it's ok

“Prom Night’s” best feature is that it came early in the slasher movie boom. It does nothing especially well and you could already see it borrowing heavily from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” but at least it follows the basics of the genre long before those basics began to get played out.


It begins with a game that demonstrates that death has already become a desensitized thing to most kids by the time they reach 10 years of age. Either that or they’re just not much worried about it yet. Maybe they should be, as an accident occurs between the five ten year olds, one kid falls out a window, and the other panic-stricken four make a pact to callously abandon the body and never bring it up again.

6 years later and it’s prom night. The dead girl’s sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the newly elected prom queen but it’s the four who should be worried. Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens), Jude (Joy Thompson), Nick (Casey Stevens) and Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin) all receive threatening phone calls, possibly from the schizophrenic who was wrongly arrested for the murder and committed to an institution.

But then again we never really know for sure until the end, though one of the more clever things about the movie is that it convinces us and then disproves many of the suspects as the film goes along. Characters played by Leslie Nielsen (as Kelly’s dad), Michael Tough (Kelly’s brother), Robert Silverman (as the High School’s creepy caretaker), and David Mucci (a school bully) are presented for us to consider.


And that is a far better thing to think about than much of the rest of what we’re given in the first hour- which concerns high school drama between Kelly, Wendy, and Nick that we could really give a shit about. There are moments of loud noise jump scares, broken mirrors, and the like but very little of it is ever all that chilling and other than Curtis, few of the rest of the cast has the charisma to make us actually want to spend time with them.


One of the more unexpected things here is how the prom suddenly becomes “Saturday Night Fever”. I’m no expert on disco so i’ll leave the music part alone but just watching Curtis’ enthusiasm and energy on the dance floor is far more fun than much of the movie.


We can also really feel the film finally beginning to rev up after the first hour feels like a very slow moving, general look at who’s who. The film never really humanizes these brats and by this point we’re left to only want to see them punished for their cockiness so our investment is more with the killer than with the prey but still it sets up some decent cat and mouse chases and a few stellar, bloody deaths.


Would that there were just a few more reasons to actually care about what’s happening and this could have been so much better than it is. The deaths are good, Curtis is fine, but she’s dancing uphill here.