Prom Night '80

A lot of people I knew were very pissed off when the Prom Night remake came out. By now everyone knows Prom Night is one of the worst things to happen to horror since Romero made Bruiser. But the original, with all it’s nostalgic praise, it’s really not that good. The plot deals with a bunch of kids who accidentally kill a young girl. Hoping to hell not to get caught, they make a pact so that nobody finds out what they’ve done. But somebody saw, and many years later a killer starts cutting them all off during their Prom Night. Yes, I Know What You Did Last Summer obviously ripped this off, but it’s a very simple and effective way to get the plot going. The movie has some good points going for it, particularly in the acting.
All of the teens seem very realistic, unlike in many of these slashers, and we get some cool performances from veterans like Leslie Nielsen, who I thought would be hilarious if he was the killer since he is, after all, the Naked Gun guy. But the movie goes downhill thanks to it’s many red herrings, it’s unsuspenseful murder-set-pieces and a very non-scary killer. I know they probably wanted to make it realistic, but it just doesn’t intimidate too much, he looks to scrawny and thin. I could beat him up. There’s also the infamous disco sequence, which is sort of a joke already but it’s still very surreal and hard to believe somebody put on so much screen time for this scene in a time when disco was already dying. Somebody didn’t want it to in this movie, that’s for sure! Anyway, it’s influential, but over-rated.