Prom Night (2008) is not so much a remake of the 1980 original of the same name. It has the same title, and the same general theme (a prom), but that's about all that ties the two together. The Jamie Lee Curtis classic, this one is not...
Prom Night centers around Donna (Brittany Snow) who came home one night many years ago to find her family murdered by her obsessive teacher. She even witnessed her mother get killed right in front of her very eyes. It is now several years later and Donna's prom is right around the corner. Her family's killer has conveniently just escaped from prison and you can be sure that Donna and all her friends are about to get slaughtered at the prom. In short : A killer sits in a hotel room and waits for teens to come up from prom to get things or fuck or what have you, and he kills them.
Boy o boy. PG13 horror. PG13 horror remake, at that. Must we remake every classic Jamie Lee Curtis film? Halloween. Sucked. The Fog. Sucked. Prom Night. Really really sucked. Even Terror Train is up on the remake agenda. And you can be sure it will suck. But we're talking about Prom Night here. This film is absolutely abysmal. Not that I expected any more from it, I just have a tendency to want to watch every new horror movie that comes out, mostly so I can warn everyone away from them.
There's a whole laundry list of things that are dreadful about this one. First of all, the killer is terrible. He's not scary, he's not shrouded in mystery, he's just a crazy ex teacher who want's to fuck his student. The gore is...o wait, there is no gore. Nearly every kill in the movie is exactly the same, and we see none of it. Not that every horror film needs copious gore (see : Halloween) but in a movie like this it's pretty necessary to bring any interest to the proceedings. If there's no gore, you at least need suspense. There is absolutely none of it. Although Brittany Snow seems to think there is. I watched the making of, purely to see if the filmmaker's took this thing seriously or were just cashing in on the name, and Snow said this film is "more about suspense." Funny. We don't care about any of the characters in it whatsoever. They're all cookie cutter cliches and the sooner they get the knife, the better. Speaking of cliche, it's packed full of every horror cliche in the book. If you weren't sick of the jump scare cliche of girl opens medicine cabinet, girl closes medicine cabinet, girl sees reflection of scary dude behind her, you sure as hell will be after this movie. There's a handful of such occurences. Worst of all, you will know every thing that's going to happen before it happens. That goes for dialogue and plot developments. There's a scene where a woman is cleaning a big yellow bowl and you just know she's gonna find a reason to drop it. Who wrote this crap? Better yet who allowed this script to be greenlit?
Prom Night is so bad that the only redeeming quality I found in it was a 2 second clip of Cant Hardly Wait on a tv in one scene. To make matters worse, the director essentially compared his film to Seven and Silence of the Lambs in the making of featurette. Can you say delusional? Throughout the entire movie, I was hoping I would be the next one to get killed off. Sadly, I wasn't. If you thought your prom sucked a big one, you may just wanna think again. I never went to mine, but if there was a killer on the loose, I think I may have rethought that decision.
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