Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

Am I Missing Something?

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2: Directed by Bruce Pittman and written by Ron Oliver. The original Prom Night was a classic slasher that was part of the original run of horror films where Jaime Lee Curtis was front and center. Her main scream queen phase. It was a tough sit for me. It had an odd hazy look about it almost like they rubbed bacon grease on the camera lens. It was honestly very odd. But the sequel is a completely different animal all together. This movie comes after the success of the Elm Street movies. They make the villain of this movie, Mary Lou into a supernatural villain much in the vein of Freddy Krueger in Freddy's Revenge. Mary Lou after jilting her date for a cooler kid to get busy with. He gets revenge on her by setting her on fire and killing her. 30 years later the demonic version of Mary Lou is trying to find her way back to the world through a young religious girl. The one thing right off the bat to mention is this is definitely not a scary movie. I'm not entirely sure it's even trying to be scary. It's over the top in a fun way. Mary Lou is in a corporeal state for the majority of the film. The deaths are wild and over the top. A stalking sequence in a girls locker room and shower with both characters completely nude. Even with this weird movie, this came out of left field. But then it comes to the eventual prom scene and this honestly felt like the ending of Carrie. It didn't have all the same details mind you. The mechanics were similar and the feeling was similar as well but the nuance was different. It does get wild and crazy in parts and Michael Ironside is pretty good in this but he's good in most of anything he does. This is the definition of a whatever movie. It's fine mostly. It's not scary. It's not funny. It doesn't offend your sensibility cinematically. I give this movie a C.

As is noted in every review of this film, outside of taking place at Hamilton High, the only thing "Prom Night II" has in common with the Jamie Lee Curtis "Prom Night" is the number of plot holes into which the unwary viewer might fall.Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is an avaricious little tramp who wants BADLY to be prom queen in 1957. Unfortunately she steps on a few heads while reaching for the crown, and one of those heads belongs to her rich but clueless boyfriend Billy (Michael Ironside), who catches her making out with bad-kid Budd (Richard Monette) at the prom. As she struts to the stage in triumph, Billy climbs into the rafters like a tuxedoed King Kong, lights a stink bomb, and throws it down onto the stage to ruin the moment. Unfortunately, the fuse catches Mary Lou's pre-OSHA dress on fire and she burns gruesomely to death in front a room full of screaming teenagers who apparently missed "Stop, Drop, and Roll" because they never think about throwing a coat over her or anything like that and just stand there watching her burn. Flash forward 30 years. It is now 1987, with all the fashion tragedy that implies. Billy is now Principal Nordham of Hamilton High, and Budd is Father Cooper, the priest of the local Catholic church (?). Billy's son Craig (Justin Louis) is dating pretty little Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), who is up for prom queen. Unfortunately, Vicki's aggressively Catholic mother won't permit her to buy a new dress, so Vicki rummages in the Hamilton High drama prop room for something suitable and comes up with the crown, sash, and cape worn by the doomed Mary Lou. She puts it on and BAM -- Mary Lou is back and out for blood. Father Cooper figures out quickly that the ensuing weirdness is tied to Mary Lou's restless spirit and tells Principal Nordham that her soul is bound to wander in purgatory because she died violently while trying to accomplish a mission (presumably becoming prom queen, since she caught fire before she was crowned). Principal Nordham refuses to believe it. It is of course the truth and in the end, Mary Lou reemerges in all her slutty, living-dead glory to wreak havoc at the prom.Unfortunately, in between the explanation and the dénouemont, the movie is a pastiche of bizarre, occasionally frustratingly unrelated vignettes of Mary Lou possessing Vicki and wreaking havoc. The first casualty is Vicki's "quirky" friend Jess (Beth Gondek), who is dispatched after a weepy emotional scene in the bathroom where she confesses to Vicki that she has just found out she is pregnant (the pregnancy never comes up again). Why does Jess try to pry a jewel out of the prom queen tiara that Vicki has found in the prop room? Why is Jess dragged toward the menacingly open paper cutter, giving everyone the impression that heads will roll, only to end up hanging from the light fixture by the ties of the prom queen cape? Only Mary Lou knows.Preening through the narrative is Kelly (Terri Hawkes), the nastiest mean girl who ever used a crimping iron, menacing all and sundry in her quest to be voted prom queen ahead of the blandly blonde Vicki. She even performs oral sex on the Val-Kilmer-esque nerd, Josh (Brock Simpson) in an effort to have him rig the computer voting; unfortunately, Mary Lou gets to him before he can complete the task. Mary Lou also finishes off Vicki's best friend Monica (Beverly Hendry), who sports the most obvious boob job in the history of 80's teen cinema frontal nudity during a shower scene gone horribly wrong. In the end, of course, everyone dies and no questions are answered. I am pretty sure they were setting up for a sequel but this movie borrows so much from so many other movies that it's entirely possible that the writers simply lost their train of thought. What, for example, was up with that carousel horse in Vicki's bedroom? I mean, yeah, the tongue was a nicely creepy touch, but this is a girl whose mother won't shake loose the cash for a new dress for the prom and yet her bedroom is a full-on Laura Ashley fantasy complete with a carousel horse? And nobody ever explains why Mary Lou was such a bitch in the first place, or what Father Cooper was reading from when he explained why she had come back. The Bible? The Necronomicon? And after positing Kelly as the nastiest little thing to strut across a disco floor, her death is disappointingly routine. I mean, this movie puts serious effort into getting you to dislike this broad, and then...nothing. By the time Mary Lou bursts out of Vicki's chest and rampages gorily through the high school in search of Billy, the story has lost its thread entirely. The end -- wherein Billy gives Mary Lou's spirit her moment in the spotlight at their prom, and in return she possesses him instead of Vicki (who is reborn a la "Poltergeist", although by then you'll have completely lost count of the number of horror films being simultaneously ripped off) made no damn sense at all, although it seems to have wanted to, very badly.

High school slut Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) dies in 1957 on prom night due to an accidental fire caused by her spurned boyfriend. Thirty years later the boyfriend has grown up to be Michael Ironside. In a manner the story doesn't really bother to explain, Mary Lou's spirit returns and is out for revenge. Nominal sequel to Prom Night is surprisingly good. Like I said, the way in which Mary Lou is brought back is pretty flimsy but I guess in movies like this it doesn't matter that much. I liked the twist of having the high school jerk Mary Lou was fooling around with grow up and become a priest. The rocking horse scene was a highlight. Michael Ironside is the biggest name in the cast. But they all do pretty well. Fans of '80s horror films should like it.

"Prom Night" took a long road towards becoming a horror series. Seven years after the original, a sequel finally rolled out. The slasher subgenre was played out by then and the original story presented little opportunity for a follow-up. "Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II" took the series in a radically different direction, one of quasi-comedic supernatural horror. The stories are totally unrelated, connected only by the high school, prom setting. It's no surprise to read that the screenplay wasn't written as a sequel at all and was, instead, slapped with the "Prom Night" connection in post."Hello Mary Lou" is so much better then you'd expect an in-name-only sequel to a minor slasher flick to be. Its premise is successfully played for both humor and chills, featuring plenty of slimy special effects and an unexpectedly erotic streak. Back in 1957, promiscuous, rebellious prom queen Mary Lou Mahoney was accidentally set ablaze by her jilted boyfriend. Thirty years later, good girl Vicki Carpenter stumbles upon Mary Lou's tiara in an old store room. Slowly, the vicious spirit of the undead prom queen begins to possess Vicki, once again making prom night a night for terror at Hamilton High."Prom Night II" takes it time setting up its premise. The opening flashback is rather brilliantly presented, the camera swooping in and out of an old storage truck at the start and end. Vicki's eventual corruption by Mary Lou's spirit is a gradual process. She has disturbing hallucinations during the school day. Some of these are humorous, like the volley ball net transforming into a spider's web, her teammates turned into pasty-faced zombies. Others are genuinely off-putting and weirdly creepy. In her bedroom at home, her childhood rocking horse gains red, reptilian eyes and a perversely long tongue. The lunch lady in the cafeteria is suddenly spooning out corpse soup with a side of fresh cockroach. A subtle one has the face of a taunting schoolmate transforming into Mary Lou's grinning face. Vicki's final nightmare sees a chalkboard morphed into a pool of black sludge. The creepy rocking horse returns for a late moment of incestuous kissing, easily the film's most disquieting bit.The stand-out moment of "Hello Mary Lou" comes after Vicki is completely taken over by the evil ghost. After her changed behavior annoys a close friend, Vicki-Lou decides to seduce the girl while they're both in the gym shower. Unexpected for 1987, both actresses show full nudity as light-kissing turns to heavy petting. The audience gets a thrill but the character doesn't buy it. The stalking scene that follows features no music, only the possessed girl humming a tune, running her hands over the locker doors. The suspense builds nicely and the gory pay-off is impressive. The rest of the movie is more of a campy guilty pleasure but that one moment combines titillation and horror fantastically.The film mostly plays its supernatural elements for humor. While stabbing a priest to death, the possessed Vicki reflects on the truths of the afterlife. A high school teacher with grabby hands gets his comeuppance comically. The culture clash of a 1950s teenage getting launched into the eighties provides some amusing antics. An attempt to rig the prom queen vote goes awry for the AV nerd, probably the movie's funniest bit. The film's jokey side mostly manifest in horror film in-jokes. Characters have familiar sounding last names, like Carpenter, Henenlotter, Browning, Craven, Wood, Waters, and O'Bannon. Mary Lou's climatic reappearance goofs on "Carrie." There are numerous shout-outs to "The Exorcist." It's apparent the film was made by fans of the genre.Keeping the film sincere among its goofiness and nastiness are surprisingly well-acted and rounded characters. Wendy Lyon is immensely likable as Vicki. Her wide-eyes and innocent good-girl looks gets the audience's sympathies. Lyon plays a girl loosing her sanity very well. Once possessed, she has no problem playing the other side of the coin. She camps it up fantastically, delivering silly one-liners. Lisa Scrage doesn't have much screen time but makes an impression as Mary Lou. She's looks fantastic with her bright blue eyes and tight prom gown. She, too, has a good time playing a campy horror villain. The commitment to character is clear when the subplots that otherwise would have been drool actually hold your attention. Vicki's best friend has a startlingly confession early on, the camera not cutting away. You wouldn't expect such a moment of honest emotion in the middle of your trashy horror sequel.And that's why "Prom Night II" is awesome. The script is refreshing and smart. The performances are committed and strong. The direction is stylish. The film gets both laughs and scares. This is a sequel that is vastly superior to the original.