Review: Prom Night (1980)

Prom Night (1980)

Rated R

Score: 3 out of 5

Best known to history as "that slasher film that Jamie Lee Curtis did after Halloween", Prom Night is more a historical curiosity than a truly great horror film in its own right, having been a box-office hit that influenced countless other high-school-set slashers and whodunit murder mysteries (including a memorable shout-out in Scream) but whose reputation is merely that of a minor cult classic. It's an awkwardly-paced film that drags in its second act when it should be getting into the horror, its characters often thinly-sketched save for a few notables, and in terms of gore and frights, other films like it have it beat. However, it boasts at least two very good performances from Curtis and Leslie Nielsen (of all people to appear in a slasher film), and once the bloodletting actually begins, it offers a handful of great kills and chase sequences that, together with a killer disco soundtrack, help save it from the gutter. It's a deep cut for slasher fans, one I'd recommend mainly for those who are already into the genre and want to see its most famous "scream queen" in one of her other early horror roles.

The plot, reminiscent of Lois Duncan's novel I Know What You Did Last Summer (whose own film adaptation seems to have taken some inspiration from this film), starts in 1974 with a group of children, Wendy, Nick, Kelly, and Jude, who accidentally kill their friend Robin while playing a game of hide and seek in an abandoned building. They agreed never to speak of what really happened, and stand aside while a wanted sex offender is arrested for the murder. Six years later, they, together with Robin's sister Kim and brother Alex, are all teenagers getting ready for the prom, when they start receiving harassing messages over the phone and taped inside their lockers. Somebody knows their secret and is out for revenge... but who? Is it the man wrongly convicted of the crime, who had just escaped from the asylum? Is it Alex, still grieving at the loss of his sister? Is it the creepy janitor?

The actual horror doesn't really become important until the third act, before which this film is mostly, save for a handful of creepy scenes, a straightforward teen drama about the senior prom. Wendy is scheming to get revenge on Kim for dating her ex-boyfriend Nick and taking him to prom, recruiting the school's "bad boy" Lou to embarrass Kim. Jude is going to prom with the class clown Slick, whose personality is immediately apparent from the contrast between his geeky appearance and the conversion van he drives. Kelly is taking Drew, who is adamant about getting laid. All the while, the police, led by Nick's father Lt. McBride, are searching for the escaped inmate who has already killed a nurse from the asylum. Honestly, save for one of them, none of these stories were all that interesting, largely because they lacked much room to breathe. They only barely impact each other, mostly existing separately apart from some remarks between them about "hey, so-and-so is dating so-and-so". The story of Wendy, Kim, Nick, and Lou was the only one that felt like it had any bearing on the plot, as the other characters' stories felt like they were there largely for the sake of melodrama. I'd have tied them back into the central story in some way and figured out how to give more focus to the character who turns out to be the killer, as, while the reveal made logical sense, it still felt kind of half-baked given how little had been done to set it up. This film's pacing is a reminder that, while Halloween had been successful, filmmakers were still working out the slasher formula that had really only been codified by Friday the 13th that same year.

Fortunately, the "meat" of the film, so to speak, still holds up once it finally gets to it. Both Slick and Wendy get some memorable chase sequences, the former involving the killer making every effort to climb into Slick's van and the latter giving us plenty of tense scenes where Wendy hides in every room in the school, all set to the distant thumping of the disco music in the gym. The killer is human, but threatening, one who's fairly athletic in how he chases his victims and quite attentive without seeming to magically teleport like Jason Voorhees. The kills are nice and bloody, and while many of them consist of the old standby of slashed throats, there is one standout where somebody's head gets lopped off with an ax and goes rolling out onto the prom stage. The soundtrack lends a unique, party-like atmosphere to the mayhem at the prom, distinct from the creepy strings of Harry Manfredini or synths of John Carpenter but still working in its own right, most notably with this memorable ditty that they wrote when they realized they didn't have the budget to license the disco tracks they wanted. The cast was mostly pretty decent or at least not offensively bad, with special mention going to Curtis' final girl Kim doing what Curtis does best in horror movies (kick the villain's ass, basically) and Leslie Nielsen, hot off of Airplane! but before he really became best known for comedy, in a supporting role as the principal and Kim's father. The last half-hour or so of this film helps redeem its middling and overly long second act, and makes for a very fun old-school slasher ride.

The Bottom Line

While the story can drag at times and the influence of Halloween and Carrie is a bit too obvious, this is still a pretty good early slasher that's worth watching just to get the joke that Randy made about it in Scream. It's one of those films that could use a proper remake that irons out its flaws while bringing its best qualities to the surface (and no, I'm not talking about that piece of crap calling itself Prom Night from ten years ago).