Census Bloodbath: Eh-Merica

Year: 1983
Director: Don McBrearty
Cast: Lawrence Day, Lora Staley, Neil Dainard
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

American Nightmare might just be the most Canadian slasher movie ever made, and that includes the title that cravenly wants you to think it's from the U.S. In front of and behind the camera is a coterie of Canadian slasher royalty, including screenwriter John Sheppard (Mark of Cain), producer Paul Lynch (who directed Prom Night and Humongous), composer Paul Zaza (Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Ghostkeeper, Curtains, and Body Count), and the word "abote." And the director doesn't have other credits in this marathon, but he does in another because somehow, some way he ended up directing a million Hallmark Christmas movies including Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe.

Now it's the accepted party line that Canadian slashers are of a piece a step above their American brethren, so let's kick the tires on that theory with the ne plus ultra of Canadian crews, shall we?

Pour some maple syrup on your popcorn and get to reading.

In American Nightmare, Eric (Lawrence Day) arrives in an unnamed American city (Toronto) to investigate the disappearance of his sister Isabelle (Alexandra Paul). He quickly discovers that she has been mixed up in the seedy underbelly of the city, namely a local strip club. The local detective (Mike Ironside, better known to everyone who isn't the credits designer on this movie as Michael Ironside, also of Visiting Hours and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II) isn't super invested, so Eric enlists the help of stripper with a heart of gold Louise (Lora Staley).

All the while, a killer wearing an evil beret and a pair of clear gloves is stalking people involved in the club, including dancers Tina (Lenore Zann of Happy Birthday to Me, Visiting Hours, and Murder by Phone) and Andrea (Claudia Udy of Edge of Sanity and Skullduggery), as well as transvestite Dolly (Larry Aubrey). Oh, and also Eric's father Hamilton Blake (Tom Harvey) owns a TV station with his business partner Tony (Neil Dainard of The Incubus) that is putting on a huge New Year's Day telethon for UniSave, which is something something underprivileged children. Suspects include Tina's boyfriend Mark (Page Fletcher of Humongous), and literally any other man onscreen for any amount of time.

Men! What would we do without them?

There are two types of exploitation slasher movies. There is the kind where everyone is in on the joke and ready to have fun embracing the over-the-top ridiculousness of it (usually teenybopper sex romps full of boobs and bloody murder ie. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter), and then there is the kind where everything is just grimy and sleazy and makes you want to take a shower afterward (anything focused on horrible rape, sweat dripping down a maniacal man's face, etc., ie. Don't Answer the Phone). It's all a matter of tone.

American Nightmare is somewhere in the middle. It doesn't have the finesse of Visiting Hours to position itself as a commentary on the misogyny of its killer, or the benefit of having a female director like the later (but similar) Stripped to Kill. But it has its merits in its own idiosyncratic, lopsided way. In the negative column, the kills are more brutally functional than creative (lots of slits throats and angry choking), and are thus pretty rough to watch. It's easier to watch annoying upper middle class teenagers get bumped off than sex workers who deserve better. Don't ask me why. Slasher viewer ethics are a gray area at all times.

But, on the plus side, American Nightmare takes the Stripped to Kill approach of including burlesque sequences that are of course meant to titillate, but also have an explicit interest of showing off a variety of talented women expressing themselves. And the characterization of the women is deeper than one might expect from the slasher genre. Hell, just a few entries ago, we reviewed Boardinghouse, where every female character was like the Phoebe Cates pool scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High had a baby with a wooden block.

There is a great deal of empathy in the portrayals here, especially Louise, who genuinely likes her job even though in some respects she is trapped in it (note the freedom she feels while performing topless vs. the torment and horror when she attends a TV audition and is forced to take off her clothes - powerfully performed by Staley). This movie posits that sex workers are real people with real feelings who deserve respect, even as it brutally punishes them with violent death. In a way, the movie is doing its job. It makes you care for its characters (including Dolly, who would probably have identified as transgender in a modern milieu, and is given an unusual depth of emotion for 1982) and thus infuses the murder scenes with extremely high stakes. 

Maybe it's harder for the slasher genre to express both sides of the body count coin when it's dealing with typically oppressed people, because - intentional or not - the themes of these movies do tend to politically align the audience in some way with the killer's actions. Note how the killer only targets women and queer people, not the straight white pimp who is actually responsible for the crime he wants revenge against.

Honestly I don't have an answer here. Let me move on before this becomes a full-on thesis.

There's a great deal of good or at least above average in American Nightmare. It's frequently well lit and occasionally throws in a pretty shot or two for good measure. And it's part of a time honored slasher tradition of being a secret Christmas movie (the impending telethon is on New Year's Day after all, and there are some threadbare Christmas trees tucked into corners). Plus Lenore Zann is intensely compelling with her huge, glistening doe eyes.

Honestly, the only weak spots in the acting are Day and Harvey as father and son. Their climactic confrontation is frankly baffling to witness. One flatly intones accusations while the other mutters lines under his breath that should have been shouted. It's all very high school one act festival. But really the only thing holding me back from giving this a full-fledged 7/10 is the extremely complicated feelings that led me to philosophize for objectively too many paragraphs earlier. All in all, not a bad start for my first real attempt at tackling 1983!

Killer: Tony Shaw (Neil Dainard)
Final Girl: Louise (Lora Staley)
Best Kill: I can't say I really liked any of these kills, but Dolly's murder, where they are lifted off the ground by the killer's sheer strength is pretty impactful.
Sign of the Times: There's a loooooot of business with VHS tapes going on.
Scariest Moment: The killer puts on vinyl gloves right after washing his hands, which I can tell you from experience over a year of quarantine is a recipe for disaster.
Weirdest Moment: Eric sits down to a movie marathon of his sister's sex tapes (to discover the identity of the killer, but still).
Champion Dialogue: "Things are really bumming out for me."
Body Count: 6

1. Isabelle has her throat slashed with a straight razor.
2. Andrea is drowned in the bathtub.
3. Dolly is stabbed in the gut.
4. Tina has her throat slit.
5. Hamilton Blake shoots himself.
6. Tony Shaw is pushed off a roof.

TL;DR: American Nightmare is grossly exploitative, but also has a surprisingly deep approach to character that redeems it somewhat.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1258

Corn This Way

Year: 2001

Director: Guy Magar

Cast: Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside 

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm starting to think that the period of me liking the Children of the Corn movies, which lasted much longer than anyone could have possibly anticipated or hoped for, is well and truly over. The general response I get when I tell people I've set out to watch all ten of these movies is "ugh, why?" and now at part seven, "ugh, why?" is unfortunately kind of becoming my mantra. 

My face as the credits have rolled on the past two movies.

Children of the Corn: Revelation is one of those ever-unpopular Dimension cash-in sequels where they presumably took a script for some unproduced movie, spruced it up with some corn and a passing mention to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and passed it off as an entry in a franchise nobody had any reason to care about anyway. Hooray!

So here we have Jamie (Claudette Mink), a young woman with so little inner life that even the corn husks are more engaging presences. She has arrived at the Hampton Arms condominium in Omaha to search for her missing grandmother. The building was recently condemned, and for good reason. It's a rotting mess filled with "eccentric" characters who are also rotting messes. 

Her most friendly and likable new neighbor is Tiffany (Crystal Lowe of Final Destination 3), the stripper whose character trait is "takes off her shirt later." But we also have Jerry (Troy Yorke), the stoner building manager; a hilariously awful paraplegic who rolls around in his wheelchair cursing at the top of his lungs and is billed as Cranky Man (John Destry); and the truly mystifying Stan (Michael Rogers), who is a mostly shirtless paranoiac and is illegally growing tomatoes in the basement for unexplained reasons. Not that I asked.

While Jamie enlists the help of local detective Armbrister (Kyle Cassie) to dig up dirt on her grandma, she keeps seeing creepy blonde children wander around the complex and as the residents begin to be murdered one by one after receiving corn husk wreaths on their doors, she... well, she doesn't really notice for a very long time, but it might just be connected to her grandmother's disappearance. Spoiler alert: It is.

Also Michael Ironside is in approximately 22.3 seconds of the film as a priest who does exactly nothing. Honestly, I'd take Karen Allen doing nothing any day, because at least her hair was great.

It's really difficult to pinpoint what exactly is the worst thing about Revelation (and oh, how telling it is that they've finally stopped numbering these movies), but I think I'd like to start with Jamie. Her complete lack of interiority is endemic to every aspect of the film. We know nothing about where she has come from, what she did or how she lived before this moment where we get to watch her be creeped out by ten-year-olds with bags under their eyes. Everyone in the movie is like this, from the lazily archetypical boy preacher Abel (Sean Smith) to the detective who is so weakly positioned as a love interest that you might be mistaken for thinking he's just an extra. It's damning that the character who gets the most backstory is Tiffany, who gets two scenes and one of them is a bubble bath where she gets murdered by stalks of corn.

The whole movie is just empty, wandering aimlessly through a mystery that solves itself via a dream sequence before the halfway mark and then wandering aimlessly through a spate of murders that feature not one wisp of the fun special effects that have marked at least one scene in every previous entry (most deaths involve dummies falling from high places, and the aforementioned Tiffany death - which is by far the most interesting - is much too dark and poorly edited to have any sense of what's actually happening). It doesn't even pull in very many markers of the mythology of the previous films, not that any of these movies have been particularly consistent or good about that. But any link to those entries that I kinda sorta occasionally liked would have been more satisfying than this unmoored wreck that drifts off into infinity for 82 minutes.

At the very very infinitesimally least, they remembered that these kids MUST have weird hats.

There are only two reasons that I haven't consigned this movie to the purgatory of evacuating every single detail of it from my brain immediately, much like I have done with the previous entry Isaac's Return. First, there are a couple non sequitur gags that would have been satisfying in a movie that took its "killer kid" concept to a campy fun extreme (a game of pattycake with a severed hand, and a girl playing hopscotch on a Pentagram). Second, there at least is an attempt at atmosphere here. The crumbling apartment complex is in all honesty not a bad setting to have around, and the flashing green light in the emergency stairwell gives it a bit of character that shows at least one person was attempting to do something with this movie.

Mind you, that's the only attempt at style that actually succeeds in any way. Two late sequences where characters discover a herd of evil children in the hallway as presented via alternately a swim fisheye lens and night vision goggles cut incessantly back and forth and drill their attempt at spooky imagery so far into your skull that it shoots right out the back.

And as much as the effects have been dodgy in this franchise from the beginning, nobody should have told this team about CGI. We're treated to a million useless shots of CGI corn rising from the ground that have zero weight or physicality and could have just used actual corn. It's corn! It's not expensive! 

It's ironic that so little effort was put into the movie, because it takes such a Herculean effort to sit through the entire thing without drifting right to sleep. If you see this movie in your local Walmart discount barrel, walk the other way immediately and don't look back.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Revelation is not as much of an abomination as the previous entry, but that's the only thing keeping it going.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1064

Reviews In This Series

Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)

Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)

Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)

Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)

Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Census Bloodbath: Intensive Scare Unit

For our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Jean-Claude Lord

Cast: Lee Grant, Michael Ironside, Linda Purl

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

For all their reputation of politeness, the Canadians really know what they’re doing when it comes to making movies about serial murder. On average, any Canadian slasher flick is miles ahead of its U. S. counterpart. My Bloody Valentine is way more loveable than the thematically similar The Prowler, the States’ Bloody Birthday couldn’t hold a candle to Happy Birthday To Me, Terror Train rattles the fraternity prank revenge flick Hell Night right off its track, and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is pretty much the Empire Strikes Back of slasherdom.

Sure, they’ve made their share of duds (I regret renting a tux for Prom Night and Humongous has miniscule worth), but in general the country knows what’s up when it comes to sticking sharp objects in people. Which is how we come to Visiting Hours, a 1982 hospital slasher that came late in the game but still lacerates the competition. Halloween II might be the medical horror people put on a pedestal form that era, but Visiting Hours is a filthy, gorgeous thoughtful treat.

As if we needed any more reasons to be scared of hospitals. Did you know they keep sick people there?

In Visiting Hours, outspoken TV anchorwoman Deborah Balin (Lee Grant) espouses nonviolent philosophies and vows to defend a woman who is being tried for shooting her husband after he beat her. Unfortunately this sets off misogynist serial killer Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside of – drumroll – Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II), a daddy’s boy whose mother severely burned his father after he hit her. After Colt attacks Deborah in her home, she is sent to County General Hospital to recuperate.

As she heals with the help of devoted/elfin and gorgeous nurse Sheila (Linda Purl) and her doting producer/boyfriend Gary Baylor (William Shatner of William Shatner), Colt stalks her over the course of Labour Day weekend. It’s a holiday, he can afford to take his time with it. Killers need to relax, too. In his deadly pursuit, he murders anystaff or patients who get in his way.

This is not, shall we say, a trivial pursuit.

The really exciting thing about Visiting Hours is that – uniquely in the slasher genre – it doesn’t just depict violence against women, it’s about violence against women. At every level, in nearly every scene, Visiting Hours engages with the real problems that manifest both in society and the media. Of course this means that the film isn’t free from the unpleasantness of those very same films, occasionally dipping into the post-grindhouse unpleasantness akin to Don’t Answer the Phone or Eyes of a Stranger.

But despite its scuzziness (most prevalent in a pretty arbitrary sequence I dubbed the Rape Interlude), Visiting Hours never asks you to enjoy the violence you’re watching. That’s a very important distinction, and its unrelenting focus brings it to a level that very few slashers even dream of reaching: it’s actually scary. From the opening attack on, Visiting Hours toys with your nerves, constructing tension sequences with all the right ingredients: well rounded, sympathetic characters, unpredictable outcomes, and multiple threads coming together for a big reveal.

The whole thing culminates in a Final Girl sequence so drawn-out and harrowing that she can hardly even scream by the end. Deborah is vulnerable, resourceful, indomitable, and very worthy of being at the center of the most meaningful character arc of early 80’s slasherdom. [SPOILERS This nonviolent woman is relentlessly pursued by Colt – an emissary of the rampant cult (geddit?) of misogyny. He so doggedly attacks her that she is eventually driven to thwart he ironclad morals and end her suffering with a violent act: gutting Colt like a fish. She is a pacifist driven to violence by a patriarchal society that devalues women and only creates more evil in the world.] It might not be perfectly expressed, but damn if it isn’t one of the most engaging slasher storylines I’ve seen in months.

And that’s saying something. Pray for me.

Happily, much of the grittiness of Colt Hawker is scrubbed away by either circumstances (the girl he brings home to torment later plays a key role in his downfall) or a hearty inoculation of camp. Because you can’t have existed in 1982 without being inherently embarrassing, there’s plenty of silly moments to cheer you up. A big source of amusement is the fact that Colt Hawker changes costumes more often than a Lady Gaga concert, including a bizarre tribal getup complete with clip-on piercings. He actually stops to change in the middle of a chase sequence! My current working theory is that Visiting Hours is an aborted prequel to the Dana Carvey classic, Master of Disguise.

Another plot point that will have you and your friends debating for hours is Sheila’s “babysitter.” She’s always around, has no qualms about using the shower or the bed, and drapes herself lovingly over the duvet wrapped only in a towel. They’re about as explicit as a lesbian couple could get back in the day, while remaining maddeningly determined to act like there’s nothing unusual going on beyond being the hired help.

Although my dream job does involve nobody giving a damn what I wear, so maybe she just hooked it up.

As if that weren’t enough, the movie is just plain good. I know I’m a sucker for a bold color scheme, but the hospital exterior and many key scenes are lit with a chilling blue that creates a dark fairy tale atmosphere that’s hard to shake off. The cinematography is as classically skillful as Canadians could get, and they’re even on the ball enough to sneak in a little symbolism hither and thither.

So there you have it. Visiting Hours is a fun, well constructed, frightening, smart, satisfying slasher flick. The fact that I could write for this long without even bringing up William Shatner speaks to how arresting it is. I do wish that some of Colt’s scenes were a little less… rapey, but they’re tolerably managed and play a huge part in the thesis of the film. Oh, Canada. What would I do without you?

Killer: Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside)

Final Girl: Deborah Balin (Lee Grant)

Best Kill: An elderly patient has her air tube cut and Colt takes her picture as she asphyxiates.

Sign of the Times: Lisa wears a leather jacket over a hot pink outfit with diagonal stripes and she isn’t arrested.

Scariest Moment: Sheila gets a call revealing that the killer is at home with her daughter.

Weirdest Moment: Colt squeezes a stress ball as he murders people.

Champion Dialogue: “You’ve got a lot of friends. Or else you know a lot of florists.”

Body Count: 7

1. Francine is killed offscreen.
2. Mrs. Corrigan has her air tube cut.
3. Connie is stabbed in the gut.
4. Vinnie is stabbed in the chest.
5. Cop #1 is thrown through a window.
6. Cop #2 has his jaw broken.
7. [Colt is gutted.]

TL;DR: Visiting Hours is a grimy but intelligent slasher that engages very well with the violence against women inherent to the genre.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1210

Census Bloodbath: A Nightmare at Hamilton High

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Year: 1987

Director: Bruce Pittman

Cast: Wendy Lyon, Louis Ferreria, Lisa Schrage

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This movie exemplifies why I love the Prom Night series. A solid seven years after the original, which was a fairly solid but bland slasher, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II comes screeching into the mix, throwing around a myriad of paranormal incidents and downright bonkers effects sequences that are completely 100% divorced from the idea of Jamie Lee Curtis' friends being picked off one by one.

Whereas Prom Night was more of a riff on Halloween, Hello Mary Lou owes just as much to A Nightmare on Elm Street as it does to Carrie. It just goes to show that after Wes Craven came along to put in his two cents with his phantasmagoric special effects masterpiece, all the big slasher franchises made wild right turns to follow suit.

The only character from the original that returns is Hamilton High School (Although it is played by a different building. The original let fame get to its head and had an outrageous asking price.), which we revisit during Prom Night 1957. Don't you dare forget that. 1957. 1957. 1957. It's 1957. There. You have just experienced the written transcript of the first scene. 

Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is a maneating vixen and has no qualms about leaving her prom date, Billy, in the dust to go make out with Buddy Cooper behind the stage ("It's not who you come with. It's who takes you home." - Literally the only tie-in with the original aside from the name of the high school). Billy gets jealous and decides to get even by releasing a stink bomb from the rafters as Mary Lou is being crowned Queen of the 1957 Prom.

Unfortunately things go awry and Carrie White Mary Lou accidentally burns to death before she can wear her crown. Cut to Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), an innocuous Hamilton High student, thirty years later. Although there is no title card to tell us that it's 1987, her hair gets the job done.

Thanks for the heads up.

Her mother is a devout Christian woman who doesn't tolerate such heathen things as motorcycle boyfriends and brand new prom dresses, the former of which Vicki has, and the latter of which she wants.

When her mom puts her foot down (she can't get money from her dad because he cosigns checks with his wife like a fool), Vicki goes to search the prop closet of the school drama department. Instead of finding an assortment of battered cutlery, an out of tune piano, and 800 trench coats like you would if you searched my high school drama department's closet, she finds an old trunk with memorabilia from PROM 1957 !!! !!! !!!

When her friend Jess (Beth Gondek) breaks one of the jewels off of the crown, she unwittingly releases the ghost of Mary Lou Maloney, who promptly strangles her with a prom cape (this is a thing in Canada maybe) and makes it look like suicide. Oh, and Jess is pregnant. Yeah, that happened. Things just got real.

Now that she's out, all Mary Lou wants is three things: revenge on the man who killed her, who is now the principal (Michael Ironside, an actual actor! What?), the title of Prom Queen, and a brand new body to celebrate in.

Poor sweet Vicki is slowly going insane with hallucinations of Mary Lou as she tries to possess her body. She is becoming more rebellious against her mother as the downright sacrilegious (and F-bomb spewing) Mary Lou starts winning the battle.

Also Vicki's friends die sometimes because this is a slasher movie after all.

Real quick, here's the Meat: Kelly (Terri Hawkes), who has a valley girl accent, pastel eyeshadow, and a mean demeanor (I was super confused, because in the previous film I kept mixing up Kelly the bland one with Wendy the evil one. As soon as I got that straight, this was thrown into the mix. Not cool, guys); Monica (Beverly Hendry), Vicki's best friend who laments not finding a date to the prom in the middle of shooting down a boy; Craig (Louis Ferreria), the motorcycle-riding principal's son who is also Vicki's loving boyfriend; and Josh (Brock Simpson, who played Young Nick in the original Prom Night), the lovable A.V. nerd.

A moment of silence for the death of the A.V. Club. Apple has ruined high school for us all.

That was a lot of words. Here's a picture of a scary horse to spice things up.

I'm sorry I'm still on plot summary, but this movie endlessly fascinates me.

Mary Lou finally accomplishes possessing Vicki through a variety of special effects setpieces (including a Water Fountain of Blood, a weird cockroach-filled dystopian lunchroom, a whirlpool chalkboard, and Evil Volleyball.) and the new Vicki spouts 50's slang and oozes sexuality.

Maybe this is a good time to mention her four minute nude scene. Maybe not. OK, I'll wrap up quick. Mary Lou and Billy are trying to kill each other, and Craig is trying to save Vicki and get rid of Mary Lou for good. 

Things get super weird and Mary Lou kills a series of people and rigs the election, but before she can be crowned Bill shoots Vicki's body, at which point Mary Lou's corpse bursts out of her skin to attack the prom and kill Craig but his father shows up to give Mary Lou the crown and they make out and she fades away and then her grave explodes and then there's a tacked on shock ending.

Whoops, spoilers.

Ain't no thang.

Do I even need to mention the performances are mostly bad? I haven't been noting that in these reviews, I just figured that was a given. Likewise, the directing has lost its personality and spark. Although there is a clear predilection for looming shots of buildings, the forces behind the camera feel mostly anonymous. Fortunately, it's what's in front of the camera that's important.

Like this little beauty.

Watching the film over again makes me wonder if I should include A Nightmare on Elm Street in my body count calculation because this film clearly murdered that one and rifled through its pockets. Vicki is attacked by bedsheets, Mary Lou scrapes her nails against a locker like Freddy's claws, the hanging scene is exactly like Rod's prison cell, and the plot is also eerily similar to the sequel, Freddy's Revenge in which Freddy takes advantage of a boy's burgeoning sexuality to take over his body and murder people.

The clincher? The science teacher is named Mr. Craven.

Right through the heart.

With the religious undertones of Carrie and the everything of Nightmare, this film could easily be a ripoff but it has so much energy and kooky charm that it plays it off perfectly.

Although there are spurts of post-Jason Lives meta comedy (a Linda Blair reference, a funeral sermon mentions the negative impact of violent movies), this movie plays it straight, much to its benefit. It is so much more fun when your stupid movies spend more time being stupid than making fun of their own stupidity, although I do love myself some meta humor.

It's cheesy, it's fun, and Schrage eats it up despite her limited screentime. There's a scene where she goes to confession and it's honestly one of my favorite cheesy movie scenes in the entire world. She's gorgeous and hammy and perfect, embracing - and embodying - how loopy the whole thing is and when I said Hello Mary Lou, I had to say Goodbye Heart.

It's a Prom Night I want to remember forever.

Cassidy: "Why does something have to blow up at the end of every 80's movie?"

Killer: Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage)

Final Girl: Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon)

Best Kill: A girl hides in a locker, but is crushed into a jelly. A wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom.

Sign of the Times: Ladies and gentlemen... Jess.

Scariest Moment: This freaking rocking horse

Weirdest Moment: Vicki (possessed by Mary Lou) makes out with her dad.

Champion Dialogue: "She looks like she's in a fashion coma."

Body Count: It's hard to tell because the ending is a little wonky, but I can feel pretty confident saying 8, counting Mary Lou.

1. Mary Lou burns to death at her prom.
2. Jess is hung by a prom cape.
3. Buddy is stabbed in the face with a crucifix.
4. Monica is crushed inside a locker.
5. Virginia is blown through a glass door by telekinesis.
6. Josh is electrocuted through a computer.
7. Kelly is impaled by a falling light.
8. Principal Bill is possessed by the spirit of Mary Lou. 

TL;DR: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is weird and wonderful.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1477

Reviews In This Series

Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver/Simpson, 1990)

Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil (Borris, 1992)

Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)