Prom Night is much like actual prom night: awkwardly fitting tuxedos, drunkenness and unfulfilling sex abound, and by the end of it, your date is hiding under the bed and crying
The original Prom Night was no gem, riding on Jamie Lee Curtis’s (then) post-Halloween popularity (probably less on co-star Leslie Nielsen, unless he was cool back then). It had all the ingredients of a cheap slasher film: faceless killer, cheap gore and brain-dead teens.
This latest Prom Night (it shares its name alone with the original — there’s nothing remotely similar about the two films) is the worst big budget remake yet. The film opens with young Donna (Brittany Snow), who comes home one night to find that her entire family has been murdered by a stalker, Richard (Johnathon Schaech). He thinks that killing her family would let them be “alone” together, which I guess is true.
Jump ahead a couple of years to the eponymous prom night held at a ridiculously swanky hotel. Donna and her friends get dolled up and head to the party, unaware that Richard has escaped from the nuthouse.
Richard’s either the most brilliant killer of all time, or the cops are fantastically stupid, as he manages to escape an entire police force and SWAT team after dispatching all of Donna’s friends, some assorted hotel folks and all of the cops guarding Donna’s house. With a fucking hunting knife! What?
So you get lots of dialogue like, “You’ll remember this night forever,” and characters sneaking off to a hotel room (where the killer is hiding) to fuck. This despite the fact that there are three couples sharing one hotel room, and they never seem to come out after they’ve gone in.
You would think that having all of your family and friends murdered would leave you an emotionally shattered human being, but Donna seems relatively OK, taking a few perfunctory moments to cry over her dead boyfriend’s body, which she was spooning with moments earlier. Yep, she’s dumb as hell, and so is everyone else in the movie. But it’s Schaech’s puerile and lazy performance that’s truly the worst, as he mopes around the hotel, muttering under his breath and barely mustering enough energy to haphazardly stab people.
Normally, the fun with bad horror flicks is the in-jokes, gore and unintentional hilarity. There’s nothing enjoyable about this film – it’s just sad. No intelligence, no point and worse, no gore. In the annals of the dead teenage movie, Prom Night is among the worst of all time.
