Visiting Hours (1982)

Sometimes when you're watching your Mad Slasher movie of choice and find yourself examining the storyline, you'll discover strange thing start to happen: you realize that no matter the unique trappings (high-rise building, cruise liner, summer camp, coal mine, high school), you've seen this story before.

It's not deja-vu, it's the fact that they can tell as many variations on a theme as they want but, basically, it's the same thing.

Back story, present-day setup, slow-but-steady murders (some of them under unusual circumstances), false alarms, final showdown, killer strikes multiple times, final victim strikes back, killer dies (or DO they?), horrified survivors' faces, stinger, fade out.

Sound familiar? It should if you've seen a Friday the 13th, Halloween, Child's Play or any variation or sequel thereof. I've written about them here more than once and taken into consideration the various differences in story - if they're there - but they are the same thing. Just a different shadowy killer, is all.

Now, remember back in the late Seventies/Early Eighties when they had the predecessor to the Friday the 13ths and such? These were slasher movies still, but they exclusively featured men and their masochistic killer instincts they practiced solely on women. Titles like Don't Answer The Phone, Don't Go In The House, Don't Go In The Woods, Don't Walk In The Kitchen With Those Muddy Feet, Don't Talk With Your Mouth Full and others made for a full plate for feminist protesters everywhere. And they were out there, believe me; protesting the fact that men were out there killing women - young and old - all over the place on the big screen. (okay, maybe I made up a couple of those, but you get the idea...)

In fact, the most infuriating thing for all these protesters about this entire sordid enterprise was that in every instance of these movies, the victim (the FEMALE victim) is shown to be weak, helpless, easily frazzled, and even-more easily victimized.

Is that a problem, you ask? I'll let you pose that question to a woman and then you get back to me.

In the meantime, let's go to 1982: dozens of variations on this theme have passed, millions raked in and even more were on the way. But it was about here that they (studios, producers) thought they could dress up the genre a bit. Yeah; dress up a movie about murdering women. A year earlier Paramount Pictures released The Fan with no less a victim than Lauren Bacall, and co-stars such as James Garner and Maureen Stapleton along for the gory ride. So with this in mind, 20th Century Fox went the same route and infused their sleazy little slasher with vitamin Lee Grant and an extra fortified shot of William Shatner!

The film was Visiting Hours, it was set in a hospital for the most part and, in spite of the cast and setting (and its strict adherence to The Cunningham/Mancuso Directive), gave us...say it with me...the same old thing.

Killer plot coming through: Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is a controversial TV journalist, whose feminist views and championing of battered women and their rights upsets the wrong man. A homicidally-deranged woman-hater, Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside) has hated women since a traumatizing incident from his youth turned him against...well, women in general, I guess. So he breaks into her home, kills Deborah's maid and nearly succeeds in killing her as well. Somehow, Deborah manages to survive the attack and is rushed to the city hospital. Realizing she is still alive, Hawker sneaks into the hospital with the goal to kill her once and for all. It all leads up to a climax where dark hospital halls, lots of sharp objects and blunt force trauma all figure in a battle to the death....

Now I'm not against violent movies in general. Not if we have a good story to carry it along. There was reason for it and reason to follow it through in Charles Bronson's classic meditation on capital punishment Death Wish. The Class of 1984 was not necessarily a movie I liked but I appreciated everything it managed to come across with and how it told a very tightly-knit revenge story. Even a movie like Sleepaway Camp told us the same thing but did it with all its cliches in check and certainly did it with a fascinating twist. The problem with Visiting Hours is that this is a story that only fits in the same mold as its early 1980 brethren.

We've had films in what is called the Mad Slasher Golden Age such as My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday To Me, Mother's Day, Terror Train, The Prowler, Maniac, The Burning, Silent Scream, Final Exam, He Knows You're Alone, Schizoid, When a Stranger Calls...there's more, believe me. And all of them do the same thing that Visiting Hours does, just all in their own varying degrees. It's kind of like saying that they're all car crashes - just this one's a Chrysler, that one's a Ford, this one here's a Yugo...understand?

But seeing that I'm getting ahead of myself, let's backtrack: director Jean-Claude Lord is a native of Canada (surprise!) and at least TRIED to get a giallo vibe going here, what with Hawker's penchant for photographing his dying victims and assembling these pictures in his home and the doom and gloom all being very shadowy and artfully positioned, at least, in spite of the blood and gore. After all, this is the man who gave us a sequel to Eddie and the Cruisers (a fave movie of mine), so I'll let him slide.

The writer, however, one Brian Taggert, is an unadulterated hack who seems to know nothing about writing aside from assembling cliches and cliched dialogue like a Mad Libs page. He's also responsible for Of Unknown Origin (another killer rat vs. man movie), The New Kids (another Sean S. Cunningham kids and killing movie - from 1985!!!), Wanted: Dead or Alive (another "TV-to-movie" effort), Poltergeist III (another Poltergeist sequel), and Omen IV: The Awakening (another direct-to-TV Satanic movie sequel). Feeling warm fuzzies yet? Must be your bunny slippers, champ....

Not a one of these actors invest their parts with anything that could conceivably be called a performance. Grant is an actress, an honest-to-goodness actress who has been in such fine examples of the art as Detective Story, Buona Sera Mrs. Campbell, In The Heat Of The Night, The Landlord, Shampoo and Plaza Suite. Of course, she's also been in latter day efforts like Airport '77, Damien: Omen II, The Swarm, When You Comin' Back Red Ryder?, The Mafu Cage and Charlie Chan And The Curse Of The Dragon Queen. She's had bad times onscreen and though she at least fights back some here, she's more of a symbol than a character. I'll get to what I mean in a second.

Williams Shatner (a nice slice of prime Canadian ham, himself) plays William Shatner. Looking for everything like a man who had some free time in-between episodes of "T.J. Hooker", Shatner offers his face, his acting and his toupee to the service of the script as the TV producer/romantic interest of Grant's character. And while it's always good to see him do his thing, this is more like a walk-through than a walk-on.

Michael Ironside (another Canadian? what IS this??) has based an entire career on being a violent thug and it's worked quite well for him. A career stretching from 1977 on, Ironside has given us violent henchmen, violent ESP practitioners, violent alien overlords, violent generals, violent sheriffs,violent detectives, violent majors, violent inspectors, violent colonels, violent doctors, violent video game voices...let's face it, he's just good at being violent. And it's not like he has the shrinking violet part. He gets to chase women around while wearing their jewelry and nothing else, grind his forearm in broken glass, glower menacingly and have flashbacks - it's not his fault that he has both the most showy part in Visiting Hours and the most thankless. Being a misogynistic murderous loner lout has its perks but being sympathetic isn't one of them.

Linda Purl, a familiar character actress from TV and movies, plays a sympathetic part as a hospital nurse/future victim, but she also suffers the same fate as most every woman who has more than five minutes of screen time in this movie: she will be stalked, threatened, victimized, endangered and attacked. All the while her acting will consist of worried looks, sweats, wide eyes, cowering, whimpers, screams and gasps and little else. Too bad.

The astute Canuck-watcher will also recognize Harvey Atkin in the cast: he of the big mustache, big glasses and expressive face whom you no doubt will remember as Morty (not Mickey) from 1978's Meatballs and a whole slew of other things. Not that he does anything noteworthy here, but just to let you know: this movie has Harvey Atkin in it. So there you go.

Now, what I said about Grant being a symbol instead of a character: she represents the fiercely independent woman of the early Eighties who has ideas, ambition and a strong sense of self. This was, of course, the biggest threat to the men in the movie (not only the antagonist, but ALL the men) and made her both the main character AND the main victim. Think about it: movies like have to have at least one woman in it that stands up to the men, proves she is their equal if not better and that, in and of itself, makes her a threat to all bastions of masculinity that must be conquered and vanquished.

That is not only a symbol in whatever movie like this you choose, but also for the viewer (male or female) to focus on and realize that, if any woman dares act too independent in a male-dominated world, she will pay the price. That sounds more than a little Cro-Magnon-ish but isn't that basically what it all boils down to? And once the independent, assertive woman gets chased and threatened, she turns into a crying, whimpering, cringing weakling, losing every thread of character she had only a few scenes before. It's happened more than once and it sure does happen here.

I realize I'm starting to sound like an old Siskel and Ebert review for something like Eyes of a Stranger or Mother's Day but the fact that Visiting Hours does nothing more interesting than retell a familiar story with no twists other than different people and different setting belies the weakness of these movies: if all you're going to prove in your movie is that women automatically become weak and cowering when pitted against a male aggressor, then all you're doing is reinforcing decade upon decade of static cliches without even bothering to make a difference in what you show.

That was the difference in movies like 1978's Halloween and even the later Scream movies: at least they didn't give us the same thing. They gave us women that thought, were resourceful, clever and bothered to establish characters that made you actually invest yourself in their situation and care about what happened to them. That's why the patron goddesses of this genre are names like Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell.

Now as far as this goes, I know I'm going to get some feedback on this along the lines of what a great movie Visiting Hours is, how great the cinematography is, how awesome and menacing Ironside is as the killer and how perfect a character we have in Lee Grant. Fine. Have at it. All I can do is tell you that this is NOT the rose-colored classic you think it is. There's a lot to be said for revisiting the past, but not when it makes you question why you thought the movie in question was a classic to begin with.

I didn't like Visiting Hours, not even when it first came out. You just feel unclean watching something like that that tries to fool you into thinking you're watching something not only artful and creative but - dare I say - different. In reality, all Visiting Hours ends up becoming is one of many; a patchwork affair made from different rotted fabrics. If that's what you choose to watch, by all means do.

Just don't blame me if you've seen this story before. It's not like you weren't warned.

Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare (1987)

When it comes to horror movies, everyone gives game-changers like Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978) a lot of flack for being responsible for giving us, the unprotected viewers, untold variations-on-a-theme. As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for those two films, most of the "HORROR" sections in the movie rental stores of my youth would be empty.

There is another film, however, that doesn't get as much flack for bringing many wannabes to the movie/video arena...but it should.

And that film, ladies and germs, is The Evil Dead (1981).

Think about it: if not for Sam Raimi's classic, any fledgling film-maker wouldn't have a basis for getting his or her foot in the door to show what kind of talent they have. This was a blueprint for films like Roger Evans' Forever Evil (1987), Michael Mfume's Ax 'Em (1992), Jason Stephenson's Off the Beaten Path (2004), Brett Anstey's Damned by Dawn (2009)...and no, you've probably never heard of many of these films.

After all, what can you expect; some of them went direct-to-video. Others still went direct-to-obscurity.

Then we have John Fasano.

Who, you ask?

Well, to be fair, he has been better known as a co-writer for films such as Another 48 Hrs. (1990) about Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte re-teaming, Darkness Falls (2003) about the Tooth Fairy, and Shauna: Every Man's Fantasy (1985) about...well...go ask your parents about that one. But for the purposes of this review, John is also a director who created a little film about rock and roll and nightmares. Named...appropriately...Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare.

How can we tell this is a true rock and roll movie? Because they only used one letter from "and" for the title, and replaced the missing letters with apostrophes - more rockin' that way, you know.

And it also was written by and stars someone who should be a legend in modern-day motion pictures. This man's name is Jon Mikl Thor, one of Canada's sons and the main reason anyone nods their head in head-banging fashion whenever Vancouver is mentioned.

What does any of this have to do with The Evil Dead, though? Glad you asked - let's get to the plot:

At an old Canadian farmhouse, a typical Canadian family mysteriously disappears at the hands of unseen Canadian forces which approach from low swooping camera angles outside. Coincidence? Prolly. After which, a van full of Canadian rock 'N' rollers, led by John Triton (Thor), arrive at same-said farmhouse, pile into the house and prepare to record their rockin' Canadian music in the adjacent Canadian barn, retro-fitted with Canadian recording devices. What follows is the appearance of various rubbery Canadian demons, which make various Canadian musicians and groupies and hangers-on possessed, force them to disappear and so forth until only one of them is left, and must do battle with the one responsible for the horrific Canadian goings-on.

In a basic description like that, one would think that this is, indeed, just another Evil Dead rip and leave it at that. Well, you're right on that count, because this IS just another Evil Dead rip - Canadian-based at that, per The Cunningham-Mancuso Directive. However, you have to understand that there are a few things that make Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare a horse of a different color.

First and foremost is the direction. Fasano doesn't have the quick skills of a Sam Raimi and so misses an opportunity to make with the quick camera cuts, different angles and comic-book-style lighting, like an issue of "Tales from the Crypt". Seeing how this was Fasano's first directorial attempt, I guess we can chalk it up to freshman jitters. Of course, the interminable van ride to the farmhouse is enough to make you think Harold P. Warren forgot to put the title sequence into THIS movie, as well (Obscure Movie Reference #72 - you're welcome).

Next we have the script itself. As written by Thor (Jeez; every time I write this guy's name, I picture him with a Viking helmet and swinging a hammer around...), we get characters that serve no real purpose other than victims, lame-joke reciters and a plot that, as far as story goes, is pretty routine. Except, of course, for one plot twist by the end that not only comes out of left field, but comes out of left field riding a brontosaurus, firing a laser cannon and singing "The Immigrant Song".

The effects are another matter. You'd swear that the effects crew must've gotten a sweet deal from Canadian Rubbers and Textiles for all the little rubbery demons and mutants that crawl around the film, especially at the end when the End Boss comes around...which is something one must see to believe. Or maybe that's too high a price to pay. Anyway....

Now we come to the acting. I guess we get what we expect from a movie named Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare. Thor heads up the cast and, like everyone else we see, at least has the big hair and glam Eighties wardrobe one expects for a flick from this era. No one really has much conviction in their dialogue, which makes it hard to accept when geeky manager Phil does his comic relief simpleton act or groupie girlfriend Randy grabs her breasts to indicate her want for male companionship (let's just say) or when Stiggy....

Okay, gotta stop here and mention Stiggy at length. The actor's name playing him is Jim Cirile, he's only acted in two movies, he now owns and operates a movie script evaluation website and, as this character - who is supposed to be Australian - has what must be the absolute worst Australian accent this side of Yahoo Serious. At least Yahoo's originally Australian, though. Cirile grates on the nerves, his voice puts teeth on edge and makes small dogs sterile and makes you long for the subtlety and charisma of a nice young soccer hooligan. In short, Cirile gets my vote for worst actor ever. Ever.

Back to the movie now: At no point in this flick does the viewer expect or get anything more than an Evil Dead goof with Canadian ham aplenty and lots of "rock" songs (see the quotes, there?) throughout courtesy of our boy Thor. Songs like "(You Give Me) Energy" and "We Live to Rock" make you long for the days when bands like Ratt and Quiet Riot roamed the countryside freely, but do very little for setting the tone of what is supposedly a horror movie.

Just a minute, though: IS Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare supposed to be a horror movie? What with the abundance of comedy relief from every other character, the laughable demon puppets, stupid characters doing stupid things and the aforementioned denouement that will quite literally leave you staring with slack-jawed incredulity at your TV screen, this thing has more laughs that NBC Thursday Nights. You don't imagine that this was written, cast or directed with the firm conviction of scaring people. Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare looks to have been written with crayons on the side of a circus tent. Really.

This may be a bad film, but it's a bad film I can certainly get behind. When you watch Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare, all you find yourself thinking is, "who comes up with this crap?" Quite rightly too, all things made known.

Thor may not be that well known in general, for his music nor for his acting, but at least with Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare, he has given the world something to marvel over. Maybe not regard with the same kind of awe as a Bruce Campbell or a Vincent Price, but in a movie with rubber killer starfish and one-eyed gape-mouthed demon lumps with troll hairdos, you take what you can get.

My advice to you: find yourself a copy of Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare and, whatever you do, make sure you're sitting down for the last 30 minutes to make sure you are prepared for the most amazing ending to an Evil Dead ripoff ever. I mean it: you will be floored. And that's not the kind of comment I just throw about lightly. And don't you dare go on moviepooper.com and see what the ending is: get the movie and see for yourself - you won't be disappointed.

However, if you're a fan of The Evil Dead or Sam Raimi...you may very well be disappointed.

Pandemonium (1982)

Eureka.

I found it.

This is without a doubt the downright stupidest, most half-thought, overdone Airplane!- wannabe comedy I have ever seen in my life.

So why did I watch it over and over again every time it popped up on TV in my youth?

...besides the fact that I was a stupid young man and would tend to watch anything back then?

As I said, this is another comedy that throws every odd bit of business in its plot it can think of to try - never mind if it works or not - and hope for the best. For some movies it works (Airplane!, Top Secret!, The Naked Gun), but for others (Jekyll & Hyde...Together Again, The Underground Comedy Movie) it sure as heck doesn't work.

Director Alfred Sole, who is most famous for directing Communion (aka: Alice Sweet Alice, Holy Terror), that low-budget horror flick that starred Brooke Shields in her very first "big" role (take THAT, Louis Malle!), felt it would be a good idea to jump on the parody wagon and give the world a horror/mad slasher spoof.

Good idea; worked so well for movies like 1981's Student Bodies or 1982's Wacko.

Heard of 'em?

No?

EXACTLY.

In fact, after the advent of 1980's Airplane!, any movie that wanted to be a comedy felt it had to do as the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team did to guarantee its success. Dozens of films tried this and dozens of films failed. Any video store, in fact, would have rows of tapes with faded blue covers in their "Comedy" sections that attest to this fact.

There's something about Pandemonium, though. Watching it again as I did then, I was struck by the thought that maybe - just maybe - this could have worked.

It didn't, understand. But it could have.

How it goes down: in her youth, cheerleader-wannabe Bambi (Candace Azzara) is the only survivor of the horrible murder of several cheerleaders by shish-ka-bob (but not the way they did it in Happy Birthday to Me). Now older and operating her own cheerleader school, Bambi takes in a new group of young cheerleaders-in-training who are now systematically being murdered by an unseen assailant. Is it recently-escaped insane furniture maker/killer Jarrett (Richard Romanus)? Can the stalwart Mountie Cooper (Tommy Smothers - yes, of The Smothers Brothers) stop the onslaught? And what about Pee-Wee Herman? I don't care what part he's playing - it's PEE-WEE HERMAN!!! What's he up to??! Huh?!!

Many of you probably did an "ahhh yeah..." when you saw those names and you'll continue to do so when I rattle off the rest of the cast. Carol Kane, Debralee Scott, Miles Chapin, Marc McClure, Kaye Ballard, Donald O'Connor, Eve Arden, Judge Reinhold, Troy Donahue, Edie McClurg, John Paragon and Luca Brasi himself: Lenny Montana.

I know: wotta cast, huh?

Well...it's not like a gigantic comedy cast or anything that puts you in the mind of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. You recognize most of them as funny people who can raise a laugh or two when called to. At least, they can be funny when given funny things to say or do.

And that's the whole problem: writers Jaime Barton Klein and Richard Whitley seem to have been the class of writers who were somehow related to the producer's best friends or something, or worse yet had just got out of college with a collection of jokes and sight gags that seemed to be hilarious when they were hopped up on the hallucinogens of their choice.

For instance, the events are set in the small town of It Had To Be, Indiana, and Bambi's cheerleader college is called It Had To Be University...or It Had To Be U, cue the popular 1920s-era song. Ha ha?

Another couple of jokes rotate around the cheerleader students being named Candy, Mandy, Sandy, Randy, Andy and Glenn...Glenn Dandy. Naturally, Glenn is the outcast of the group.

There's also a couple of jokes dealing with the Japanese that just aren't funny. Not that they're all that demeaning or racist, they're just...bland. When you have a cameo by Godzilla that doesn't even raise a smile, maybe it should have been edited out.

One joke that was good was that the hero of the piece was a Mountie, since most all of these slasher movies of the Eighties were filmed and produced in the land of Our Neighbor to the North. Remember The Cunningham/Mancuso Directive?

The acting is the problem here. Everyone tries to overact their way around jokes and gags that aren't funny so often that they threaten to shake the film right off its sprockets. There is quite literally so much jumping around and running and wide eyes and overly-exaggerated facial tics that you'd think the actors didn't know they were using sound film and reverted back to the Mack Sennett school of filming.

Even Carol Kane, who is usually so funny and sweet in movies like Carnal Knowledge, Annie Hall and Harry and Walter Go to New York, struggles to pull off her slightly off-balance giddiness that so many other times was effortless. She even sounds forced when declaring her excitement at the prospect of finally using her diaphragm.

So this film was made. It must have been released to theaters at some point, if even for a week, out of contractual obligation. I wonder if anyone who saw this in a theater would admit it today? I wonder if any of the actors would admit remembering being in it, or pull a Richard Dreyfuss (a la Whose Life Is It Anyway?) and wash their hands of it?

This thing could have cost $500 to make and not only would I believe it, I would also believe if it never made back as much as half its budget.

Like I said earlier, this could have worked. With a better script, smarter ideas, if it wasn't so tightly-bound by its PG rating and had the nudity, blood and guts that were in the movies it was wanting to make fun of.

I think that was the biggest problem with Pandemonium - it was too afraid of offending anybody. It wanted to be cute and cuddly and have its Mad Slasher cake, too.

Just like every movie can't support a horse in full dress uniform, neither can any spoof film shy away from its subject matter. Wes Craven understood that with Scream, and that's why his series worked. Unfortunately, this is something Alfred Sole and company failed to realize.

Pandemonium: this is one movie that was aptly named.

By the way, did you know that co-writer Richard Whitley also co-wrote that classic musical Rock and Roll High School? Talk about two extremes....

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.