Customer Reviews

Prom Night

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(37)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

For a few years, it was hard to obtain a decent DVD copy of this film. The Anchor Bay version had been long out of print and could only be obtained from private sellers at a ridiculous price. I never saw the 1998 Anchor Bay version but heard it was a nice release. The 2004 edition from Alliance Atlantis (or Echo Bridge Home Entertainment) where the cover art displays a knife blade with Jaime Lee Curtis' face reflected was a dispicable release in every way. It was like watching a used VHS copy with terrible picture and sound quality and that is not why DVD's evolved. The companies releasing these films should have to pass some sort of inspection for DVD transfers. At last, Echo Bridge released a new version of Prom Night in 2007 with fancier cover art (Jaime Lee Curtis standing in the school hallway with her prom dress and tiara on holding a bouquet of flowers with a bloody ax in them). I was very impressed with the effort that went into this as it was well done. Great picture quality (the scenes that were too dark to see what was going on before are now visible). Also included was a nice chapter menu and more chapter stops (the previous release only had 5 chapter stops and a bad looking menu). If you are a fan of eighties slashers, this version needs to be in your collection beside Terror Train and Halloween. A nice chase scene with Eddie Benton in this film is also worth savoring. What to recommend is the Australian thriller Road Games featuring Jaime Lee Curtis that many people may have missed. For the genre, I give Prom Night 4 stars. I really liked this one. There was something about the Canadian horror films that made them stand out (Black Christmas and Happy Birthday to Me were some others). Another Canadian horror gem I'm still waiting patiently for is Curtains which has unfortunately not seen the light of day on DVD yet.

..but one has to give credit to PROM NIGHT for being one of the first teen slasher flicks to also attempt to be a compelling mystery. 70s scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis followed up her HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and TERROR TRAIN as the heroine of the film, whose biggest scene is a laughably non-erotic disco dance at the prom. Leslie Nielsen is around as Jamie's principal dad, but he's hardly in the film at all. Annemarie (Eddy) Benton takes on one of her many slutty roles as the bitchy vixen out to spoil the prom for Jamie and her date, who happens to be Benton's ex. The mystery is pretty easy to solve, and the pace is a little slow by today's standards, but PROM NIGHT is representative of what we could expect in the coming years of teen slashers.

Okay, I was going to give Prom Night two stars, but..come on...any movie that features Leslie Neilson cutting a rug to a disco soundtrack deserves at least 3 stars! Jamie Lee Curtis, riding high as the 80's scream-queen poster girl tackles a six-year old mystery, steals a hot-blond's boyfriend and engages in some of the most hilarious disco dancing seen this side of the Village People in the movie "TGIF". Actually, Prom Night was a bit ahead of it's time in that it not only is a slasher flick, but also creates a pretty decent little mystery as to who the killer may be. Later movies like "Scream" and "I Know What you Did Last Summer" borrowed this plotline to varying degrees of success almost 30 years later. The kills are pretty standard early 80's stuff, not really gory, but there are a couple intense chase scenes that will keep you riveted. Also, this movie may feature one of the ugliest casts in filmdom. The main heel, bad-guy with the unibrow and unfortunate teeth is just disturbing to look at. One of my favorite characters is Slick, an overweight, dork who drives a 70's conversion van, that is just too damn funny to be taken seriously. There are two main drawbacks to Prom Night; 1. How come everyone is 30 years old and still in high school? I mean come on, I can suspend belief for quite a bit, but most of these actors looked closer to middle age than to 18 and 2. Sure Disco was the sound of the time, but man it really dates this movie. I have seen worse slasher flicks, but I have seen a lot better too. If you are a fan of the genre then you should check this out, but I would wait until a $10 version is available before I would buy it.

When I first looked up Prom Night, everyone seemed to think that it was not a good movie. Then I bought it, and I realized that these people were wrong. There was nothing wrong with the movie. The storyline was similar to I Know What You Did Last Summer, but it was still original. Four children play some game that ends in the accidental death of a girl. Like I Know What You Did Last Summer, they make a desperate attempt to cover up the crime. The four of them make a pact, and they leave the body for the police to discover it. Seven years later, the four have forgotten the whole thing. That's when they began to get the creepy phone calls and death threats. When Prom Night arrives, the terror begins. Soon, sex and murder wil take place. The four will realize that someone grew up waiting to get their revenge. It kind of surprised me when I saw Leslie Nielsen starring in the movie. He is normally the type that goes out for spoofs and comedies. He crates an outstanding performance in this film. I remember the part where Jamie Lee Curtis dances in something similar to Saturdany Night Fever. Overall, this movie is supenseful as it is gory. I would recommend this to any who wants to see a movie that builds up suspense and spine-tingling horror.

I'm a late bloomer on this one. I never saw it until tonight - don't know how that happened. I love the horror/slasher movies from the late 70's mid-80's. This killed me! Halloween meets Carrie meets Saturday Night Fever. An escaped luntic, the police chase, disco-disco (good music BTW) and a prom with two conniving students all add up to a lot of fun. Not great, not overly scary, but a real hoot!

One day in 1974 a group of kids decide to play a little game and it goes too far... One ends up dead. Afterwards they make a pact. Six years later someone is out to get them and wants revenge.. Soon after they are being stalked by a masked man. He ends up trying to get them all back on Prom Night.

Cheesy Disco Music, predictable plot, campy... but as a whole it wasnt bad. I had an idea of who the killer was and I was right. I also could guess what took place before the ending down to a t. but the rest of the film makes up for it. For the genre I would rate this one somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. It's a decent low budget horror film.

Jamie Lee Curtis was right in the middle of her run of slasher flicks with this one. it was After halloween and The Fog and before Terror Train and Halloween II. I'd give it 2 1/2 stars really. The plot is pretty typical for the early 1980's. The film begins six years earlier when five kids playing in an old school when four of them try scaring a little girl and she accidently falls to her death. The other kids agree to never tell what happened but there was another witness to what happened.

Six years later before the senior prom the four start getting mysterious phone calls, ala "I know what you did last Summer". Jamie Lee is Kim Hammond the sister of the little girl who was killed and ends up going out with Nick who was one of the boys involved in the little girl's death. Soon, one by one, a mysterious killer begins to kill off those involved in the girl's death.

There wasn't a lot of imagination shown by the filmmakers in the murder scenes. It would still be a couple of years before Friday the 13th would really give us new and imaginative ways to bump off some one. Still, the film has its moments. It's got a fair amount of suspense and a setting that people can relate to. Leslie Nielsen is the only other name actor in the film, playing Jamie Lee's father. He actully did this film right after "Airplane" which would cement him as a comedy star.

In 1974, four children, all about age 11 or 12, are playing--in an abandoned schoolhouse--hide-and-seek. When a ponytailed ten-year-old girl named Robin intrudes on these four children on her way home from school, she is backed up to a window ledge and falls through the pane, plummeting to her death two stories below. As the four other children gaze at the girl's corpse covered with broken glass, they realize no one will believe it is an accident and make a pact to keep the incident a secret. Which is a deadly mistake, as we shall see, for someone else has witnessed little Robin's death and wants revenge....

Fast forward six years to 1980. Now the four children are seniors in high school and it's prom night--but much worse, it's also the anniversary of Robin's death. Robin's older sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) is friends with two of the foursome--timorous Kelly and jolly Jude--and another of the four, Nick, is Kim's boyfriend. The last of the four--Wendy--is jealous of Kim because Kim stole Nick away from her.

That morning, the foursome recieve ominous phone calls from a shadowy figure with a thin, slimy, whispery voice; later in the day they discover their yearbook photos taped to their locker doors with daggerlike shards of broken glass--echoes of the broken glass that had cloaked little Robin's cadaver. The incidents are dismissed as pranks as the group prepares for the prom.

As darkness falls they arrive at the prom and dance to the synthesized rhythms of disco music. The movie is worth watching for the disco score alone--it boasts some of the best disco ever created, composed by Paul Zaza, with a pulsating 4/4 beat, sensuous mock-symphonic orchestration that has glorious violin riffs and flourishes. It's a pity that there's no available soundtrack, as I've searched extensively for one. And then there's that wonderfully choreographed SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER-like dance between KIm and Nick, the two of them twirling and gyrating to the disco beat.

Then the killing begins.

Kelly, a wan young lass, is snuffed out with a shard of broken glass (again echoes of the shattered glass blanketing little Robin's corpse) in the girl's locker room after reneging on her promise to give up her virginity to her boyfriend.

Jolly party-girl Jude inadventently exposes her neck to the killer while rollicking with her date in back of a van parked outside the school.

Wendy, looking more like a seasoned prostitute than a junior miss in her plungy red gown with the tight sequined bodice, is stalked from restroom to parking garage, from parking garage to science lab, from science lab to storage room where she is safe...

....until Kelly's bloody body dangles down from a shelf, causing her to scream--whereupon she is discovered and felled with an axe.

The chase scene with Wendy fleeing through the labryrinth of darkened school corridors is the ONLY horror flick scene that has truly scared me.

Then the killer goes after Nick, who struggles with him on the disco floor now empty of terrified dancers. The strobe-lit, disco-scored axe-fight is tense, and finally Kim grabs the hatchet and stuns the masked maniac, who flees outside before crumbling to the sidewalk.

PROM NIGHT is perhaps the best slasher movie ever made--this from a movie buff who's seen them all. It's far superior to the mediocre FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, which was released that same year. PROM NIGHT has it all: a fast-moving plot, mystery, a magnificent disco score, macabre killings, and characters you actually care about. If you don't want to be scared, then don't see this movie.

Canada was one of the key players at the forefront of the slasher movie wave of the early 1980s. "Prom Night" was released during the crest of this phenomenon and the filmmakers were among the "A" list of Canadian horror, considering that the excellent music score skills contributed by Paul Zaza would turn up in the following year's "My Bloody Valentine" (another one of the best) and that "Prom Night's" writing/directing team of William Gray and Paul Lynch would go on to make 1981's "Humongous" (which has never seen a DVD release).

Still, "Prom Night," though filmed in Toronto, is set in the U.S. and features some familiar faces like Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis, the latter of whom was still riding high on the success of "Halloween" (and would also star in another 1980 Canadian slasher production "Terror Train").

"Prom Night" is just one fun movie. It has a good, attractive cast, a sense of humor, and an overriding teenage innocence to it that is very appealing.

The characters are largely adolescent caricature archetypes. You have the likable and popular prom queen Kim (Curtis), the hormonally driven, van driving, pot smoking burnout Slick (Sheldon Rybowski), the violent, aggressive miscreant Lou (David Mucci), and my favorite, the spiteful and malicious (I'm avoiding using the "B" word here) but oh so hot Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, billed here as Eddie Benton), who zooms around in a fast sports car and has a cat fight-like rivalry with Kim over the attention of prom king and common love interest Nick (Casey Stevens).

That said, one of the common gripes against the film from seasoned cinema gore hounds is that it doesn't feature enough nudity or red stuff spurting out of bodies. I would respond by saying that while compared to some others it is somewhat light in the sex and gore quotient (though a good decapitation and dismembered corpse, not to mention a hot girl mooning someone are notable exceptions), it more than makes up for it in being an otherwise so appealing and classy effort, and one of the best and most fun slashers ever. Highly recommended.

Okay, so plot pretty simple:

A group of young kids accidentely kill a young girl durring a game of "killer" (ummmm), someone saw what happened....and is out for revenge.

YEARS before "I Know What You Did Last Summer" was written there was "Prom Night". The idea is pretty much the same, although the kids as teen-agers don't really seem to show any remorse for what they did (besides Jamie Lee's boyfriend). So it's hard to connect the teens to the killing they did when they were little.

This movie is ALL about red herrings. The killer is a mental patient, the killer is the Bully at school, the killer is the janitor....I'm surprised they didn't put a pair of black gloves in Jamie Lee's locker....it doesn't matter though, the killer's identity was a surprise to me at least, when I first watched it when I was 15 (I'm 21 now). The Red herrings work I guess, although I never really thought it was the Janitor or the mental patient. Speaking of the mental patient, I guess he got blamed for the little girls death, and escapes years later leading the police to think he's coming back to Hamilton High. This part of the film was disstracting to me, but after knowing the ending it's become downright unbearable. TOTAL miss-direction, and once you know it for what it is...it gets boring.

However I think that it's good they put it there, to keep you guessing.

The death scenes are not that great, except for the little girl falling through the window in the beginning. There's definete style to this film and came on the radar just after Halloween, but before Nightmare and Friday...so it wasn't stock in the sense that that it's bimbo's running around naked. The characters are actually developed though not that like-able.

Jamie Lee's character is pretty much what you would expect from her in those early days, so I won't go into that.

My favorite part is the prom...and the music....I WISH I could have had a light up dance floor at mine, and the music (though all the songs kinda sound the same) went great along-side the flashing lights....really creating an atmosphere of glitz, lights and dance. Just what Prom should be. A Night to remember....or dismember...lol, sorry.

One thing I did hate about the film, is the ten minute chase scene. The killer goes after Wendy, the bitchy popular girl (though she never really seemed to have friends) who looks like she's 30! It goes on and on, and the song is the same "Prom Night...everything is allright" so it gets very old, very fast.

But overall, it's a fun slasher....a slasher that came out before the genre got tired. If you love disco, this will be your wet dream. If you love Sexy ladies....this probably won't do much for you. The girls weren't really that attractive (besides Jamie Lee, though that hair made me wanna pull it out strand by strand). But it was nice that the teens (who did look a bit too old) were normal. They looked like every-day kids, which is great considering the New Prom Night movie is gonna be all hotties like Brittney Snow....lame.

This stays in my collection as one of the greats. And it kicked off an...interesting series to say the least. Let's hope Prom Night 2008 will get us a special edition release of the original with commentary from Jamie Lee! (hey, I can dream!)

-DeNis