Prom Night

There's something about seventies movies. The seventies truly were a different planet, and watching movies made in the seventies are proof of that. It's like all the rules of normal society just don't apply. For instance, take the character of Jude. She desperately wants to go to the prom, but she has no date. On her way to school on the day of Prom Night, a fat kid pulls up beside her and offers her a ride in his van to school. She accepts. That night they lose their viginity to each other at the Prom. Stranger danger, Jude!!! Didn't your mother tell you not to get into a car with strangers???

And what's with the idea that, if you haven't had a shag by Prom Night, that's the night you're gonna get some. I'm not just pointing the finger at Prom Night, by the way, because aside from all of its sequels, it's not the only movie to give us this idea. Big pressure in America at school, I would imagine.

Oh, and incidentally, I know Prom Night was released in 1980, but it was made the year before.

So we come to the original Prom Night, a movie born from the idea in the seventies that slasher flicks could make as much, if not more money than horror flicks. It's a good theory, by the by, and if it wasn't this movie wouldn't be made, because it is essentially crap. It's a kind of reworking of Carrie, with Halloween thrown in for good measure, and that's not just because Jamie Lee Curtis makes another slasher appearance, securing her reputation as the original scream queen. The wonderful thing about slasher flicks in the seventies was that the killer needs no motivation to actually perform the killing. They just do. We don't know why Michael Myers (in the original Halloween) has any desire to kill off his sister and then come back and kill randomly any old babysitter he can find on the street close to where he used to live. It bears absolutely no logical thought at all, and what's more, when it is finally given a reason in the second film, the reason is a little bollocks, truth to tell. By the eighties, someone believed that it was necessary to give the killers motivation, and so, resorting to the Halloween II theory, they were given the weakest of motivations, and generally the killers turned out to be lunatics before the dreaded thing that happened to them happened (Mrs Voorhees, I'm talking to you).

Prom Night fits in between the two camps somewhere without actually satisfying either. The killer has a motivation (and a surprisingly good one...although...more on that in a moment), but for the majority of the movie we are presented with a vague sort of mystery; who is the killer? The real killer is never alluded to, except given the pretitle sequence it's pretty obvious, but the false starts we are given include a convicted sex killer, and a retarded school janitor. Gotta love the seventies:

"He's probably the killer."

"Why?"

"Cause he's a mong."

"Oh, of course."
The big surprise being, of course, that it's neither.

The pretitle sequence shows a little girl being inadvertantly killed in stupid game with four slightly older kids. When it's the four slightly older kids who are targeted years later, it becomes pretty obvious that the killer is someone associated with the little girl's death, and given that the only person with her on that day was her brother...well... It's hardly likely, then, to be the sex offender who was horrifically mutilated on the day of the original death, or the retarded janitor who turned up years later.

For a slasher film there is surprisingly little slashing, and it takes an incredibly long time before people start to die. When they do die, it's not terribly scary deaths, and one in particular - the school bitch - is both long and boring, the latter being primarily because we have no sympathy for her. She was going to do a Carrie and disrupt the school prom, so poo to her with nobs on. There is also surprisingly little nudity, although I suppose to be fair that sort of thing was more of an eighties slasher check.

It's weird to think that there was a time when Leslie Neilsen made movies that weren't crap spoofs of other films. Sad to think that he sits around by the phone hoping for a call from David Zucker and Robert K Weiss to tell him that they want him to appear in another of their mindless and pretty stupid "MOVIE" movies. However, here is in Prom Night, actually trying to act and doing a relatively good job. However, again one of the strange things about this movie is the fact that Neilsen's character disappears towards the end of the film, presumably to suggest that he is potentially the killer, but once the real killer is unmasked Neilsen doesn't show up again. What happens to him?

And while we're on the subject of faults in the movie, let's get back to the killer and his motivation and actions. OK, so it's the little girl's brother. That's fine. He knew that four of his older sister's friends were responsible for the death of his twin sister, and he's going to get them back. Again, no problem, make's sense. But why wait til his older sister's Prom Night? Especially as he knows that she is going to be Prom Queen...does he hate her as well?

The good old police lieutenant who investigated the original murder discovers that the sex offender is back in town and for bizarre reasons, calls in the psychiatrist who was there at the time. The psychiatrist is as baffled as the rest of the audience but he gets to go to a crime scene and be disgusted by the murder there. So who was the girl that was killed? And why? And who by? Presumably not the main killer because he had only four targets, so are we supposed to believe the girl was killed by the sex offender? And if we are, why did he kill her in the same place as the original movie...or was that just coincidence?

Our good lieutenant turns up at the prom to make sure everything is fine. Err...why, exactly? He doesn't seem to have any reason to suspect that the sex offender will go to the school (indeed given that the original murder was a pre-adolescent girl and the prom is going to be filled with (very horny) adolescents, there is even less reason), so why is he there?

There have been very few remakes which were better than the original, and in this current state of remaking old horror movies, the success rate has been even lower than usual. Halloween, The Fog, House Of Wax, etc are all not as good as the original. Only The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was better than the original and that's because the original was so absolutely awful. However, the remake of Prom Night is actually a better film than the original because at least its plot is thought out. In this movie there is nothing to really keep the movie together aside from a few vague ideas. If you want to make a murder mystery, don't give us the motivation for the murder at the beginning and thereby make it obvious who the killer is - only Agatha Christie can really get away with showing us motivations at the beginning of a story, and that's because she's a master.

"C"