Prom Night

source: Prom Night

I'm a big horror fan and I have always heard good things about Prom Night. That it's one of the classics and it is mentioned as one of the Jamie Lee Curtis scream queen classics. Ha ha please. I love Jamie Lee Curtis but never was she ever stalked in this film, thus not making her any kind of scream queen in this film. The points I liked in this movie: The creepy beginning, the old camera of this film (I love "old" horror movies, they have a more creepier atmosphere to them, I hate new cameras), the insanely creepy phone calls. The voice and whispers of the phone calls are just disturbing and also when he is killing victims he speaks with that voice. Then the rest of the movie tanked it...here's why. The movie dragged, there were no murders throughout the film. Everything was saved for the end, and when you reach the end you get hit with insane amounts of disco music. I personally do not like to see my murderers on screen. I prefer that they remain mysterious and anonymous till the very end. If your gonna show your killer please make him scary. This murderer was too skinny, dressed in black and just wearing a plain black mask with two holes in the eyes. Just stupid. I hated that. the decapitation was great but that final scene at the prom just reeked of Carrie. So everyone runs for the hills when they see the decapitated head, and the disco is STILL on and Jamie Lee, her boyfriend in this movie and the killer are fighting to disco music. That was that. The icing on this mess is the revelation that the killer is Jamie Lee's brother in the movie. In the flashback it just simply shows you that her brother witnessed the murder at the beginning sequence of the movie. Just lame. I was really expecting just a good solid horror movie but this just didn't do it for me. I gave this movie points for atmosphere and Jamie Lee Curtis. The rest of it is a bomb.

In truth, this is standard fair for a slasher. Only slightly above the level of many other slasher outings at the time. The killer only gets active during the last half hour of the movie, his identity easily guessed in the end (naturally revolving around a trauma from his past). The red herring is also very obvious. Lots of disco-dancing too in this one. At the time, I imagine it became mildly notorious because of one decapitation scene and gained a little recognition because of scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis starring in it. If you're a slasher fan, this is one you ought to see, even if it's not the most exciting watch you'll ever have.

Prom Night (directed by Paul Lynch) is a blatantly obvious rip off of Halloween. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Neilson, this is a typical slasher flick. The plot is fairly simple. Kids are playing some kind of chasey-killer game and accidentally kill a girl, they vow to never tell anyone. Six years later, those four people start getting scary phone calls. This movie had a good plot and could have been quite good, but it flops miserably. The killings don't start until about the one-hour mark which is much to long. And even when they start they are boring, unoriginal kills and they are mostly all off-screen. It is a very darkly lit movie, the last half-hour is a struggle to watch. I can only give this one and a half out of five. And thats only because Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Neilson are quite good and add a touch of class. Plus there is a lengthy chase scene, but the death is so lame I don't want to think about it. 1½/5

I gotta ask: how was Jamie Lee Curtis playing a high school student when she didn't even play a high school student in Halloween which came out two years prior? She looked 26 in this movie. Besides the adults playing teens I had a problem with the pacing of this movie. It took over an hour for the first kill! I wanted a scary movie and I got a mesh between your typical high school movie and Saturday Night Fever. It was highly annoying. Carrie is still the best prom night on film and this movie didn't even threaten that title.

DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME !!!LONG AND DRAWN OUT AND REALLY CORNY!!

A children's game goes horribly wrong and a child falls backwards from the first floor window of an abandoned building and dies. The remaining kids vow to never tell anyone about what happened. Its now 7 years on and the children in the gang are preparing for their prom night. They one by one start to receive menacing phone calls... I first saw this and expected to see a C grade slasher movie- one of the many mediocre movies made in the wake of Halloween. Boy, was I wrong! There's loads to love about this movie. Firstly, Jamie Lee Curtis is in it. Shes such a great actress that if shes on the cast list you can expect a stunning performance. Not only is she another kick arse Final Girl but we also get to see her disco moves. She also has a great exchange with the school bitch. This features some fantastically camp lines ('Its not who takes you to the prom. Its about who takes you home!') Jamie wins and has the last word in this verbal volley naturally. Another great feature of this film is that its actually very scary in the appropriate scenes. The killer ringing the teenagers one by one is a scene so threatening and jarring that its a sequence that is one of the scariest I've ever seen in any horror film. The simplicity of the scene (just a hand, a pencil, the list of names and the phone) is extremely effective and downright chilling. The film is also brilliantly chilling as it touches on the subject of paedophilia- a local sex offender is known to the police and they think he is the reason for the dead little girl. They hound him to such a degree that he crashes his car which bursts into flames. The police had no evidence that it was him but hey, hes so disfigured that he now can't commit anymore crimes and is placed in an asylum. And there are the actual kills and the scenes they are contained within which are directed with aplomb. These are very tense and unnerving. OK so this certainly isn't John Carpenter's Halloween but these scenes are still very good for a slasher movie. With Halloween being a major influence on this film there are also the atypical scenes of the female characters talking about, y'know, girls things- boys, hair, going to the prom etc etc. In fact in the book Blood Money it has been suggested that there were two types of advertising for this film- one that dwelt on the themes thought to be more appealing to a young female demographic (the disco music, the relationships and drama within the film) and one that dwelt on what was thought to appeal to the guys- namely the tension, suspense and kills. The film really does feel like a cross between Halloween, Carrie (the prom setting and the potential for carnage in this setting) and Saturday Night Fever- this film has disco stomps and a brilliant disco soundtrack that strangely provides a brilliant and sinister backdrop to the murders. Another great feature is that of the character of Slick. Just like the bawdy British comedies of the 1970's featured the most unlikely candidates for male eye-candy who somehow get the women, so does this film. Slick thinks hes a modern day babe magnet. I'll leave it up to you to agree or disagree with his self perception. This movie also has one of the most hilarious characters in horror history- look out for Mr Sykes played by Robert Silverman (he would also appear in Scanners and Jason X). Is he the killer or a far too obvious red herring? Prom Night is far too good than a Halloween rip-off slasher movie deserves to be. If Halloween is A+ then Prom Night is B+ If you're going to buy this film please look out for the Region 1 Blu ray from Synapse Films. The best transfer and bonus features I've ever seen for ANY Blu ray title. Stunning.

While other slasher flicks of the early eighties involved an identifiable villain slicing and dicing countless teens, "Prom Night"'s killer remained a mystery. But like all good horrors, there is a back story which sets up the reason for the killings, in this case, the motif is purely revenge. Four childhood friends who would later grow up to be the school's nice boy, diva, meek girl and geek girl, were all involved in the death of another young girl. That girl is the sister of Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Kim. And, as Prom Night approaches, someone is hunting down those four former friends. Jamie Lee Curtis is obviously the main reason to watch this film, but "Prom Night" is not without other good points. The idea of a murderer prowling around on Prom Night is great, the music is very cool, especially the song on the closing credits. Oh, and Jamie Lee Curtis sure can dance! The rest of the cast are pretty good. Leslie Nielson's involvement is minimal, though Antionette Bower is wasted. Pita Oliver, David Mucci, Casey Stevens and Anne-Marie Martin as the school diva are especially note worthy.

Arriving as it did during the early moments of the slasher film explosion of the 80's, Prom Night was undoubtedly much more impressive then than it is today. Stripped of historical significance, modern viewers will probably be disappointed to find this dated offering to be a relatively bloodless affair with a meager body count and limited thrills. Certainly, as a horror film, Prom Night doesn't have the tools to deliver any solid scares. But as a piece of time capsule kitsch, this movie is a very fun watch, even if the unintentional laughs outweigh the splatter elements. The set-up that ultimately launches the film's flimsy revenge plot is silly and awkwardly-staged, with a young girl basically walking out of a window to her death because a quartet of pint-sized kids her own age chant "kill" over and over again. This isn't a particularly terrifying scenario, so things get off to a clumsy start here. It doesn't help matters that the next hour of the film is almost completely devoid of anything suspenseful, scary, or even interesting, save for a series of phone calls to the film's eventual victims made by a killer who has obviously watched too many Dario Argento films. The rest of the runtime for the first two acts is padded with long-winded character development, needless subplots, and a few attempts at red herring planting that ultimately fall flat. There is also a lot of screen time devoted to extended Disco dancing sequences, which, predictably, have aged far worse than the rest of the film. Compounding the goofiness, when Jamie Lee Curtis and her date are horrified to see that their nemeses have arrived at the prom despite being expelled, Jamie Lee proclaims, "let's show them what we can do!", at which point she and her partner take to the dance floor and lay down some revenge boogie. Take that, jerks! The film shows us too much of the killer early on, so even though this is supposed to be a whodunnit, the list of likely suspects is quite short by the time any of the murders start happening. Even worse, the masked, black-clad maniac is the smallest-statured movie psycho of all time, and any menace derived from our mysterious prom-crasher is promptly done away with once we see them and Jamie Lee on the screen at the same time, at which point we can't help but notice that our scream queen star is both taller and more physically intimidating than the killer. When the slasher movie festivities finally get underway, the resulting murders are downright quaint in their subdued delivery, and only a couple of sequences have any real impact. The payoff is relatively meager considering the extended exposition, and while the killer's surprise reveal at the end makes narrative sense, it is a bit disconcerting to see that the skulking murderer we've been following throughout the film is actually the most benign character in the entire cast. A horror classic, this ain't. But the glaring markers of the era give the film nostalgic interest, and it's definitely fun to see Leslie Nielsen playing it straight, even if he abruptly disappears from the film without explanation before the climax. Jamie Lee is also a welcome presence, and although she seems to be phoning her scenes in most of the time, we have to concede that she gives the admittedly weak material about what it deserves. The ancillary elements of the film (including the very cool theatrical poster and its killer tag-line) are actually more interesting than the finished product, and only the most forgiving fans of the genre's boom during this period will gleam much enjoyment here. It's hard to recommend a film that has such limited appeal, but I must confess that I have a genuine fondness for Prom Night, and I still enjoy myself every time I watch it. 1978-1983 was truly a magical era when the horror genre exploded with low budget delights, and if you hold those golden years in your heart, your chances of forgiving this film's trespasses are much better.

Prom Night is one of those slasher films regarded as a classic, but it seems the only reason is because it featured Jamie Lee Curtis. Jamie Lee is an excellent actress but seems bored all the way through this film. Prom Night starts off promising with some great camera-work and what seems to be an attempt to build suspense, but soon loses steam. About 3 quarters into the film I was wondering if I was watching a slasher or a high school drama, because nothing really happens until the end. When things do start to happen, your senses are bombarded with cheesy disco music and some tedious stalk and slash scenes which are completely devoid of suspense. There is also no real gore apart from a severed head. The severed head scene is cool in a cheesy way, but that's about it. Watch this if you must, but please stop billing it as a classic. Halloween was a classic, and even Terror Train had something going for it, but Jamie Lee was really slumming it with Prom Night.