Prom Night (1980)

Overrated

One of my all time favorites.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

After failing to sell Halloween producer Irwin Yablans on his pitch for a movie, director Paul Lynch ran with the suggestion that he set his film during a holiday. A prom seemed like a pretty big event and it tied in well with a story writer Robert Guza had created that was all about childhood trauma coming back to haunt people. Once Jamie Lee Curtis signed to be in the film (Brady Bunch star Eve Plumb was also up for the role), all that was left was to make the movie. The film starts in 1974, when Wendy, Jude, Kelly and Nick are playing some weird game that seems like hide and seek but has them screaming, "The murderers are coming!" Maybe this is a game that kids play in Canada that teaches them that if they are not polite, they will be killed.Another girl, Robin, tries to join in but they start chasing her while yelling, "Kill! Kill!" They back her up toward a window which she falls out of to her doom. Instead of telling the police, the kids make a pact to never reveal the truth. After Leonard Mench, a sex offender, is caught in the area, he is blamed and jailed for the crime.Six years later, Robin's family celebrate the memorial of her death while her twin brother Alex and teenage sister Kim (Curtis) prepare for the prom. Their parents will also be at the prom, as Mr. Hammond is the school principal He's played by Leslie Nielsen, adding some star power before everyone would only know him as a serious actor. In fact, Airplane! would come out the same month as this movie.Kelly, Jude and Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, billed here as Eddie Benton, former wife of Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton) have all started getting obscene calls while Nick never answers the phone. They're all too worried about the prom, after all. Kim and Nick have been dating, Jude is going with goofball Slick Crane and Kelly is going with Drew (and he cannot wait for afterward, so they can have sex). Wendy used to date Nick and now, she is going to the prom with school bad boy Lou to embarrass her former friends.There are so many bad omens: the locker room mirror is cracked and a shard is missing; Leonard Mench has escaped; and Wendy, Jude and Kelly have discovered their yearbook photos stabbed with glass and placed in their lockers.Everyone still goes to the prom, where most of the drama is the triangle between Kim, Nick and Wendy. Disco was still somewhat around - it's never really died to be honest - when this was released. Dig that dancing goodness. Kelly and Drew are getting hot and heavy, but she refuses to go all the way. He leaves just in time for a giallo-style black-clad killer to slit her throat with a shard of the mirror. This same killer kills Jude and Slick after they share a joint and do some dancing - horizontal style - in his van.The sex offender has been caught, so the police stop scrutinizing the prom. Yep, three kids are dead under their noses and they just move on. Maybe this really is a giallo with a police force this bad at their jobs!Actually, that number is increasing, as the killer has an axe and he chases Wendy through the school, finally killing her just after she finds Kelly's corpse.Will Prom Night only be a slasher movie? Nope. It's going to have a Carrie scene as well, in addition to trying to be Saturday Night Fever! Kim and Nick are just about to be crowned king and queen when Lou and his gang tie up Nick and steal his crown. Lou gets ready backstage and the killer thinks he's Nick and well, his head rolls as the prom dancers run in abject terror.Kim frees her boyfriend and they run from the killer, who only attacks him. She grabs the axe and hits the masked man in the head before realizing who it is - her brother! Turns out he watched the kids kill their sister and has been waiting for revenge. She tries to stop the cops from shooting him, but the axe wound does him in and our heroine cries at the death of her brother.Wow. Who knew Canadians were so nihilistic? What a dark ending! Prom Night is a great slice of 80's fun that really has nothing in common with any of its sequels. But that's fine.

When Nick, Wendy, Jude & Kelly were playing "Killers Are Coming" in the abandoned convent (which was such a dangerous structure for these kids to be running around in), and Robin interrupted their twisted variation of Hide & Go Seek...just what was the last man standing (in this case Nick) going to win/lose? Oddly enough, Nick was the catalyst for Robin's literal downfall that day; instead of warning her that Warpath Wendy would target her mercilessly and ushering her out of the building before the others caught him, he screamed "Here Killers, Here!" (which might have been one of their rules in case an outsider intervened), getting the attention of his three co-conspirators who literally scared Robin to death! Nick always seemed the guiltiest of the four, from the get-go when he started to mention that they needed to "get somebody, quick!" but outnumbered by the three girls, he agreed to the pact and still felt totally guilty six years later on the day of the prom during his romantic scenes with Kim.WHAT IF??? Nick ran home that day in 1974 and confessed everything to his father, Lt. McBride...who in turn was looking for a reason to capture local pedophile Leonard Murch, and decided to cover up his son's crime by blaming Murch, leading to his car explosion capture? McBride seemed to be a single father in the 1980 story, and I always thought he was a widower but there were no paintings or photos of Nick's missing mother in their apartment (but there was a framed photo by Nick's phone of him and another guy on a tennis court). I'm assuming that Mrs. McBride was devastated over her young son's malicious mayhem & subsequent coverup by her cop husband...so she flew the coop and left them both! (I know, like the mothers in Happy Birthday To Me and the original Scream did). Maybe Mrs. McBride was friends with Mrs. Hammond at the time and couldn't bear to see her friend suffer at the hands of her own family! And maybe she couldn't live with the fact that her husband framed an innocent man (at least at that time) of Robin's murder. Maybe Lt. McBride and Wendy's obviously wealthy unseen no-show father conspired to keep their children's crime a secret? I know all of this couldn't play out in the 90min movie (with the post-production tacked-on Leonard Murch scenes still in tact!).Speaking of Nick & Kim, after all that time...their Senior year romance seemed to be new since Wendy's jilted lover routine didn't come off as desperate like they've been fighting over him since they were 12!I just wonder about these things years later!

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.

This is probably the worst horror film I've ever seen. I love Jamie Lee Curtis but this was a mistake in her career.... it's not that she's bad in the film but she's not the star, and everything else in the movie is bad. The acting is extremely over the top cheesy and cliché, the story is pretty weak... they had a chance to make a longer more substantive horror movie, but they resorted to boring cliché material that leaves you feeling like this was a huge missed opportunity. The story centers around 4 kids who were involved in the accidental death of a little girl (Jamie's sister in the film), and now six years later a killer who knows their secret is coming after them... sound kinda familiar? (I know what you did last summer). Watch that one instead of this one if that kind of plot summary sounds interesting to you because it's far better than this disaster. The killing scenes aren't suspenseful or scary, hell none of the scenes in this movie are scary.... just boring and more boring. This is a flop! I recommend you keep looking if you run across this one. 1/10.