Prom Night

WRITER'S NOTE: The following review contains spoilers. You have been warned.

I think it's safe to say that there have been very few thrillers as senseless and tactless as Prom Night. Of course, I am using the word thriller in the loosest sense of the word, as no one except the advertising people at Screen Gems and Sony Entertainment could consider anything that happens during the course of the film as thrilling. The movie certainly doesn't want to thrill, or excite, or spark the young minds that are already flocking to the movie opening weekend (my screening was nearly packed), seeking cheap scares and easy entertainment. All it wants to do is steal the money and time of the youth market, and make them depressed that they even considered going to see it in the first place.

The film was originally billed as a remake of the early 80s slasher that featured at the time reigning Scream Queen, Jamie Lee Curtis. However the only thing the 2008 Prom Night has with the original is that it's set at a high school prom, and there's a killer lurking about in the shadows. The opening credits to this movie don't even mention the original, so I think it's safe to say that the filmmakers have dropped the "remake" angle, and are just selling it on its own. It's just as well, as the fewer people associated with the movie, the better. This is the kind of film where the entire cast and crew would have been better off going under assumed names. Many of the faces are new to me, or are making their break to the big screen after working on TV shows. Maybe they'll go on to better things and laugh about this experience. More likely, once this stinker is viewed, it will probably kill more than a few budding careers, or at the very least slow them down.

The plot plays out pretty much as expected. Head heroine Donna (Brittany Snow, who was much livelier in last summer's Hairspray than she is here) saw her entire family get slaughtered in bloodless PG-13 fashion three years ago when an obsessed teacher at her school broke into her house, looking for her. Donna survived by hiding under a bed, and has since been living with her Aunt and Uncle. We see the killer (played by Johnathon Schaech) in flashbacks, and he looks less like someone who would be shaping young minds, and more like a crazed homeless person crossed with one of the Geico Cavemen. You'd just have to take one look at him to know he was hiding a knife somewhere on his body. The teacher was sent away, and Donna has been trying to go on with her life. Around the time of Donna's Senior Prom, the guy has managed to escape from prison, and is now hiding out at the same luxury hotel where the Prom is being held. Donna and her friends are completely oblivious to the fact that the hotel staff and eventually the student body are being murdered one by one by this killer who lurks in the shadows, and holds that ever popular ability that all slasher villains hold to pop up in the darndest of places, even though it should seemingly be impossible for the villain's presence to not be known. Eventually Donna's Aunt and Uncle are informed by police that the man who murdered her entire family is on the loose and possibly close by, but they choose not to bring Donna home early, because (and I quote) "they don't want to scare her".

Once the set up of Donna's past with the killer is established, Prom Night basically revolves around the same scenes over and over again. We either see the kids partying in the hotel ballroom, or we see the killer lurking in the shadows and killing a random hotel employee or one of Donna's friends who have wandered from the safety of the Prom. The murder scenes are extremely anti-climactic, and it's not just because they have been edited to hell in order to avoid an R-rating. The scenes basically exist entirely of one of Donna's friends wandering slowly around in the dark, saying someone's name over and over again. Sometimes they say a variety of names, but no matter what, it gets to the point that the audience starts shouting out names back at the screen every time someone's about to get killed. There's a "false scare", where a character will cautiously open a closet door or pull back a shower curtain, only to see no one is there. That's when the killer pops up literally out of nowhere (since he should have been in plain sight of the victim, considering where he is standing when he "surprises" them) and kills them. It's not just the fact that we can predict every single kill before the movie, it's the fact that no energy or tension is on display. Director Nelson McCormick (whose previous experience has been strictly with television) doesn't know how to stage a successful scare, and has an annoying habit of keeping the camera moving and spinning around the actors, even when there is no reason to.

The third act of the film moves the action from the Prom to Donna's house, where even though there is seemingly constant police presence right outside, the killer can still freely move about, cutting off all phone communication and breaking into the house without any of the cops and detectives noticing. It's here where the movie goes from being pathetic and uninspired to just plain unintentionally hilarious. This is a movie that expects us to believe that Donna can be attacked by the killer and screaming at the top of her lungs, yet her Aunt and Uncle are too engrossed with their conversation with the head police detective to even hear her at first. Of course, the detective does eventually figure out that the sound of Donna screaming from the next room means that she's in trouble, and that's when the movie decides to rip off the climax of the original Halloween almost frame-for-frame, with the detective in place of Dr. Loomis. Fortunately, the movie does not recreate the last shot of Halloween, which hinted that the killer was still alive and that a sequel was on the way. The only smart thing it does is wrap everything up at the end, and not leave things open for continuation.

If you feel I've spoiled the movie, consider yourself lucky. You're one less person who will have to pay to see Prom Night. Don't worry, though. The film offers very few surprises, and very few reasons for anyone to watch it. It's a moldy, dusty old slasher movie that knows it's supposed to play by the expected rules, but doesn't know how to even play the game in the first place. When my screening was done, I saw a line of teens lined up behind a rope for the next show. I could see that they were happy, excited, and ready to be scared. All I could do was think how sad it was that they wouldn't even have their most basic desires fulfilled, and would walk out 90 minutes later feeling ripped off and probably a little bit angrier.

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