine what would happen when someone would write Syversen a better script for his next outing.