By Geno McGahee
This is a very popular early slasher, but I don’t see why. We begin with a group of children in an abandoned building, playing a game where they pretend to kill somebody. It’s sort of like “hide and go seek” for psychos. So, you have this group of kids chasing this poor girl through this building, eventually cornering her, screaming: “Killers are coming,” until she falls backward out a window to her death. As she lay dead, the kids make a deal not to say a word.
Now, six years later, the prom is upon a group of high school kids that look like they are 40 years old or so. Jamie Lee Curtis stars in this film as “Kim Hammond,” the daughter of the Principal of the high school, Mr. Raymond Hammond (Leslie Nielson). She plays her typical role as the nice girl in a horror film, but this movie fails to be scary and also fails to be interesting. There are barely any murders, and the line of suspects that they imply may be responsible for the killing or lack thereof, are undeveloped. Most of the characters in this movie blend together, and the death scenes are horrible…all two of them.
Prom night is the night when the big killing spree was supposed to begin, and it did…sort of. A dude got his head cut off, and then a guy dressed in black and wearing a ski mask began running after people with an axe in his hands. Perhaps he was angry about the disco music, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ horrible dancing. Watching her dance, I began to think that she must have a boyfriend that she saw recently with the nickname: “Mr. Wrong Hole.”
The acting is OK, and the killer whispering when he prank calls his prospective victims and when he is actually killing them is pretty amusing. To kill somebody and whisper at the same time has to be tough to do…sort of like whistling with a mouthful of crackers or something else. Other than that, this movie blows really bad. If you are looking for a good slasher, keep looking. This is not it.
Scared Stiff Rating: 2/10 The Whispering phone sex murderer is the only saving grace.
