PROM NIGHT (1980)

Image from www.movieposter.com



REVIEW / MOVIE\ SENIOR PROM, SOPHOMORIC PLOT'

Boston Globe - August 18, 1980

Author: Michael Blowen Globe Correspondent

A film directed by Paul Lynch. Screenplay by William Gray. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielson, Antoinette Bower and a host of unknowns. At the Sack Saxon and suburbs. Rated R.

My senior prom was a horror show. Everyone dressed in rented formal wear and danced to the music of the Eddie Corcoran Trio. We were kids dressed up like mini-adults indulging in a fantasy conceived and executed by our parents and the school administrators. It wasn't much fun.

Neither is "Prom Night," a low-budget exploitation film, imported from Canada, to fill this summer's quota of quickie horror movies.

The plot is predictably sophomoric. A killer, who six years earlier observed four children forcing a little girl out of the window of a deserted schoolhouse to her death, is stalking the hallways of Alexander Hamilton High School. He seeks revenge.

The concept of a maniac returning to avenge injustice is certainly not new to the genre. " Halloween ," John Carpenter's bargain basement horror film, is only the most recent example. But "Prom Night" isn't half as frightening as Carpenter's movie.

Except for the pre-credit sequence, when the four children tease the little girl by chanting, "The Killer's Coming, The Killer's Coming," as the camera darts around the dark, deserted hallways, there is little else that's terrifying. And when people aren't frightened at horror movies, when the situations are as ridiculous as those presented in this slice and dice exploiter, people begin to laugh. And "Prom Night" is laughable.

The entire cast must have flunked algebra at least 10 times. They all look old enough to be dancing the bop and, when Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens, the King and Queen of the prom, start to disco, it's uproarious. Their awkwardness is symptomatic of the film's misdirected style.

Director Paul Lynch could have made a witty satire on the nature of proms or a frightening excursion into the terror of locker-lined hallways after dark. But, with the exception of one obvious cut from a bloody victim to the Hawaiian punch bowl, he's humorless and inadequate.

"Prom Night" certainly doesn't give you any moments to remember.