By Geno McGahee
Well before there was I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and SCREAM there was a movie by the name of “PROM NIGHT.” I haven’t seen this film in a long time and I remember not thinking much of it, but after all these years, I have changed my opinion a great deal. This isn’t the best of the 80’s slashers, but this one turned out to be interesting and you can see where the inspirations for this film came from and what inspiration it had on future films of the sort.
In 1978, Jamie Lee Curtis became a hot ticket for horror fans. Starring in the mega-hit “HALLOWEEN,” she was able to capitalize on that success with horror follow-ups like THE FOG, TERROR TRAIN and PROM NIGHT. She even freaked up Friday, but that was much later.
With the horror slasher craze well underway, the idea to link killing time to events was well in order. HALLOWEEN worked…linked to an event. So, PROM NIGHT, happening at a senior prom where all the students were apparently held back fifteen years, fit the formula. Another shared idea among these films is the revenge factor, and they set the tone early here. A bunch of youngsters with their silly game of “killer” chases some poor girl and inadvertently knock her out the window to her death. At that point, the group vows to never talk about it. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER directly borrows from this.
Kim (Lee Curtis) and her brother Alex (Michael Tough) live with the death of their sister, but carry on and prepare for the senior prom. Their father, Mr. Hammond (Leslie Nielsen), runs the school and also has some inner demons to contend with. As the story moves along, the suspects begin to add up. This slasher is giving you many options. Who is the killer? When will the killer kill? It takes about an hour for him to get going, but it’s a rather interesting ride to get there.
My favorite suspect is the yard guy, Sykes (Robert A. Silverman). In horror movies, custodial staff and yards men at a high school are depicted as weird perverts and they made sure to make this guy especially strange. At one point, one of the girls moon him and he just looks at her with tongue hanging out of his mouth for a long period of time. Props to the director for not cutting that scene. The added time of him ogling her made it that much more amusing.
The targets for the murders get phone calls first…much like SCREAM. He also rips out pages from the yearbook and scratches out their name on a yellow notepad. Usually the killer in one of these films has one or the other. They are usually content with a notepad or the yearbook, but not this killer. He wanted both just in case he misplaced one.
We are treated to some terrible disco music and dancing. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis dance here, I have to give her credit. She was way better in TRUE LIES. She must have taken several dance classes to improve or she may have just stopped listening to disco. Can you really dance to disco and not look like an asshole?
Jealous rival of Kim, Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin) recruits school bully, Lou (David Mucci), to disrupt the prom. Lou is obnoxious and saying he overacts is an understatement. They did a great job in making him a bum. He drives a shitbox car, wears jeans to the prom, and drinks like a fish. Wendy is far classier, but saw the opportunity to ruin Kim’s night, but she gets more than she bargained for.
A man in a ski mask is going around with a knife or axe and murdering the partying guests. It becomes a life or death situation and Kim must fight off this killer in a final showdown with the shocking murderer reveal. I should also mention that the killer is believed to be an escaped mental patient that was once a registered sex offender that was accused of killing Kim’s sister. He was chased down by the police and terribly disfigured when his car caught on fire and he became engulfed. So, there was some HALLOWEEN influence here…a lot, actually.
PROM NIGHT is a decent 80’s slasher. It is slow at times and when the action finally does get going, it’s over before you know it. Some of the chase scenes are played out a little bit too much and the disco dancing proves to be mere filler and they use it a lot. I was curious as to why the killer was wearing pink lipstick, but I guess the answer was he ran out of red.
I sort of felt that Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t feeling this movie as much as she was HALLOWEEN. Her acting is good at times and then incredibly clunky. She was still in the infancy of her career, so she may have been still finding her way, but there were some takes in here that wasn’t her best work. In the end, however, she worked out incredibly well in the lead role, just as she did in HALLOWEEN.
I recommend PROM NIGHT. It was amusing enough to keep my interest and it had many of the elements that make an 80’s slasher an 80’s slasher. Overall, it worked.
Rating: 7/10
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