Prom Night (1980)

best movie i've ever seen.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

After failing to sell Halloween producer Irwin Yablans on his pitch for a movie, director Paul Lynch ran with the suggestion that he set his film during a holiday. A prom seemed like a pretty big event and it tied in well with a story writer Robert Guza had created that was all about childhood trauma coming back to haunt people. Once Jamie Lee Curtis signed to be in the film (Brady Bunch star Eve Plumb was also up for the role), all that was left was to make the movie. The film starts in 1974, when Wendy, Jude, Kelly and Nick are playing some weird game that seems like hide and seek but has them screaming, "The murderers are coming!" Maybe this is a game that kids play in Canada that teaches them that if they are not polite, they will be killed.Another girl, Robin, tries to join in but they start chasing her while yelling, "Kill! Kill!" They back her up toward a window which she falls out of to her doom. Instead of telling the police, the kids make a pact to never reveal the truth. After Leonard Mench, a sex offender, is caught in the area, he is blamed and jailed for the crime.Six years later, Robin's family celebrate the memorial of her death while her twin brother Alex and teenage sister Kim (Curtis) prepare for the prom. Their parents will also be at the prom, as Mr. Hammond is the school principal He's played by Leslie Nielsen, adding some star power before everyone would only know him as a serious actor. In fact, Airplane! would come out the same month as this movie.Kelly, Jude and Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, billed here as Eddie Benton, former wife of Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton) have all started getting obscene calls while Nick never answers the phone. They're all too worried about the prom, after all. Kim and Nick have been dating, Jude is going with goofball Slick Crane and Kelly is going with Drew (and he cannot wait for afterward, so they can have sex). Wendy used to date Nick and now, she is going to the prom with school bad boy Lou to embarrass her former friends.There are so many bad omens: the locker room mirror is cracked and a shard is missing; Leonard Mench has escaped; and Wendy, Jude and Kelly have discovered their yearbook photos stabbed with glass and placed in their lockers.Everyone still goes to the prom, where most of the drama is the triangle between Kim, Nick and Wendy. Disco was still somewhat around - it's never really died to be honest - when this was released. Dig that dancing goodness. Kelly and Drew are getting hot and heavy, but she refuses to go all the way. He leaves just in time for a giallo-style black-clad killer to slit her throat with a shard of the mirror. This same killer kills Jude and Slick after they share a joint and do some dancing - horizontal style - in his van.The sex offender has been caught, so the police stop scrutinizing the prom. Yep, three kids are dead under their noses and they just move on. Maybe this really is a giallo with a police force this bad at their jobs!Actually, that number is increasing, as the killer has an axe and he chases Wendy through the school, finally killing her just after she finds Kelly's corpse.Will Prom Night only be a slasher movie? Nope. It's going to have a Carrie scene as well, in addition to trying to be Saturday Night Fever! Kim and Nick are just about to be crowned king and queen when Lou and his gang tie up Nick and steal his crown. Lou gets ready backstage and the killer thinks he's Nick and well, his head rolls as the prom dancers run in abject terror.Kim frees her boyfriend and they run from the killer, who only attacks him. She grabs the axe and hits the masked man in the head before realizing who it is - her brother! Turns out he watched the kids kill their sister and has been waiting for revenge. She tries to stop the cops from shooting him, but the axe wound does him in and our heroine cries at the death of her brother.Wow. Who knew Canadians were so nihilistic? What a dark ending! Prom Night is a great slice of 80's fun that really has nothing in common with any of its sequels. But that's fine.

Six years after a young girl falls from a second floor window during a game called "The Killer is Coming" goes unbelievably wrong deaths begin happening at Hamilton High. Can you figure out who the killer is? Is it the super creepy custodian Sykes? Or the macho hornball with the unibrow Lou? Influenced by better horror films such as John Carpenter's Halloween. Certainly not a brutal horror movie, but does not seem to rise above most of the early 80s slashers. Which is too bad, because it does star Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. The film seems to stop just so you can watch Curtis do the "Disco Madness" on the dance floor which also horribly dates the film.

Pretty much your typical slasher film, this is one that was clichéd when it came out, and that was twenty years ago! Strange to see how films like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER are still using the same clichés even now, perhaps in twenty years time we'll be watching yet more blonde girls getting stalked through corridors by mad people...Still, as an example of its type, you could do a lot worse, and at least this presents a nice variety of clichés for us to enjoy, such as (deep breath): an escaped lunatic who kidnapped a nurse, cf. HALLOWEEN; some threatening phone calls, cf. BLACK Christmas; a weird cleaner as a main suspect; teenagers having sex and then getting killed, cf. just about any slasher film in existence! Although filmed on a low budget in Canada, the film succeeds by building up lots of red herrings and potential murderers in the cast, before bumping off half a dozen teens in the last third (although it's never explained why the fat guy in the van gets murdered when he had nothing to do with the original accident).The cast is mainly populated by nobodies, headlined by two stars; one up-and-coming girl, one middle-aged actor going through a lean patch in his career; that is, Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. Curtis was typed as a screaming heroine at this time, having appeared in HALLOWEEN, TERROR TRAIN, and THE FOG, to name but three, and here she performs perfectly adequately - apart from her embarrassing moves on the disco floor, which should have been consigned to cutting room history! It's difficult to watch Nielsen acting seriously - you expect him to start blowing things up accidentally or killing people in a comic fashion. He looks as if he doesn't want to be in this film, and he actually isn't...near the end, he suddenly disappears, never to be heard of again! Where did Nielsen go? One minute he's dancing, the next...people are looking for him but to no avail! Was this some secret hint that there was actually a conspiracy involved that night - and maybe Nielsen was a second murderer? Or maybe the budget ran low and the producers had to quickly ditch the most expensive star.For a slasher film, there are surprisingly few deaths, and most of the film's running time is padded out with endless conversions about the prom, some low lifes at the school fighting, drugs, sex, flashing, and girls putting make up on. Not to mention some obvious spooky scenes, like a window smashing suddenly and nobody being there. When the deaths do come, they're pretty simplistic and disappointing - some blood, throat slashings, nothing spectacular apart from a flying severed rubber head moment at the end of the film (pretty funny, but not exactly worth waiting for). The killer dresses entirely in black and wears a balaclava; personally he reminded me more of a ninja than a murderer.PROM NIGHT was a moderate success, spawning three unrelated sequels to date. There are a few effective stalk and slash moments in the film to enjoy, but not really much horror content. If you want the blueprints of the genre then it's probably a good idea to go with the two most popular slasher films which were responsible for all of these imitations: HALLOWEEN and Friday the 13th (themselves influenced by many other pictures, I know). Or even something gory like THE BURNING. This film falls about the middle of the scale of slasher film quality.

Starring then scream-queen (and current yogurt peddler) Jamie Lee Curtis and a pre-goofball Leslie Nielsen, "Prom Night" is one of the first in what would be many holiday-themed slasher flicks meant to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter's seminal "Halloween." The concept is at once simple and yet convoluted: a gaggle of tweens playing a rather odd and slightly sadistic "hide and go seek"-type game in an abandoned warehouse accidentally drive another child to their death. Because it's always a good idea in this sort of movie, the kids all vow never to speak a word of this to anyone. Fast- forward six years later, and the kids are now teenagers getting ready for their prom. Only somebody saw what happened that fateful day, and somebody is going to make them pay.Like its fellow brethren in "My Bloody Valentine," "Prom Night" is a low-budget production straight out of Canada. Director Paul Lynch works the meager concept into a rather sleek and efficient blaze of tension, bloodshed and disco. For better or worse, not much blood is shed until about 2/3 of the way through the movie. For at least the first half of the movie, we are treated to a lot of obscene phone calls, botched hook-ups in locker rooms and student-on-student pranks. There's also adequate time to set-up the somewhat stock characters, which is handled surprisingly well. Jamie Lee Curtis sticks out from the bunch as the innocent by-stander who, before becoming the de-facto survivor girl, gets to bust out in an obscenely long dance-number that almost gives a similar scene in "Airplane" a run for its money. The kill scenes are then, somewhat ironically, less memorable than all the stuff that comes before it, which is perhaps a testament to Lynch's unheralded skill or maybe just dumb luck.Either way, "Prom Night" is a great example of the '80s slasher. All the tropes you've come to expect -- revenge, premarital relations, bratty teens, recreational drug-use -- it's all here. Perhaps not as refined as its predecessors, "Prom Night" remains an entertaining and somewhat endearing experience all these years later. It even inspired a pair of silly yet throroughly entertaining sequels in "Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou" and "Prom Night III: The Last Kiss," along with a somewhat forgettable fourth film and an absolute piece of garbage remake. But if you're looking to hit the dance floor with a well- worn semi-classic of its era, you couldn't pick a better date than the original "Prom Night."