At last, a prom night more pathetic than my own!
Definitely one of the more lame (if more prominent) slasher movies to crop up in the wake of Halloween, Prom Night doesn't technically revolve around a holiday but hey, it's prom night, close enough. Determined to stay as true to (that is, derivative of) the form, it starts out with a flashback to a childhood tragedy, where four kids playing a prank on another end up pushing her back and back and back in an abandoned school until she falls out the window to her death. ("If we tell anyone, they'll say it's our fault!" sagely warns one of them) So they make a pact to keep it forever a secret, and a secret it remains, until the day of their senior prom, when somebody bent on bloodshed flies off the handle.
Leslie Nielsen is top-billed as the school principal, but it's Jamie Lee Curtis who probably gets the most screen time as the older sister of the dead girl (for her performance, she was nominated for a Genie in the "Best performance by a foreign actress" category, showing that the Genies were even more hard up for nominees then than they are now). She was 21 at the time of filming, and looks 30. (mind you, it's 20 years later now and she looks 40, so she must be doing okay) We get to see her disco moves, a lot. I wonder if she had to go into intensive disco training for this role. It kinda hurts to watch this movie - not just because it's so bad, but because it reminds me of how old I am. I remember seeing ads for this as a kid, and thinking "Wow, proms look dangerous!"
This is set in one of those innocent, trusting small towns where a pretty teenaged girl accepts a ride to school in the van of a creepy fat guy who calls himself "Slick". Later, she gets the line "I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life!", some variant of which I've heard about a million times in this kind of movie, but it never fails to get a guffaw.
Those kids and others have grown up to be your typical high-school stereotypes; the sexpot, the bully, the girl who just can't go through with giving up her virginity and the dastardly guy who says "I'll get it somewhere else!" - they're all here. Okay, so the fat guy isn't a prankster (he's actually a sex machine with a sizeable, if poorly maintained, stash of joints).
The plot is typical slasher-flick nonsense, with great pains taken to cast suspicion on two non-characters who get one line between them and only exist to attract suspicion. Nothing much even happens until there's exactly 27 minutes to go; until then, the most menacing things we see are the killer's prank phone calls. Crashing vehicles explode for no reason. Cops handle crime-scene evidence with their bare hands. The bully character has clearly gone to the James T. Kirk school of martial arts, where a single blow can incapacitate any opponent. The killer's weapon of choice, at first, is a big shard of glass. He must conclude that it's an unreliable weapon at best, likely to transform at any moment into a little shard of glass, so soon he's swinging an axe.
I don't know what it is with made-in-Canada movies, whose geographical setting doesn't matter in the least, having to go out of their way to insist that they're American. Three or four shots of the American flag, Alexander Hamilton High School...I mean, what's the point? Like a lot of Canadian movies, everything looks drab and dim and I have no idea why.
The score, composed by two people whose names both start with "Z" (pseudonyms?), sounds like it was performed by the school's marching band. At least it's got more subtlety than the disco soundtrack, with songs like "Love Me 'Til I Die". Halloween kind of dates itself, but in a good way, more in terms of atmosphere and an overall vibe than the crashing self-dating we see here. I kept looking for John Travolta and that leisure suit of his which kept his career chained down for sixteen years.
Does Prom Night suck? The answer to that question would be yes. And it would go on to suck further, with three sequels (in name only; if I recall correctly, none of them actually had anything to do with this movie). Jamie Lee Curtis worked hard for her "scream queen" title, but this wasn't one of her better moments. If you're looking for some good scream-queen horror from this period and have watched the first two Halloween movies to death, try Terror Train instead.
And for those with sharper eyes than mine (and DVD players!) - is that Stephen King I see in the yearbook, with big glasses on, behind the two pictures which are torn out and then apart from each other?
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