Prom Night
Prom Night -- despite its dance set pieces and boogying soundtrack -- is the saddest of slasher movies.
Following swiftly on the heels of Halloween, Prom Nigh is unique among slasher movies by combining disjointed elements into an odd whole that is, strangely enough, more entertaining than it might seem. It suffers in the present day through an involuntary association by its title with many later slasher movies -- its own remake especially -- that are more like any given episode of Dawson's Creek with an interloping slasher than an actual horror movie.
Oh Lord -- you might think.
A slasher movie set at prom with -- fucking disco?
Yes, and believe it or not, Prom Night is pretty good.
The movie revolves around a killer murdering a small group of kids during prom; a killer whose motives are obscured through the presence of several red herrings, who themselves dispatched from the plot in a one-to-one ratio with each murder. (For all the incessant bitching done about how slasher movies are too formulaic, rarely is it said how formally perfect some of them are.)
Prom Night opens with a group on ten year olds -- Nick, Wendy, Jude, and Kelly -- who accidently kill another girl named Robin while playing a game in an abandoned convent. This of course is a Very Bad Thing, so -- at the behest of Wendy, the Bitch of the group -- they agree to abscond from the convent and never mention the murder ever again. This might sound like so much you've seen before, but in 1980 this was a new development in the slasher genre, and indeed one that is rarely used -- implicating the victims in a previous crime. Not a prank gone wrong that disfigures the future killer, but a full-blown murder. This opening tragedy is perhaps played out a little too good, in no small part because of Tammy Bourne's great performance, and is therefore a bit more disturbing than it should be. But more about that at the proper time.
Much later, the ten-year-olds playing ten-year-olds have grown up into twenty-somethings playing teens. There are also Robin's siblings, her older sister -- Jamie Lee Curtis -- and twin brother Alex.
The great bulk of the rest of the movie focuses on a love triangle between Wendy, Nick, and Jamie Lee Curtis. It's interesting and entertaining almost soley because Wendy -- well played by the sexy and underappreciated Anne-Marie Martin -- is such a relentless, single-minded bitch that she's utterly captivating anytime she's on screen. Nick is made a sympathetic enoughby being the only one of the four murderers who feels badly about the murder and almost tells Curtis about it. The others, as far as can be told, have apparently forgotten it.
The other murderers have their own subplots that more or less attempt to make them engaging and more or less succeed. Prom Night is well aware that, given the opening, it needs to make these characters sympathetic if we're going to spend ninety minutes with them and care if they die. It does with Jude by giving her the comic-relief boyfriend -- Slick -- a goofy pothead who drives a Black Phone van and is apparently quite something in the sack. It tries to make Kelly sympathetic by giving her a Moral Dliema: she isn't quite ready to lose her virginity but her boyfriend is impatient and might break up with her if she doesn't, and so she must battle her love for him and her own integrity. That's pretty heavy stuff for a disco slasher movie, and Prom Night is smart enough not to dwell on it too long.
There is a police procedural plot in which a detective follows the trail of a sex pervert who was previously burned up in a car wreck and has now escaped from a mental home. This is one of Prom Night's few flaws: the police just conclude, with no evidence and little reasoning, that the sex pervert killed Robin, and then doggedly pursue him as a red herring throughout their subplot so tenaciously that it makes them tangential to the story. There's Prom Night, which is damn good slasher movie, and Dirty Harry 4 that keeps intruding occasionally to disrupt the weed-smoking and fucking and dancing and murders.
That's pretty much the meat of Prom Night: dance scenes intercut with sex and death. Kelly decides not to sleep with her boyfriend, who promptly leaves her for someone who will fuck him, and Kelly is left crying in the locker room. It's a depressing scene, vastly more so than you would expect, and gives perhaps too much weight to Kelly's death than a slasher movie can properly get away with.
Prom Night also borrows heavily from Carrie, smuggling in a revenge plot with Wendy, whom Nick won't date anymore, and Lou -- the Dollar Store John Travolta. The movie, however, spends so much time on dancing and death that it doesn't have time to elaborate on what exactly Wendy and Lou's Master Plan is. It seems, I suppose, to be knocking out Nick and walking out with his prom king hat on.
Well, Lou is a dumbass.
Other than Kelly's depressing death and really good car explosion that removes Slick from this mortal coil, Prom Night is pretty standard -- right up until the very end. After killing Wendy -- who in my opinion deserved better, easily being the most interesting character -- the killer tries to take down Nick and is stopped by Curtis. (This movie, by way, nearly exclusively focuses on females and female issues, so remember than the next time some cynical corporate stooge like Elisabeth Banks tries to sell her female-centered movie as innovative.) Curtis recognizes the killer as her brother Alex, and he staggers out of the auditorium to his death.
Alex's death is one masterful thing. I believe and have no reason to think otherwise that this was intentional: Prom Night is so fun and nostalgic and, even if you don't particularly like disco, musically charming that you forget almost entirely about the opening murder, or at least have grown to like the murderers enough for the initial tragic tone to have completely worn off. Then, in the literal last five or so minutes, it hits you with a sad flashback and Michal Tough (Alex) and Curits give a tear-jerking performance as Alex reveals who really killed Robin. Prom Night might have the most sympathetic killer in any horror movie ever, because what could be more understandable than avenging the death of your little sister, especially when her murderers not only seem to feel no guilt but have utterly forgotten it in place a dancing, booze, and weed?
Alex dies and the movie closes in a wide shot of the convent with a sad song.
So yeah.
Fuck you.
That's Prom Night's last word.
And it's a damn good ending, one of those rare ones that leave you pondering the story as the credits run.
I'm not altogether sure why slasher movies got such a bad rap in early 80s, because Prom Night is a well done, emotionally provocative movie that doesn't rely on cheap twists and gory kills. Say whatever negative thing you want, Prom Night ain't gory. I guess it just goes to show that people were as tasteless and stupid and eager to jump on any hate wagon then as they are now.
Anyhow.
Prom Night is great.
Check it out.
Prom Night -- despite its dance set pieces and boogying soundtrack -- is the saddest of slasher movies.
Following swiftly on the heels of Halloween, Prom Nigh is unique among slasher movies by combining disjointed elements into an odd whole that is, strangely enough, more entertaining than it might seem. It suffers in the present day through an involuntary association by its title with many later slasher movies -- its own remake especially -- that are more like any given episode of Dawson's Creek with an interloping slasher than an actual horror movie.
Oh Lord -- you might think.
A slasher movie set at prom with -- fucking disco?
Yes, and believe it or not, Prom Night is pretty good.
The movie revolves around a killer murdering a small group of kids during prom; a killer whose motives are obscured through the presence of several red herrings, who themselves dispatched from the plot in a one-to-one ratio with each murder. (For all the incessant bitching done about how slasher movies are too formulaic, rarely is it said how formally perfect some of them are.)
Prom Night opens with a group on ten year olds -- Nick, Wendy, Jude, and Kelly -- who accidently kill another girl named Robin while playing a game in an abandoned convent. This of course is a Very Bad Thing, so -- at the behest of Wendy, the Bitch of the group -- they agree to abscond from the convent and never mention the murder ever again. This might sound like so much you've seen before, but in 1980 this was a new development in the slasher genre, and indeed one that is rarely used -- implicating the victims in a previous crime. Not a prank gone wrong that disfigures the future killer, but a full-blown murder. This opening tragedy is perhaps played out a little too good, in no small part because of Tammy Bourne's great performance, and is therefore a bit more disturbing than it should be. But more about that at the proper time.
Much later, the ten-year-olds playing ten-year-olds have grown up into twenty-somethings playing teens. There are also Robin's siblings, her older sister -- Jamie Lee Curtis -- and twin brother Alex.
The great bulk of the rest of the movie focuses on a love triangle between Wendy, Nick, and Jamie Lee Curtis. It's interesting and entertaining almost soley because Wendy -- well played by the sexy and underappreciated Anne-Marie Martin -- is such a relentless, single-minded bitch that she's utterly captivating anytime she's on screen. Nick is made a sympathetic enoughby being the only one of the four murderers who feels badly about the murder and almost tells Curtis about it. The others, as far as can be told, have apparently forgotten it.
The other murderers have their own subplots that more or less attempt to make them engaging and more or less succeed. Prom Night is well aware that, given the opening, it needs to make these characters sympathetic if we're going to spend ninety minutes with them and care if they die. It does with Jude by giving her the comic-relief boyfriend -- Slick -- a goofy pothead who drives a Black Phone van and is apparently quite something in the sack. It tries to make Kelly sympathetic by giving her a Moral Dliema: she isn't quite ready to lose her virginity but her boyfriend is impatient and might break up with her if she doesn't, and so she must battle her love for him and her own integrity. That's pretty heavy stuff for a disco slasher movie, and Prom Night is smart enough not to dwell on it too long.
There is a police procedural plot in which a detective follows the trail of a sex pervert who was previously burned up in a car wreck and has now escaped from a mental home. This is one of Prom Night's few flaws: the police just conclude, with no evidence and little reasoning, that the sex pervert killed Robin, and then doggedly pursue him as a red herring throughout their subplot so tenaciously that it makes them tangential to the story. There's Prom Night, which is damn good slasher movie, and Dirty Harry 4 that keeps intruding occasionally to disrupt the weed-smoking and fucking and dancing and murders.
That's pretty much the meat of Prom Night: dance scenes intercut with sex and death. Kelly decides not to sleep with her boyfriend, who promptly leaves her for someone who will fuck him, and Kelly is left crying in the locker room. It's a depressing scene, vastly more so than you would expect, and gives perhaps too much weight to Kelly's death than a slasher movie can properly get away with.
Prom Night also borrows heavily from Carrie, smuggling in a revenge plot with Wendy, whom Nick won't date anymore, and Lou -- the Dollar Store John Travolta. The movie, however, spends so much time on dancing and death that it doesn't have time to elaborate on what exactly Wendy and Lou's Master Plan is. It seems, I suppose, to be knocking out Nick and walking out with his prom king hat on.
Well, Lou is a dumbass.
Other than Kelly's depressing death and really good car explosion that removes Slick from this mortal coil, Prom Night is pretty standard -- right up until the very end. After killing Wendy -- who in my opinion deserved better, easily being the most interesting character -- the killer tries to take down Nick and is stopped by Curtis. (This movie, by way, nearly exclusively focuses on females and female issues, so remember than the next time some cynical corporate stooge like Elisabeth Banks tries to sell her female-centered movie as innovative.) Curtis recognizes the killer as her brother Alex, and he staggers out of the auditorium to his death.
Alex's death is one masterful thing. I believe and have no reason to think otherwise that this was intentional: Prom Night is so fun and nostalgic and, even if you don't particularly like disco, musically charming that you forget almost entirely about the opening murder, or at least have grown to like the murderers enough for the initial tragic tone to have completely worn off. Then, in the literal last five or so minutes, it hits you with a sad flashback and Michal Tough (Alex) and Curits give a tear-jerking performance as Alex reveals who really killed Robin. Prom Night might have the most sympathetic killer in any horror movie ever, because what could be more understandable than avenging the death of your little sister, especially when her murderers not only seem to feel no guilt but have utterly forgotten it in place a dancing, booze, and weed?
Alex dies and the movie closes in a wide shot of the convent with a sad song.
So yeah.
Fuck you.
That's Prom Night's last word.
And it's a damn good ending, one of those rare ones that leave you pondering the story as the credits run.
I'm not altogether sure why slasher movies got such a bad rap in early 80s, because Prom Night is a well done, emotionally provocative movie that doesn't rely on cheap twists and gory kills. Say whatever negative thing you want, Prom Night ain't gory. I guess it just goes to show that people were as tasteless and stupid and eager to jump on any hate wagon then as they are now.
Anyhow.
Prom Night is great.
Check it out.