OK, why did I watch Prom Night? I mean, basically, it is on my Fill-In Filmography poster. I’m not sure why it is, but it is. I don’t question the poster’s selections anymore. I just assume they needed 1,500 entries and went with anything even remotely memorable in some categories. But there are other movies on the poster I haven’t gotten to yet. Why this one at this moment?
Eh, mostly because it featured Leslie Nielsen in a dramatic role from the same year Airplane! came out and reinvented his career.
In 1974, four kids–three girls and a boy–taunt a little girl until she falls through an upper-story window to her accidental death. The four decide to never tell anyone what happened. A few years later, the kids are now teenagers getting ready for their prom. The young girl’s sister Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) is among them, dating the boy Nick (Casey Stevens). The girls–Wendy (Eddie Benton), Jude (Joy Thompson), and Kelly (Mary Beth Rubens)–all received and dismissed what sounded like obscene phone calls but were perhaps a bit more threatening. Meanwhile, Kim’s brother Alex (Michael Tough) and father (Nielsen) are also prepping for the prom. Alex is a student, obviously, and a protective brother at that, and Nielsen’s character is also the school principal.
Well, the kids should have paid attention to those calls because there’s a deranged killer out there targeting them and their respective dates. It sure seems to be connected to the death from the opening scene, but who even knows about it? The cops are on duty on the lookout for another escaped killer, a sex offender that was officially charged with the girl’s death. Is it him? Someone else? And will any of these alleged teenagers survive?
Yeah, I know most teens in movies like this are played by actors in their twenties, but I couldn’t quite accept it this time, particularly Curtis. She made Halloween two years earlier, and I thought she was a little too mature to play a high school student then. She also had The Fog come out the same year as Prom Night, and she was playing an adult character in that one, and she’s only a couple years away from Coming to America. Now, in a good enough movie, I might overlook how much the actors are clearly older than their roles. But for something like Prom Night, I just can’t.
This really isn’t a very good movie. The mystery killer doesn’t pop up until near the end, and much of the movie is spent trying to get to know these paper-thin characters. Nielsen does OK, all things being equal, and the movie even tries to make it look like he’s the killer when he disappears at one point and doesn’t come back. There are the usual half-assed deaths meant to look creative, teenagers behaving badly and paying for it in that genre’s own style of morality, and finally, it ends and I was left unimpressed. But I stopped questioning my Fill-In Filmography a while ago.
Grade: C-
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