Prom Night

Here's some obscure trivia for you that is probably meaningless and you will wonder why I even bothered to bring it up. This is actually the fifth Prom Night movie, although its been hyped as a remake of the original. Quite why that is I have no idea seeing as the plot - teacher becomes obsessed with student and manages to escape the pyschiatric hospital he was sent to for killing said student's family, and goes after the student yet again - bears absolutely no resemblence to the original plot at all. The movie should be called Prom Night 5, because none of the other Prom Nights have had any sort of continuity between them (except 2 and 3). Different killers, different motives...the only linking thing is it happens on Prom Night. Even the makers of Friday the 13th and Halloween realised that wasn't going to be good enough for a series to go on and on.

Now it just so happens that I love horror/slasher flicks. Nothing better than watching something with a plot you only have to vaguely concentrate on, with copious amounts of gratuitious violence and gore (and nudity helps as well). Sadly, these days, we don't have a scream queen. Back in the day Jamie Lee Curtis would usually get horror movies up and running, and she certainly did with Prom Night (the original) playing the girl who would ultimately kill the killer (who turned out to be her brother...just like Halloween!! Small world...). We could have a scream queen. Someone like Denise Richards or Anne Hathaway would have been great...or even Jennifer Love Hewitt. Alas, we don't and so the somewhat dopey Brittany Snow gets the leading role in this movie.

Recent horror movies have started to redefine the rules of horror movies, and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is probably one that this Prom Night borrows from heavily. We have a trio of girls (meaning that one has to be black) who are dating a trio of boys (no inter-racial partners...we don't do that sort of thing in Hollywood). The black couple are madly in love, as are our leads, and the other couple are having difficulties. Cue the start of stupid people doing really stupid and pointless things.

Now, understand this, I know that people do silly things in horror movies. In Scream, Sidney should have just got out of the cab, but instead she decides to take the mask of the killer off. In my mind I can justify this. She's a brave girl, and she wants to know who it is that has decided to take a knife to her in spectacularly embarrassing fashion. Rather than jump through a window to escape a killer, most girls run upstairs and have to jump through the window on the upper floors, where they do themselves more damage. But you know what, they are probably nervous and not thinking clearly. In this movie the stupidity is just basic stupidity.

One of heroines is five minutes away from discovering whether she is going to be the prom queen, and her man the prom king. Five minutes. They think about it, and then decide that they will have enough time to run upstairs and have sex, then get back down for the announcement. They don't and they get killed. They couldn't hold their hormones in check for five minutes?? What's wrong with these people?

Our couple who are arguing also quickly make their way up to their room in order to get killed. Prom Night is a funny thing because in many ways it's something in Australia we can't really understand. We don't do the whole "prom at a hotel and hire a room for the night" thing at our school formals, so the idea of going somewhere and being desperate to get to the room that we hired for the night is a little foreign to us. I'm assuming that the whole point of prom night in America is to actually have sex. Go dance for a bit and then shag. Lots.

There are a multitude of other things about this movie that don't make an awful lot of sense. Nothing, for instance, is made of the fact that the killer used to be the student's teacher. That's what he is, but for most of the movie he's just a standard psychopath. It's nice, then, when one of the student's recognises him, but rather than saying "OMG that's Mr Jihad" she just says "It's him!! I have to tell...". See, the movie is so ordinary I don't remember the characters' names. The writer seems a bit irked that he's got such a short time and very limited sets to play with, and clearly he wasn't keen on the Prom because he gets everybody out of there as soon as possible.

It's a pretty ordinary movie, all told.

And now a message to the stupid people of the world. As I came out of the cinema I heard a girl say "That was weird. That went over my head. How did the killer get past the police?" Were you WATCHING THE MOVIE??? If you mean, how did he get out of the hotel - well, in disguise just like they showed and then showed again when the police realised what happened. Or did you mean into the heroine's house? Because I'm guessing the dead policemen would probably answer that question. If you want to know what's going on in the movie, WATCH IT! Pay attention, and then you won't come out of the cinema looking like a dickhead.

"C"