I Just Saw

This is a slasher film to make you appreciate both the fine artistic craft of the original Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the crude efficiency of the Friday the 13th sequels. Heck, even the original Friday the 13th wasn’t this dull. I’d be interested to see the 2008 reboot of Prom Night just because I can’t imagine any 21st-century film with a budget behind it being allowed to go a full hour without something happening.

In a prologue that plays like one of those industrial safety films warning children not to play on building sites, some kids are chasing each other around an abandoned convent when one of them dies and the survivors agree to keep it a secret. Eight years later, the sex offender assumed to have been responsible escapes from confinement and returns, just as a mysterious caller rings up each of the survivors in turn as they prepare for prom night…

This plot really doesn’t deserve that suspenseful ellipsis I gave it. I can’t stress enough how much of this film is dedicated to so much nothing. A couple of detectives pursue the sex offender but get no development, and the teenage characters just sort of wander in and out of each other’s lives.

Plot elements are borrowed from both Halloween and Brian de Palma’s Carrie, such as the escaped killer who makes base in the convent and the mean girl who plots to humiliate the prom queen with the help of a bad boy. But none of these elements are effectively dramatised. Basically, when Prom Night isn’t ripping off another film’s plot, it doesn’t have a plot.

The most notable actors are Leslie Nielsen, in a rare dramatic role post-Airplane!, and of course Jamie Lee Curtis, the era’s Scream Queen in one of the slashers whose Final Girl she played before Trading Places (1983) sent her mainstream. Curtis is such a likeable actress that she elevates this material, as does Nielsen, as small as his role is.

Incidentally, the actors playing Curtis’ boyfriend and brother respectively are a case of bad casting. They’re styled much the same way, down to their curly mops of brown hair, so that I couldn’t always tell them apart. Making an already thin storyline confusing as well.

It occurred to me while watching scene after scene of blandly written and uninterestingly shot interactions that this is basically the ‘80s equivalent of those drive-in horror films from the 1950s. If you were to watch 1958’s The Blob you might be surprised by how much of it is just Steve McQueen and co carrying on long conversations as opposed to, you know, fighting the blob.

The idea, I think, was that you’d take your date to the film and engage in some sweet hetero canoodling during the non-action scenes before the big climax. After which you’d go home and tell everyone what a great movie it was based on those last twenty minutes.

The last twenty to thirty minutes of Prom Night are a lot of fun. The first kill is a wash (though it proves that virgins didn’t always survive slasher films, contrary to lore), filmed in a slow motion style that drains it of shock and horror, but the next is effective and followed by an engaging chase scene around an empty school.

The next kill is an absolute classic and the highlight of the whole movie. It involves one of those remarkably easy decapitations that you see in ‘80s horror, leading you to believe that removing a living person’s head is as easy as knocking off a mannequin’s.

An amusing fight scene follows and then the mystery is solved, although it makes little sense. Once you’ve seen the last shot, ask yourself why that person was there, how no-one noticed them, and why it took them eight years to have any reaction to what they saw. Moreover, why are they wearing lipstick in the present day? What did that have to do with… anything?

Maybe I missed something, but if so, you can hardly blame me. Prom Night isn’t a film that holds your gaze and clings on hard. You could save yourself 90 minutes and get the same experience by watching the kill count on YouTube.

Featured image from themoviedb.org