Prom Night (1980)

Is it altogether possible that I have been a little too hard on the legacy of Halloween?

After all, any movie made artfully that deals with such tactless subject matter as death, teenagers and mysterious masked killers can be palatable when it contains the hands-on contributions of such past masters of the craft as John Carpenter, Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci.

They all had an undeniable style and grace with which they pulled of their classic film works and they all have their fans. In all honesty, they make the case that some horror movies can be - GASP - artistic.

Of course, then we have Paul Lynch.

No, I didn't say DAVID Lynch, who can be artistic when he wants to be. I said PAUL Lynch, a director from the bright, sunny shores of Liverpool, England, whose style consists of making every movie and/or TV show he films look as if it were set in an overcast part of Edinboro around seven in the morning.

Who else would you want to film your Mad Slasher movie that's set in - wait for it - wait - Canada!

See, they all have to be lensed in Canada, ever since 1979. Even if they're set in California. It's the law, they call it The Cunningham/Mancuso Directive: every color motion picture featuring any combination of teenagers, mad killers, poor lighting and up to one featured star that half of the world's populace has heard of in a supporting role, must be filmed in Canada, Nova Scotia or a province thereof.

This was revised somewhat in 1984 to accommodate a filibuster being held at the time by director Wes Craven, who lobbied to include Southern California so as to make his filming of A Nightmare on Elm Street fall within the law's guidelines....

...You don't buy that, do you?

Fine. Sheesh.

Here's the details: For six long years, Hamilton High School seniors Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens), Jude (Joy Thompson), Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin), and Nick (Casey Stevens) have been hiding the truth of what happened to ten-year-old Robin Hammond (Tammy Bourne) the day her broken body was discovered near an old abandoned convent.

The foursome kept the secret of how they taunted Robin until, frightened, she stood on a window ledge... and fell to her death. Though an accident, the then-twelve-year-olds feared they'd be held responsible and vowed never to tell.

But someone else was there that day... watching. And now, that someone is ready to exact murderous revenge on Halloween!

Oops...I mean, Prom Night.

Okay, right there is your basic boilerplate for a mad killer on the loose story. Past sins, secrets sworn to be hidden, bloody killings. All that's missing is some style, some imagination and some class.

In fact, those are the same three things that are missing in Prom Night, too.

This story is told in a basic, almost mindless way that is lock-step in its simplicity; if a little girl is killed, then OF COURSE someone is going to have witnessed it and OF COURSE that someone is going to keep things bottled up until the present day and OF COURSE they're going to wait for a huge moment in the guilty parties' lives to strike and OF COURSE they will try and intimidate them as much as possible before the axe falls, so to speak.

Typical situation: teenage girl machinates things so that she is all alone in the corridors of said high school, she hears someone breathing heavily in the shadows, she sees the Mad Slasher wielding their axe, runs away hysterically - yet still maintaining a slow-enough pace so that the Mad Slasher can keep up with her - and/or same-said Mad Slasher then can pop up in close proximity to her and dispatch her quite easily. By knife, by axe, bye-bye.

See, not a lot of the girls in this movie have much of an I.Q., so this is less a story arc and more like the Darwin Awards being handed out.

And for another OF COURSE, many of the victims are young teenage girls - or at least as teenage as these Mad Slasher movies get.

What do I mean? Well, for one thing, one of the high schoolers is none other than our poster child for the Mad Slasher movement of the Early Eighties, Miss Jamie Lee Curtis, folks. And yes, she was in her 20s when this film was made but that's okay; part of the magic of Hollywood (Canadian branch) is the art of deception, and making women of 20 years+ look every bit the fresh-faced, pubescent flower of womanhood that these flicks crave, hunt down, slice up and discard is all part and parcel of Big Screen Magic (c).

But anyway, Jamie is clearly bored here. I mean, look at her; when she interacts with people, she stares blankly like she can't wait for the scene to be over; when she speaks, it's almost in a monotone; even when she boogies to the late 70s/ealy 80s beat (oh yes, there will be disco), it's with all the vim and verve of a lethargic 80 year-old after chugging the last of the NyQuil.

In other words, this is not the Jamie Lee Curtis we all knew and loved and sympathized with in Halloween. This is the Jamie Lee Curtis who is picking up a paycheck until something better comes along. Sorry, Jamie: you'll have to wait a couple of years down the road for that when John Landis knocks at your door with his Trading Places script. Until then, expect to be in at least three or four more variations on this theme.

Oh, and Leslie Nielsen! Yes, he's here, as a no-nonsense principal at the high school where the bloody business is about to go down. And no, he doesn't play a single scene for laughs. This was the same year that Airplane! came around, but also the same time in his career that Leslie was still thought of as nothing more than a staunch, serious actor. That would change after 1980, but he still had this period in his life to get through. And he plays a no-nonsense principal about as well as a serious, deadpan, unaware Leslie Nielsen would. Don't worry, though - he grew out of this period of his career for the better.

Well, unless you count 2001: A Space Travesty, but anyway....

No one else in this cast counts as anything but a background player, victim or a red herring to throw into the works. Yeah; there's a creepy pedophilic groundskeeper at the school, there's a pill-popping and booze-guzzling mom of Jamie's, there's a hot-headed young stud tyro at school who likes to threaten and torment anyone in his field of vision, and I'll bet I missed a couple more of 'em, but it doesn't matter - once the killer is unmasked, you'll not only hate yourself for missing them to begin with (there's a BIG clue as to the killer's identity early on) but you'll also hate the film-makers for stringing you along right up to the very last minute. Jerks.

Writers William Gray and Robert Guza Jr. cut their teeth writing for this flick and went on to careers writing for even smaller movies and for soap operas, respectively. Not that any of them went on to bigger and better things, but hey: at least they were familiar enough with manipulating standard formulas that writing movies like Humongous and The Philidelphia Experiment and TV shows like "Melrose Place" and "Sunset Beach" came as second nature.

So what happened after all was filmed and released to poor unsuspecting theaters the world over? Well, for a budget of less than 2 million (Canadian) dollars, Prom Night went on to earn more that 14 million (regular) dollars, proving yet again that there was a market for trashy Halloween ripoffs and by golly, producers knew to strike when the iron was hot...and this particular iron was a-sizzlin'.

But to what end? Prom Night was, for as much as everyone involved (well, MOST everyone) wanted to kid themselves and everyone around them into thinking they were doing something different, something important and something ground-breaking, just another example of the same old thing done the same old way. No invention. No imagination. No creativity. Nothing.

Still, for everything, this was a small bump in the road for both Curtis and Nielsen, who would have varied and vibrant careers ahead of them for decades to come - and both for reinventing themselves from one set of films and into others.

And I'm happy for them both. Really.

At least SOMEONE was able to recover from Prom Night. And sooner than I will, that's for sure.