There’s an age old truism in reviewing horror movies: an exploding head will always improve a movie by one grade level. So a C becomes a B, a B+ become and A+ and so on.

1981’s The Prowler, which I watched yesterday, has an exploding head, so how does it rank? Pretty high actually, because even the non-exploding head parts were decent. (Imagine that!) I’ll give it an A-.

The plot is standard order slasher material: A masked killer, for not totally understandable reasons, goes after young people at a college dance. (I never really get the logic of killers who are like “Someone once offended/betrayed me a long time ago, so now I will kill anyone who vaguely resembles them!” It’s like, you’re piling a lot of work on your plate there, dude.)

The kill scenes, beyond the exploding head (hopefully it’s not a spoiler that the person whose head explodes is killed), are pretty graphic, the handiwork of the maestro Tom Savini.

A few interesting actors show up. Farley Granger of Hitchcock’s Rope is an aging sheriff. And Thom Bray, who played the geeky computer dude on the 80s action show Riptide, is one of the young men. He really had a talent for portraying an annoying weirdo.

I mentioned Hitchcock, and the whole film has a Hitchcock feel (or perhaps more that of his bloodier successor, Brian De Palma.) The camera lingers as Hitch liked to. The tension simmers.

So check it out. If you get bored, just know that an exploding head is on the way!