Prom Night

Unusually incompetent from start to finish, Prom Night possesses few attributes designed to capture (and subsequently hold) one’s interest – with the egregiously deliberate pace and complete lack of compelling characters certainly ranking as the film’s most overt deficiencies. The movie opens with a baffling scene involving several little kids who essentially scare one of their own to death, with the remainder of the proceedings revolving around the build-up to a high-school prom – where, as expected, a mysterious figure starts knocking off attractive teens. There’s little doubt that Prom Night‘s status as a particularly blatant rip-off of Halloween is cemented early on, as screenwriter William Gray, in addition to employing virtually the same structure as John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 slasher, has peppered the film with a relentless stream of elements that hearken back to its enormously superior predecessor (including, of course, the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis within the supporting cast). Even if one were willing to overlook such similarities, however, Prom Night would still come off as an entirely underwhelming horror effort – as the interminable running time has been padded out with a variety of utterly superfluous scenes and subplots (eg a dance sequence that goes on and on and on). And though it’s bad enough that the first kill doesn’t come until the one-hour mark, Prom Night‘s downfall is ultimately secured by its unconscionable lack of gore (ie without bloody instances of mayhem, what’s the point?)

* out of ****