Prom Night [M]

Six years ago a game of hide and seek went awry when a group of 12 year-olds taunted little Robin Hammond, backing her into a corner where she slipped on a ledge and fell to her death. Fearing that they would be held responsible, Wendy, Jude, Kelly, and Nick have never told anyone what happened that day. But someone else was there who saw it all and now the kids are paying their dues in blood as a masked killer stalks them and picks them off one by one at the prom. 

Jamie Lee Curtis made a name for herself within the horror genre and whilst this movie is no Halloween, it still provides a bit of mindless horror movie gore and fun through its somewhat shaky plot misdirection and seemingly random killer reveal at the end. To be fair, it’s not a terrible piece of cinema, but it is pretty bad enough to be considered within that cult canon of horror flicks that were around in the 70s and 80s. 

Six years ago a game of hide and seek went awry when a group of 12 year-olds taunted little Robin Hammond, backing her into a corner where she slipped on a ledge and fell to her death. Fearing that they would be held responsible, Wendy, Jude, Kelly, and Nick have never told anyone what happened that day. But someone else was there who saw it all and now the kids are paying their dues in blood as a masked killer stalks them and picks them off one by one at the prom. 

As we’ve most famously seen in Brian de Palma’s adaptation of Carrie, the prom is a perfect setting for mayhem, murder, and a shitload of bloodshed. Whilst Prom Night does not feature any kick arse split-screens or haunting displays of telekinesis, there actually is a lot in it that is quite reminiscent of de Palma’s classic. We’ve got the prom setting, that part is obvious, but there is also a separate revenge plot thrown into the mix against the prom queen. Unlike the pivotal moment in Carrie however, this revenge prank backfires when the initial perpetrator gets murdered somewhere else in the school and one of the members in on the joke gets his head cut off! This part was actually quite laughable because the guy was a dick and the token genre idiot: all brawn, and no brains. 

The story is simple enough, though I do have to say that it’s nothing at all special. In fact, for the most part it is highly predictable, filled with red herrings that we see through right from the get-go, very heavy on the horror movie clichés regarding sex and drugs (those that indulge are the first to get killed), and even the reveal at the end, whilst it did come as a little bit of a surprise, was pretty pathetic. 

The killer itself was pretty piss-weak, all dressed in black with a balaclava hiding their identity. Most of the victims actually put up a pretty good fight, which just goes to show that this killer was pretty amateurish: generally just not very scary. Whilst suspense gets built up relatively well in this flick, there’s something of the anticlimax surrounding the entire thing, which leaves you on a bit of a dispirited note. 

Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielsen, Casey Stephens, Anne-Marie Martin, Antionette Bower, Michael Tough, Robert A. Silverman, Pita Oliver, David Mucci, Jeff Wincott, Marybeth Rubens, and Joy Thompson, Prom Night is a flick filled with romance, drama, suspense, violence, blood, and murder. It’s a fair enough horror flick, but only if you are in the mood for a mindless and clichéd movie. There’s nothing at all groundbreaking or cinematically clever about, it’s just your typical mindless cult horror movie.