Harry Reems got perhaps his best late-in-career assignment in NIGHT PROWLERS, an ambitious attempt to combine porn with suspense (B-movie level) that came late - bearing a 1985 copyright but shot on film after most production had switched to video. It's no great shakes, but worth watching for having at least tried.
Film opens with 4 guys watching a football game at home, but the halftime entertainment is a couple of pretty hookers servicing them. Police sergeant Harry Reems is shown arriving home, humping policewoman Cara Lott, and soon assigned to the case of a robbery at the very home (belonging to Herschel Savage) from the opening scene.
Twist is that Susan Hart and Heather Wayne, familiar young things from the video era, are cast as the cat burglars, and for the fans' sake, also lesbian lovers. Weak wrinkle in filmmaker Will Kelly's script is that Reems/Lott and Hart/Wayne are neighbors: they seduce him (amidst some extremely lame double entendre dialog) after helping him out after Lott's husband Sasha Gabor beats him up, and only later discover he's a cop (and as we in the audience know, the very cop assigned to hunt them down).
The girls' phone number 555-SEXY turns out to be the crucial clue in solving the case, though as the film drags on it becomes increasingly obvious that it is more porn than suspense in terms of content. Gabor gets to beat up Reems a second time, the gals keep up their robbery spree and after a foot chase various plot threads get sorted out.
With a tag line: "When it gets dark...More than the sun goes down" it's hard to take NIGHT PROWLERS seriously. I'm reminded of a couple of lavish (by porn standards) cop vehicles starring Buck Adams in the '90s, yet none of these laudable efforts have ever achieved the campy and sublime crappiness of the Bob Chinn/Johnny Wadd movies, immortalized by P.T. Anderson via BOOGIE NIGHTS. Reems' legendary status in Adult Film history is secure, and it is unfortunate that he, like Holmes, ended his career appearing in an endless string of nothing projects.
