Prom Night(2008)
The following review may contain Spoilers! Be warned! That’s how we roll here!
“April is the cruelest month”…or so the saying goes. Well, for movie geeks, that may be truer than for anyone else. January through April is the doldrums of the film release calendar, with few exceptions. It’s pretty much the dumping ground for movies that weren’t good enough to get released in the higher profile Holiday frame of the previous year. April is the worst though, because you are just a few short weeks away from May, when all the big genre blockbusters that you’re actually looking forward to come out. But it’s possible that the month of April has hit a new low with the release of the latest in what seems like a never ending string of horror remakes: Prom Night.
Now, I’m not totally against remakes. Some of the greatest horror flicks of all time are remakes; like John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly. But let’s face it; those are the exceptions to the rule. Most of the time we are stuck with uninspired garbage made for no other reason than to cash in on name recognition. And in the last few years, it’s only gotten worse.
In a way though, a movie like Prom Night is the best example of a movie that should be remade, because frankly, the original isn’t very good. In theory, you have nowhere to go but up. I can’t say I really remember the original movie all that much, but I do remember the experience: a friend and I rented the movie and watched it instead of going to our actual senior prom, and probably fantasized that the unfortunate victims in it were some of our own classmates that we didn’t like. The plot had something to do with a bunch of kids bullying some little girl till she dies accidentally, and years later her brother getting revenge by killing them all off on the night of senior prom. This was made during Jamie Lee Curtis’ post Halloween career plan of starring in shittier knock-offs of the role that made her famous (this same career tactic would later make a star out of Julia Roberts). Other than the very basic premise of kids getting knocked off at the prom, the 1980 and 2008 versions of Prom Night only share the name in common.
Prom Night 2008 is an excruciating exercise in unoriginality. A true oxymoron, this may be the first PG-13 Slasher movie ever. The original film at LEAST had a mildly engaging “who’s really the killer?” plot and, like any exploitation movie worth it’s name, it had plenty of over the top blood and gore. This new version didn’t deliver either of the two.
We are introduced to Donna (Brittany Snow, who looks a lot like a pre-coke whore Tara Reid), a high school senior who has her entire family killed by an obsessed former teacher who was previously stalking her. Unlike the horror films of yore, Prom Night 2008 removes the masked killer and replaces him with something that scares young girls today far, far more in our To Catch A Predator world: The Creepy Older Guy. Cut to three years later, our blonde and personality-less heroine and her equally pretty and vapid friends and boyfriend are getting ready to celebrate their senior prom in style. Of course, crazy stalker killer guy escapes from the loony bin just in time to ruin everyone’s night of underage drinking and sex.
The rest of the movie is essentially oodles of horrible and pointless dialogue from our teen victims. This all happens while our killer patiently waits in their hotel room for each of the kids to come back up for one stupid reason or another. He then disgraces the genre itself by disposing of them in the most boring and bloodless way possible. He even offs a housekeeper and a hotel employee for no other reason than to add to the body count. The killings in this movie were so tame they could have easily been in some Lifetime TV movie starring a side character from One Tree Hill and it would have been exactly the same.
As bad as this movie is, I won’t lie and say it wasn’t sort of fun to watch at certain points – in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 way, of course. This enjoyment was only magnified by the fact that I watched the movie in an urban theater with a gaggle of teenagers whom apparently had never seen a horror flick in their entire lives – judging by the screams that came after every clichéd scare moment that could have possibly been squeeze into this poorly written script. The audience’s clueless reactions were far more entertaining than the actual movie.
I think the fact that this movie actually managed to scare ANYONE was actually far more frightening than anything that was onscreen. Prom Night is 90 minutes that feels more like 3 hours, so do yourself a favor and skip it and wait along with the rest of us for American horror to actually get good again. It’s bound to happen eventually.
