Prom Night (

1980

)

I’m really not a very hard critic to please, to borrow a line from Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989), I like films “with tits and blood.” All a slasher movie needs to do to get an ok rating from me is show me some gratuitous nudity or a gruesome killing every 15 minutes or so. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. So when Prom Night was pushing into the one-hour mark with no more gore than an accidental death in the opening sequence and a cheeky bum flash about thirty minutes in I was understandably disappointed. This is a horror movie from the 1980s; where is the tawdry excess of gore, sex, and wanton cruelty that I was implicitly promised? I guess that while it was true that horror movies were a lot nastier in the 80s than they are today, it is equally true that there were a lot more boring half-baked productions looking to cash in on the trend. Still, Prom Night isn’t a total snooze-fest at least when the film finally picks up it provides a couple of halfway decent murders.

Six years ago, a gang of four 11-year-olds: Wendy, Jude, Kelly, and Nick accidentally kill 10-year-old Robin Hammond during a weirdly aggressive game of hide-and-seek. It’s an accident, but the four kids agree to cover it up lest they get in trouble with their parents. The set up is a little odd to me, what 11-year-old boy is gonna spend his free time hanging around a group of disparate girls? This is just leaving himself open for bullying and accusations of being “queer” especially given the film’s setting in the mid-1970s. If he were a couple of years older I’d be willing to believe he had a crush on one of them, but as it stands they are all way too young for any romantic feelings. Anyway, the four bike home after swearing each other to secrecy, and the camera lingers on Robin’s dead body for a moment, before a shadow looms over her. Just who is casting it is a mystery, though I found it almost trivially easy to guess.

Flash-forward to the present day and the four kids have all grow up. In a startling bit of realism, the four are no longer close friends having drifted apart at the onset of adolescence and gone in different directions. Jude is a nerdy girl who despite her unpopularity is desperate to find a boyfriend/fuck buddy and she’s not exactly picky about who. Kelly is a goody-two-shoes so devoted to her own virginity that she visibly winces whenever her boyfriend touches her (if I were a betting man I’d put good money on her coming out as a lesbian in college). Wendy is the popular mean girl type, so beloved and sought after by the men of her school that she can hardly believe it when Nick dumps her in favor of Kim Hammond, Robin Hammond’s older sister. Naturally, she’s not about to stand this implied insult and is hatching a plan to humiliate her rival. You might have noticed that all these girls are defined solely by their relationships with and desire for men. You could call this sexist, but really it’s something far worse than that: bad writing. These girls are not fleshed-out characters so much as delivery vectors for sex and violence. Now if the film would hurry up and deliver that sex and violence I might forgive it, which at least shows a clarity of purpose of the part of the filmmakers. Yet given the turgid nature of Prom Night’s first hour, this writing is all the worse.

None of these girls are the lead though; oddly enough this honor goes to Robin Hammond’s older sister, Kim Hammond. Since this is a Halloween (1978) rip-off, the filmmakers have gone the extra mile and actually cast the Jamie Lee Curtis, the lead actress from Halloween (1978) in the role. The only problem is the 22-year-old actress looks noticeably older than her costars, almost to an alarming degree. Indeed, if you’re not paying attention you might think that she’s a teacher with wildly inappropriate relationships with her students. Kim fairs a bit better than the rest of the female cast when it comes to characterization, she at least seems like a human being and Curtis is a capable enough actress to work with the little she’s given. Kim obviously misses her sister, but it’s equally obvious that the tragedy of her childhood does not define her. Her dates with Nick are convincingly authentic, even though Nick is wracked with guilt and desperate to confess to her about his role in her sister’s death. But I guess the promise of his childhood pinky swear is too much because despite having every intention of being honest with Kim, Nick can never manage to choke out a confession.

In the days leading up to the senior prom, Jude, Kelly, Wendy, and Nick receive threatening calls from an unseen figure. Prom Night insists that there be some mystery about the killer’s identity even though any viewer with a brain has figured it out by the ten-minute mark. We are treated to a veritable army of Red Herrings, from a Michael Myers knock off in the form of a disfigured, escaped mental patient, to a creepy janitor who spends his time drinking and leering at the teenage girls in his High School, to a juvenile delinquent with an obsessive and obnoxious fixation on Kim. Obviously, none of them are the killer because if any of them were the real killer the movie wouldn’t bother dropping hints about them. I had the real murderer identified before the flashback sequence was over, though I have spent a lot of time watching Scooby-Doo and Detective Conan, so maybe my instincts are a bit more honed than the average viewer’s.

Prom Night lives in the shadow of other, better films. It is not as scary as Halloween (1978), or as inventive as Black Christmas (1974) or as transgressive as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), or even as successful as Friday the 13th (1980). Yet more than any of these films, Prom Night falls short of the mark set by Carrie (1976). Indeed, Carrie (1976) provides a model by which Prom Night could have worked. Like Prom Night, Carrie (1976) is a story that is lacking in any action until one final grotesque sequence at a high school prom. Yet unlike Prom Night, Carrie (1976) is never boring. That’s because Carrie’s director, Brian de Palma, disguised his film as something else allowing the horror to stew on the back burner. Carrie (1976) plays like a slightly off-kilter nudie cutie for its first hour or so, enlivened at times with de Palma’s operatic style. Prom Night didn’t need to follow the exact same route as its predecessor, but there was a blueprint there for a quality or at least a mediocre film. Imagine a Prom Night that treats its first couple acts as a mystery, or a romance, or a coming of age story, and you start to get the picture. Hell, turning it into a soft-core porno would have made the first thirty minutes or so at least stimulating.

That said, Prom Night does have one unique selling point for guys of my age that grew up with The Naked Gun (1988), Spy Hard (1996), and Airplane! (1980): Leslie Nielsen in a serious role. He plays Robin Hammond’s father, who just so happens to be the principal of the high school that all the major characters attend. Now I know that Nielsen had a long career as a serious actor before becoming a clown in his later years. Indeed, he was cast in Airplane! (1980) for his deadpan delivery and seemingly serious demeanor. The truth is that Nielson’s acting technique never really changed from when he was playing a stoic 1950s hero in Forbidden Planet (1956). It just the passage of time slowly made this sort of style seem at first old-fashioned and eventually faintly hilarious. This is probably Nielsen’s last serious performance before Airplane! (1980) turned him into a comedy star making it seem faintly off. I just kept waiting for a bad pun or an absurd sight gag that never came.