Prom Night (1980)

zero stars
A character in Scream says that if someone watched Prom Night, that person would know the rules of the slasher film genre and survive if such a scenario ever came up. As I watched Prom Night, I couldn't find any rules established anywhere in its runtime, so its educational value is in question. Its entertainment value is also in question, since there is not a single decent acting job to be found, nor is there any reasonable attempt by the director to generate any kind of tension, nor is there any interesting dialogue written to get the plot going. In short, this is a wasteful 87 minutes of stunningly awful story exposition.

As the movie opens, a group of kids is playing a sadistic form of hide and seek. Four of the kids corner the last girl, and frighten her so much that she backs herself onto a ledge and falls to her death. They vow never to tell anyone about what happened, for fear that they would be blamed (as if to say that they weren't at fault in the first place). Six years later, they are seniors in high school and getting ready for the prom. Nick (Casey Stevens), Wendy (Eddie Benton), Jude (Joy Thompson) and Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens) have pretty much forgotten about that day, but that all changes when they start receiving prank calls by a crazed stalker who prefers to whisper his threats with a cheesy accent.

The filmmakers try to engage our suspicion by including an escaped convict who was accused of killing the girl. The convict escapes from jail on the day of the prom, and the local police is on alert in order to capture him. The plot basically lays down the bread crumbs for us to follow, so that we can be coerced into thinking that this guy is the prank caller. Anyone who can see this will know that the plot will inevitably introduce the real killer, making the whole escaped-convict subplot a worthless red herring.

The showdown in the high school is ineptly staged and completely lacking in any kind of suspense. The killer, wearing black clothes and a black ski mask, at first goes after his victims with a shard of glass that he took from a busted mirror, apparently before realizing that such a weapon might hurt his hand; he later switches to the more reliable axe. An unexpected beheading is the most interesting effect in the movie following the scene with the van that shoots flames out of its back doors after falling hood-first over a cliff.

The movie offers embarrassing appearances by Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis, playing father and daughter. Prom Night is one of five horror movies that Curtis made during her Scream Queen days. It's a forgettable entry on her résumé, being that it's such an early project and made before she was really established, so the movie actually makes an uglier impression on Leslie Nielsen's filmography. He had made many more movies, and by the time Prom Night came along in his career, he would have been far above something like this. A few years later, in 1983, he starred in Creepshow, a better horror film that aimed higher and achieved more success with its talented crew. Talent is something that was lacking behind the scenes of Prom Night.

© 2004 Silver Screen Reviews