Note: I'm not certain as to why I'm still posting here. I'm being treated very poorly in my estimation. But old habits die hard, one supposes.
Someone once claimed they knew Jeffrey Dahmer was a strange character when he left the Senior Prom to go and get McDonald’s. Cannibal murders aside, I’m in complete understanding as to how he felt about the Prom after watching this tepid, half-baked slasher flick.
Prom Night is a sort of somnambulistic slasher flick from the era right after Jamie Lee did Halloween. It moves along at a snail’s pace, features little in the way of titties and blood, and generally is the quietest damn horror flick I think I’ve ever seen.
However, it does begin promisingly enough.
A quattro of bad little monsters, at some unspecified point in the past that I think is supposed to be the Nineteen Fifties, are exploring what looks to be an abandoned school. They play an interminable game of hide-and-seek, and everything is sort of hazy, as though someone spread Vaseline on the lens. Nice and eerie, right up front. The buried memories of some unspecified childhood trauma come back to haunt the viewer. I suppose.
The monstrous tots suddenly turn on one of the girls, Robin Hammond (Debbie Greenfield), and manage to push her out of a second-story window, where she lands belly-up on what appears to be a number of panes of glass.
And the next scene is of the pathetic little small-town ambulance carting the body away while the presumable mother bawls, and it’s all that we expect from such a picture.
Flash forward to the NOW (1980, or thereabouts), and Jamie Lee Curtis and her beaux are King and Queen of the Senior Prom. (We think that’s how these things work.) They’re on the committee to get things set up so that all the popular kids can come and boogie down to contemporary disco hits that are mixed so poorly that all I can really hear on the soundtrack is the reverbed chorus and not much else. Along the way and by the by, we have an escaped mental patient, Leonard Murch, who goes and kills some girl, and the detective who tracks him down—though this might be what you would call a McGuffin. Red Herring. But not, for that reason (as an old fortune teller such as myself might use as a stock phrase), proof that the perpetrator is anyone else.
Jamie Lee is as long, lean, and mean a Scream Queen as she’s ever been here, but unfortunately the material is not up to snuff. (No pun.) It’s a very, very (very) slow-moving flick with a scene or two there of hot young bodies (these high school kids are all, noticeably, at least twenty-two), and a prom night dance that does have at least one very bloody high point (although not enough is revealed to really, really push it). There are a few intense flash scenes of violence, a spooky, whispery voice, and a masked killer who stalks the school prom, slashing throats in a vague, can’t-see-a-damn-thing way. He or she is a bloodless, no-background, anonymous slasher-stock killer in a ski mask who kills a fat dude in a van (imagine that in 1980) making out with a girl, and all you’re thinking is, “Why the hell didn’t chicks like that exist when I was in high school and was fat with a permed, White Man ’Fro?” Inquiring minds and all.
Leslie Nielsen is in this flick, and I’m not certain why. I suppose I liked him better as an eccentric, vindictive, and undeniably homicidal beach-combing millionaire killer who gets his comeuppance after burying Ted Danson up to his neck on a beach in the original Creepshow a few years later (a film which also had the undeniable advantage of featuring bodacious beeyotch Adrienne Barbeau).
Leslie doesn’t do anything very interesting here, and you barely realize he’s even in it. Jamie Lee Curtis gives a competent performance in a film that is otherwise whispery, dull, and can’t decide if it wants to be exploitative slasher-flick trash or, like, a genuine mystery flick.
The ending is straight “Scooby-Doo” shit.
I, BTW, don’t think the ending made ANY sense. Now, I’m a go and watch The Funhouse or Friday the Thirteenth Part 5 and wash the taste of Prom Night’s bad turd-in-the-punchbowl juice out of my viewing palate.
Prom Night | Cult Horror | Slasher | Jamie Lee Curtis | Leslie Nielsen | Full Movie
Links
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low trash Volume 1
My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels by C. Augustine
My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread
About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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