Prom Night (1980)
(In French, On TV, October 2020) I have rather vivid memories of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (ugh, that locker scene), and was curious about its prequel, but it turns out that the films barely have anything in common except the title and general high-school-horror theme. Most fundamentally, Prom Night is a boring psycho-with-a-knife slasher, rather than the supernatural horror that I find more interesting. Not only that, but Prom Night is influential: coming in a few months after Friday the 13th, starring Halloween scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, and affirming the tradition of special-day-themed slashers, it ended up providing a template for many other low-budget filmmakers trying to follow in those footsteps, littering the early 1980s with dozens if not hundreds of broadly similar (and awful) horror films. The highlights of those films are “the kills” rather than “the plot” and they continue to make critics grumpy to these days. Prom Night doesn’t fly all that high: the structure is familiar, the mystery is familiar, the prom night setting is not as original considering the example left by Carrie, and the characters couldn’t be blander if they tried. There are a few ways in which the film is more interesting as a historical marker than for itself. It’s one of the most successful Canadian movies of the era, for instance (my country has much to answer for in the role it played in the slasher explosion), was put together in Toronto by a young Toronto-area cast and crew, and it features Leslie Nielsen in what would be one of his last dramatic roles following the success of Airplane! But even by slasher standards, Prom Night is not all that interesting, and given that I don’t like the genre to begin with, there’s little else to say—fans of the genre will like, but it won’t convert anyone else.