Film - Prom Night

Reviews, By Cheetah77, 15th April, 2008

I have always loved horror films and some of my absolute favorites, are the classics – Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street. Another one I’ve always loved is Prom Night, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis at the height of her “Scream Queen” notoriety and was the inspiration for this new version.

With this remake, they’ve gathered a whole heap of up and coming actors from TV shows and minor-hit movies and put them all together in this teen slasher flick resulting in a film that is good but not fantastic.

Donna Keppel is a teenage girl who becomes the object of her teacher’s obsession and when the family take an AVO out on his ass, what else can he do but slaughter the family? And even worse, poor Donna is hiding under the bed when he murders her mother before her very eyes, traumatising the poor lamb and sending her to therapy for years to come.

Now, three years later and it’s Donna’s senior prom and as she and her friends head out to build a night’s worth of memories, her favorite psycho teacher breaks out of his maximum security psychiatric hospital with only one thing in mind – finding the love of his life and starting their life together. Cue running, screaming and people dying left and right. It has suspense, it has some good production values but the one thing this movie obviously lacked was blood.

Now I totally get and respect that the director and writers wanted to take horror back to the pre- Saw and Hostel days where the thrill of the chase made the movies, instead of the gore. But in this case I think they rewound it too far and in most of the killing scenes, despite the numerous knife wounds and slashed throats left in his wake, there was just no blood. Seriously, some of the wounds looked like they’d been drawn on with lippy and with some of them, apart from a small trickle of blood from the corner of their lips you couldn’t even tell they were dead!

The characters also weren’t developed very well and I was surprised to read afterwards that the killer in the movie suffered from erotomania – the same condition that John Hinckley JR did with Jodie Foster. Interesting for sure, but I would not known had I not read the production notes. At only 88 mins long, they definitely could have spent some more time on the development so you cared when the characters finally met their demise.

Where they did well though, were the lead ups to the attacks – long camera shots where you want to tell the characters the killer is right behind them and lots of spooky dark corners where he could be hiding make for a couple of good ‘on the edge of your seat’ moments, but really lacked anything that could be described as scary.

This movie is entertaining, although not particularly scary, and apart from the bad make up and a rather uninspired bag of tricks from the killer, the film obviously had a bit of money put into the production. It has that sleek American look and the performances were fairly good throughout but could definitely have benefited from what you go to a horror film for – some darkness, a splash of gore and a whole lot more scary.

Prom Night is screening in theatres nationally through Sony Pictures.

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