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

Census Bloodbath: Keep It

Year:1982
Director: Jim Makichuk
Cast: Riva Spier, Murray Ord, Sheri McFadden
Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Holiday-themed movies are anything but uncommon in the 80's slasher genre. The only thing odd about encountering one set on New Year's Eve as we continue our journey through 1982 is the fact that the entire film isn't built around the holiday. In fact, I've never seen Ghostkeeper on any list of holiday slashers. Sure, it barely uses any tropes or signposts of the holiday beyond a couple mentions of the year to come, but that doesn't stop people from recognizing that same year's Humongous for taking place on Labor Day, something only mentioned in a title card. To find out why this movie isn't getting its name out there, let's dive in deeper, shall we?

Oops. Too deep! Too deep!

Ghostkeeper is not as lurid as the title might make it sound, but it's still a slasher that goes pretty damn far off model. For one thing, the potential body count is stymied by an incredibly small cast. Three city folk - Jenny (Riva Spier), whose only character trait is that her mother was institutionalized and she worries about her own mental health; Marty (Murray Ord), Jenny's boyfriend who is an unbelievably douchey prep; and Chrissy (Sheri McFadden), a sexed-up blonde who transparently wants to sleep with Marty - go off snowmobiling while bored on the morning of New Year's Eve. When the snow starts coming down hard, they hole up at Deer Lodge, an abandoned ski resort higher up in the mountains.

They think they're alone, but they soon meet an old woman credited only as Ghostkeeper (Georgie Collins), who spends a lot of time refusing to answer their questions in anything but gruff, elliptical vagaries. She also mentions she has a son hanging around her somewhere. Naturally, the young folks begin dying, but with such a small platter of meat, this takes a bit longer than usual. It begins to come to light (pretty much only because of a title card explaining it before the credits even roll) that this lodge is now the home of a windigo, described in this case as a "ghost who lives on human flesh." This doesn't really matter because the director ran out of money before being able to include pretty much anything actually with the windigo, who is depicted in the few shots he's in as a man with a bunch of dirt on his face.

Spoooooooky.

Ghostkeeper is an early 80's slasher hailing from Canada (which I could have told you even without looking it up, thanks to the copious "sore-y's," "eh's," and the presence of composer Paul Zaza), and that's usually a good sign. But there's a reason it ain't ending up on any Canadian slasher lists either: nobody wants to claim this movie for themselves.

The movie starts off by banking a whole bunch of goodwill. The chilly, snowbound atmosphere is a fun wintry blanket to wrap yourself up in, and the Deer Lodge is an excellent location. There's something deeply alluring about abandoned places, and the trio's exploration of empty restaurants and ballrooms is eerily enticing. If anything, this setting draws a straight line between the elegant chills of The Shining and the frigid slasher efficacy of Cold Prey.

Unfortunately, once the plot kicks in, Ghostkeeper almost immediately begins to squander all that goodwill. The slasher movie mainstay of having characters wander down dark hallways arrives in full force here, padding the time that should have been filled with more kills, then the time where there should have been a monster. Essentially, if there's a genre we can call "Hallway," Ghsotkeeper fits into that way more than it does "Horror."

Exhibit A.

It's a shame, because there are some solid elements floating around in the primordial ooze that could be creepy if they were implemented properly. For a film so cheap and so devoted to not actually killing anybody, there are some really decent gore effects. They don't push the envelope in any way, but they're rendered with more realism than one might reasonably expect from a C-picture like this. And I do want to commend the work of Georgie Collins, whose hoarse whisper and erratic physical performance craft a character who is uncanny and exhilarating to be around.

Unfortunately, her screen time is relatively small, and the other characters are wallpaper when they're not being exquisitely irritating. Jenny's constant monologuing about her vague sub-Hereditary backstory fail to crack onto any sort of pathos, Chrissy is shallow and vapid, and Marty is perhaps the most casually cruel individual to ever walk the earth. It's a curiosity why any woman would be interested in anything about him other than his jawline. He mercilessly mocks any living being he finds himself in close contact with, and has two moments alone with Jenny where he behaves almost like a mad dictator.

Ghostkeeper is a profoundly empty movie, a fact that's made even more painful by the way it squanders an excellent setting and a promising villain. It's far from the worst slasher I've watched for this project. It's not even the worst slasher of the summer of '82. But I can't think of any reason to recommend it to anybody at any time. Maybe if you're a completist of the smallish sub-subgenre of New Year's Horror, but I'm afraid if that's the case, you're even more far gone than Yours Truly.

Killer: Ghostkeeper (Georgie Collins), her son, and oddly not the Windigo
Final Girl: Jenny (Riva Spier)
Best Kill: Chrissy is drowned in the bathtub, but when the movie cuts back to her she's still alive for some reason so her throat is slashed, in a pretty solid effect.
Sign of the Times: The waist of Jenny's pants might literally be high enough to cover her nipples.
Scariest Moment: During a fireside hangout, Marty begins to sing a horribly racist parody of the Mexican song "Cielito Lindo," which is a pretty deep thing to know if you're gonna be a bigot.
Weirdest Moment: After Jenny kills the Ghostkeeper's son, Marty goes completely mad and rubs grease all over his face, babbling incoherently.
Champion Dialogue: "I should learn never to go places with geological engineers."
Body Count: 6; 2 by the son, 1 by the mother, 2 by Jenny, and 1 by an act of nature.

1. Man is speared in the gut.
2. Chrissy has her throat slashed.
3. Ghostkeeper's Son is impaled on a metal fence.
4. Hiker is stabbed.
5. Ghostkeeper is shot in the gut.
6. Marty freezes to death.

TL;DR: Ghostkeeper starts off strong, but deflates slowly across its tedious run time.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1114

Census Bloodbath: Ice To Skate You

Year: 1983

Director: Jonathan Stryker

Cast: John Vernon, Samantha Eggar, Linda Thorson 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's the accepted party line in the slasher fandom that Canadian slashers are as a whole superior to their American counterparts, and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. However, for every Visiting Hours or My Bloody Valentine, there's a Prom Night or Humongous (come to think of it, maybe I'm just not a Paul Lynch fan). But Paul Lynch had nothing to do with Curtains, a movie that was created by a Who's Who of Canadian slashmakers, including composer Paul Zaza, producer Peter R. Simpson, and Funeral Home and Happy Birthday to Me actress Lesleh Donaldson. So I guess there's a hole in that theory, because Curtains is an absolute mess.

And not just because they left doll heads all littered about.

Curtains is a uniquely unfocused film due to its notorious troubled production, a three-year exercise in frustrating rewrites and additional photography that led the director to remove his name from the project entirely. At first it's about actress Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar), who is preparing for a role in her director boyfriend Jonathan Stryker's (John Vernon) upcoming movie about an insane woman. She's method (AKA irritating) so she wants to be checked into a mental institution, which Stryker helps her accomplish before completely abandoning her and refusing to check her out. That's one way to ghost somebody you're dating.

Cut to years later and he's prepping for the very same film once more, gathering six young actresses from all over into his secluded cabin for a weekend of hardcore auditioning. They wonder what his scheme could possibly be, because they're all so very different. What right do a skinny white lady with short hair and a skinny white lady with long hair have to audition for the same part?

Anyway, there's clearly no possible way this could go wrong. Of course, Samantha breaks out of the institution at the exact same time that the girls he's gathered start dying off one by one? Is this the work of a jealous, aged actress? Is one of the young and hungry actresses a little too hungry? Or is Stryker just the psychosexual maniac the whole premise of this film would show him to be?

But seriously, I have no answers about the dolls. Don't even ask.

The reason Curtains enjoys any sort of cult status must be the ice skating scene. For one thing, it's the only scene I seem to be able to find screen grabs of online. For the other, it's the only scene that is actually creepy or remarkable, and it's a heck of a lot of both. The killer, bestowed in their trademark "hag" mask, skates after one of the girls bearing a curved scythe, and the film's music and cinematography lurch into pure psychedelia. In or out of context, it's an off-kilter and exciting moment, but it's a diamond in a whole lot of rough.

Unfortunately, not a single one of the other kills in the film are an ounce as outré or exciting. The bulk of the deaths in the back half are relegated offscreen, and the ones we do get to see are bloodless and uneventful. I definitely think there's something there in the killer's getup, thematically evoking the fear and horror of women aging out of Hollywood, but other than Samantha Sherwood being a delightful vamp, the film doesn't seem particularly interested in pulling at that thread. 

Also, I'm sure the months and months it was knocking around in the back of some producer's trunk probably helped with its uncanny, withered look.

Really, pretty much every element of Curtains is lacking in one way or another, especially the plot, which is meandering nonsense. I know it took three years to make, but it shouldn't feel like it takes three years to watch. There is no apparent structure to the film, which makes it difficult to set up the series of red herrings and twists that a whodunit like this desperately needs. 

Even if it doesn't have that, the whodunit at least needs to have who's that "it" is done to. OK, that line might not have worked, but I'm saying the characters are entirely interchangeable. It's even more ironic that the girls are so perplexed by how deeply different they are because I literally had to look up a plot synopsis to figure out who died when. I usually have a Meet the Meat segment in my plot synopsis where I run through all the characters and their one personality trait, but I don't think this collected group of six girls has two interesting traits to rub together. The only one of them who's had a career worth mentioning anyway is Sandee Currie, who played Mitchy in Terror Train. Here she's a character called Tara, who... does something, I guess.

Curtains isn't necessarily a bad film, but it's just so thoroughly unremarkable that every detail slides right out of your brain by the time the credits roll. It certainly joins the pile of exceptions to the Canadian slasher rule, though. I will always perk up when I see a movie in the schedule that hails from the Great White North, but if there are more cracks in the armor like this one, that enthusiasm may fade sooner than later.

Killer: [Patti (Lynne Griffin)]

Final Girl: Patti (Lynne Griffin)

Best Kill: C'mon.

Sign of the Times: A man suggests Pac-Man themed role-play.

Scariest Moment: The mask is pretty creepy.

Weirdest Moment: There are definitely parts where this movie wants us to think a sentient doll is the killer, at least for a couple seconds at a time.

Champion Dialogue: "All's fair in love and auditions."

Body Count: 8

1. Mandy is stabbed to death.
2. Christie has her throat slit with a scythe.
3. Laurian is stabbed.
4. Brooke is shot.
5. Stryker falls out of a window.
6. Matthew is stabbed in the back offscreen.
7. Tara is killed offscreen.
8. Samantha is stabbed in the gut.

TL;DR: Curtains is a messy, largely incoherent slasher that leans on one iconic kill to prop up its reputation.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1030

Census Bloodbath: Bleeding Heart

For the crossover review of this film over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: George Mihalka

Cast: Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The legend goes that My Bloody Valentine's producers, when tasked with creating a new slasher film, decided to set the film on a holiday that hadn't been used up already in the early slasher boom. This was no small accomplishment considering that, only one year into the genre's heyday, Christmas had already been used a whopping four times (three in 1980 alone), Halloween was pretty well taken care of with John Carpenter's classic, New Years had been used twice, and even minor/non-existent holidays like Mother's Day, Friday the 13th, and Prom Night had already received the slasher treatment.

So they settled on Valentine's Day, just about the only recognizable holiday left after the developing genre had razed the calendar. By all accounts this should have been a supremely average affair, just like (most of) the rest, but this being Canada (well regarded as the best country for slasher films) and this being 1981 (the consensus pick for best year of the slasher Golden Age), the stars were aligned, producing a highly enjoyable film, even after being mercilessly slaughtered by the MPAA.

And it is here, even more than any other slasher film with similar problems (and there are more slashers hurt by the MPAA on this planet than there are trees) that we reach a point of contention. The unrated cut of My Bloody Valentine, finally released in 2009 in concurrence with the release of the remake, adds so much to the film that it renders it virtually unrecognizable. The addition of extended gore scenes makes the film undeniably better and far more coherent, although the original cut is still nothing to shake a stick at. Although I would rather gush (quite literally, in some cases) about the unrated version, I'll be sticking to the original theatrical print for this review, considering that it was the only one that existed for some thirty-odd years.

Sorry to strip mine the film, man, but it's only fair.

The small Canadian mining town of Valentine Bluffs (unique for the sub-subgenre of Canadian slashers, there is no visible strain to pretend it takes place in America, allowing the regional accents and Moosehead beer to flow freely) has a problem. They haven't had their traditional Valentine dance in twenty years thanks to a horrific accident in which a group of miners were buried alive because their supervisors left early so they could attend the dance.

Harry Warden (Peter Cowper), the sole survivor of this ordeal, sought revenge the next year and cut out the supervisors' hearts, putting them in heart-shaped candy boxes and delivering them to the dance, vowing to seek revenge on any future Valentines celebrations the town will ever have. The town officials assume enough time has passed that the institutionalized Harry will no longer loom over the citizens' minds, so they reinstate the dance for the first time. They'll soon learn that maybe they should have stuck with candy hearts and pre-packaged Snoopy cards.

Our Meat for the evening is a sizable array of young miners, preceded by a delectable tray of hors d'oeuvres - a larger than usual adult presence. There's Howard (Alf Humphreys of Funeral Home), the obligatory prankster who, as an apprentice, is the butt of scorn from the older workers; Dave (Carl Marotte), a handsome wallflower who becomes significantly less handsome when he inexplicably shaves halfway through the film and turns into a twelve-year-old; Michael (Thomas Kovacs), a human male with - presumably - a pulse; Hollis (Keith Knight), who thanks to his bristly mustache and burly frame looks like a cross between the walrus and the carpenter; Axel (Neil Affleck, also of Visiting Hours, and who is now a supervising animator on The Simpsons of all things), a hotheaded, jealous blond; and TJ (Paul Kelman), the mine owner's son who has just returned after attempting to make it on his own in the west coast. Which coast - and whether he was trying to be an actor in California or a fisherman in British Columbia is anyone's guess.

Because there is a holiday framework here, nearly every single one of these men has valentines, but the only three we should be concerned with are Harriet (Terry Waterland), a virginal barmaid and eventual recipient of Michael's member; Patty (Cynthia Dale), the bubbly counterpart to Hollis; and Sarah (Lori Hallier), a spunky blonde and Patty's best friend, who is currently dating Axel although she pines for TJ, with whom she was going steady before he left town. His unexpected return racks up tensions between him and Axel, but while they prepare to go all MMA on one another because a lady is a prize to be won by fisticuffs and spitting, Sarah quietly makes her own decision and sits back to watch the punches fly.

I mean, it's not like romantic rivalries within this winsome group are exactly fraught with tension.

After several ominous deaths (in which the town leaders receive valentines with threatening poems), the dance is cancelled for good, but the Hubris of Teenager knows no bounds. One boner leads to another and the kids end up having a party in the mine, accidentally incurring the wrath of The Miner (Peter Cowper), a pickaxe-wielding bully in a gas mask who is presumably Harry Warden out for his promised revenge. 

The deck is stacked with such a solid premise (don't you just love baroque, holiday-related killer MO's?) that it barely even registers that the characters aren't perhaps quite as fleshed out as they could be. Though, this being Canada, they are all immensely likable and easy to tell apart, a blessing which I shall not overlook.

And even in spite of the butchering My Bloody Valentine received from the MPAA, the kills are remarkably scary, an astronomical achievement in the genre. Cowper's physical performance as the Miner is looming, threatening, and bubbling with seething anger. If he were but two stories taller, he could give genre legend Kane Hodder a run for his money. But his physicality combined with the menacing oddity of his costume - a gas mask and a pickaxe - provides a truly memorable villain, a unique occurrence for a one-off slasher like this.

It also helps that he's so thoughtful - look, he even gave us a present!

With intense kills and a classic antagonist, it would take a whole lot of going wrong to undo the value of this film. This patently does not happen although, as I have mentioned, many of the characters are a little more one-dimensional than they could have been. Some early scenes tend to drag before we get a bead on who this group is and how they interact, weighed down a little too much by shaky acting.

This dynamic is typically buoyed by the presence of Hallier, whose performance as Sarah is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the cast, including the adult performers. It's a crying shame that she is forced to wring chemistry from the damp dishrag that is Paul Kelman's TJ, but her performance is so committed and pitch perfect that it glosses over many of the clunkier moments in the script.

Really, it's not even as bad as I'm making it out to be, it's just a slight annoyance. Much like the gamely sexist cockfighting between Sarah's romantic rivals, which thankfully peters out by the end of the second act. But for all the issues presented by the ensemble, Valentine Bluffs really feels like a small town, an ambience achieved by the characters' familiarity with one another and the limited, familiar-looking locations. Grounding these characters firmly in a reality makes it much easier to overlook some of their shortcomings.

And the final act of the film is so tremendous, it's impossible to complain at any length about anything in the entire movie. As the kids descend into the mine and begin to be picked off in earnest, an elongated chase sequence begins as the split-up survivors attempt to escape the twisting tunnels. It is a rapid, harrowing jumble - nobody knows where anybody else is or even who might still be alive as the desperate groups fight to find a way out.

The darkness in the mineshaft scenes is shot with aplomb, utilizing shadows significantly instead of showering the frame in blackness as even the best of Canadian slasher directors were wont to do. It's claustrophobic and frantic with an admittedly mystifying but electric conclusion. 

It's a true shame My Bloody Valentine never earned itself a franchise, because it's absolutely one of the best standalones in the business, a flawed but thrilling bit of Golden Age terror.

Before we sign off, it is absolutely imperative we discuss the unrated cut for a brief moment. The extended gore scenes are essential viewing, providing some of the grimmest grue of any slasher I've ever seen. It's exactly the kind of scintillating gore that would have sent this film over the edge, injecting the film with enough fun to overpower the slower moments in totum.

Also a gore shot is crucial in understanding just what the hell happens in the final reel. Its absence is sorely felt in the theatrical cut. With these additions, My Bloody Valentine is a just about perfect slasher movie. Unfortunately, it's rather too late to consider them "canon" but I would urge anybody and everybody interested in this film to seek out this version, not the original DVD release.

Killer: The Miner (Peter Cowper) [aka Axel (Neil Affleck)]

Final Girl: Sarah (Lori Hallier) feat. TJ (Paul Kelman)

Best Kill: Sylvia is impaled on a shower rod and water (mixed with blood) squirts out of her mouth.

Sign of the Times: Not only do the boys seem afflicted with such terrible arthritis they can't button their shirts, but TJ's neckerchief chokes out any chance of this film being timeless.

Scariest Moment: The survivors must climb up a narrow shaft on a ladder while Patty undergoes a mental breakdown.

Weirdest Moment: TJ and Axel share an angry harmonica duet in a junkyard.

Champion Dialogue: "You're supposed to be decorating the room, not each other."

Body Count: 12; not including four miners killed in a flashback cave-in.

1. Blonde Woman is impaled on a pickaxe.
2. Supervisor is pickaxed in the chest.
3. Supervisor #2 is killed offscreen.
4. Mabel is pickaxed and stuffed into a clothes dryer.
5. Bartender is axed through the chest/eye, depending on which cut you watch.
6. Dave has his face shoved into a pot of boiling hot dogs.
7. Sylvia is impaled on a shower unit.
8. Michael and
9. Harriet are impaled by a mining drill offscreen while they have sex.
10. Hollis is shot in the face with a nail gun.
11. Howard is hung and (in the unrated cut) decapitated by the rope.
12. Patty is pickaxed in the gut.

TL;DR: My Bloody Valentine is hurt by some shallow characters, but is a surprisingly scary and effective slasher.

Rating: 8/10; 9/10 if we're counting the unrated cut, although considering that it only surfaced five years ago, I daresay it doesn't count.

Word Count: 1854

CinemaBeach: God Save the Sluts and the Whores

Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil

Year: 1992

Director: Clay Borris

Cast: Nikki de Boer, J. H. Wyman, Joy Tanner

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Canadian Prom Night franchise is one of my absolute favorites. Having dedicated my life to watching a series of weird and terrible movies, these films always deliver. Why, you ask, did I decide to write about the fourth one when you, dear reader, almost certainly haven’t seen all of the others? Because, in the true tradition of direct-to-video slasher madness, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil has absolutely nothing to do with any of the previous films.

The original Prom Night is about Jamie Lee Curtis’ friends being killed one by one at Hamilton High’s prom on account of a crime they committed as children. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II completely ignores that, instead opting to be about the ghost of a Prom Queen who died in 1957 who returns to get revenge on her killers and reclaim her title. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, the only film in the franchise with a returning character, features Mary Lou (still a ghost) stalking a cute boy and killing his enemies. This film takes a long look at its venerable and thoroughly bizarre history and decides to instead be about a mad preacher killing people who have sex in a secluded house in the woods.

Which, to be fair, is a pretty solid slasher concept.

Prom Night IV opens on Hamilton High’s prom in 1957 (a hopeless leap at continuity with the Mary Lou movies that actually muddies up the timeline even worse than before), where a crazed clergyman, Father Jonas (James Carver) kills a couple who are making love in the backseat of a car. The church decides it is more pious to sedate him for the rest of his life and keep him in a dungeon instead of calling the cops.

When young Father Colin (Brock Simpson, the only actor to be in all four movies of the franchise) is given the task of watching over the captive in 1991 (though the film was released one year later), he fails pretty much immediately and is killed by the stigmata-sprouting Father Jonas, who escapes to a mountain retreat that used to be an old monastery.

The monastery is now a house owned by Mark (J. H. Wyman)’s parents, and as fate would have it, he and his friends are having an anti-prom party (this is the film’s only connection to the “Prom Night” idea beyond the 1957 sequence) there that very night. Also in attendance are Mark’s girlfriend Meagan (Nikki de Boer), an overly pious and thoroughly annoying goodie goodie who is without a doubt our Final Girl for the evening; Laura (Joy Tanner), a naughty blonde Catholic schoolgirl who loves sex and rebellion, in that order; and her horndog boyfriend Jeff (Alle Ghadban).

Father Jonas takes the “sex = death” rule of slasher movies far too seriously and starts killing them one by one while whispering harsh diatribes against sluts and whores. The gross misogyny of the film is only leavened by the fact that we’re obviously not supposed to agree with the killer, but still it feels extremely unnecessary. Plus, whispering killers tend to be pretty cheesy.

Complaining about minor details is useless though, because even changing most of them wouldn’t alter the fact that Prom Night IV is a terrible movie. The most obviously direct-to-video Prom Night venture yet, the camera work is grainy and shaky and Paul Zaza’s score is characterized by sharp stabs of music that seem incidental to what’s actually happening on screen. The movie is bloodless, characterless, there are lengthy stalking scenes that go nowhere, a jump scare is so halfhearted that not even the characters are scared, the climactic chase scene spends about two minutes on a character in no danger climbing up a staircase, and the Final Girl is a shrill harpy who is stupid enough to take off her boots before entering a wine cellar where she has already cut open her foot on a shard of glass.

There are major plot holes, my favorite of which is that the killer has been in a coma for 33 years, meaning he’s probably around 60 years old. There is also an obvious body count padding death when Jeff’s little brother shows up outside, spying on the couples only to become the first victim of the angry Father. However, he has no car and the house in the woods is an hour’s drive from where he lives. It’s not worth it to put any thought into how he got there, because clearly the filmmakers didn’t.

Providing the cherry on top of the Sundae of Tears that is Prom Night IV, there are loads of missed opportunities that could have made this film better, perhaps even good. There is a cool shot of two characters’ heads as seen through loops in a statue, but nothing ever comes of it. Evidently the director saw an opportunity to make at least one artistic moment, but didn’t see fit to make it resonant with anything like a theme.

The most lamentable of these missed opportunities is Father Jonas’ stigmata. Whenever he enters a religious fervor, his hands and feet start to bleed, mirroring the body of Christ on the cross. This is a fairly well-known religious phenomenon, and an important part of the extremely prevalent Christian imagery in the film. At one point early on in the film, Meagan cuts her foot on glass and does the same thing again later in the film when she is hiding from the hissing Father Jonas. In the movie as is, this just shows Meagan is much too stupid to have somehow survived.

However, she could have utilized her injuries to convince Jonas that she has stigmata too, convincing him that she is as pious as him and allowing her safe passage. The fact that this doesn’t happen will forever be an annoying thorn in the side of the movie.

So, to conclude, Prom Night IV is flawed. But in spite of its many many many problems, I still love it wholeheartedly. Being a grubby cash-in slasher film is exactly what I expected of it, being the fourth film in a chain of increasingly low budget movies. This level of mediocrity and insipidity is something I expect and demand from most every slasher film I watch and it delivers in full force. This is a film only for the genre faithful, but it a prime example of the depths to which the slasher could sink but still exist in its purest form.

Killer: Father Jonas (James Carver)

Final Girl: Meagan (Nikki de Boer)

Best Kill: Father Jonas puts on a wig (or possibly a scalp) to look like Laura, kisses Jeff on the mouth, then crushes his skull.

Scariest Moment: When Mark is about to fall off the roof, he must hold onto the Father Jonas’ weapon as it pokes through the tiles, cutting his hands in the process.

Weirdest Moment: Father Jonas starts spraying holy water and things catch on fire!

Champion Dialogue: “Here’s to Prom Night!” “To Jamie Lee Curtis!”

Body Count: 8; 2 killed in 1957, the rest in 1991

1. Lisa's throat is slit with a crucifix.
2. Brad is stabbed in the chest with a crucifix.
3. Father Colin is garroted with cord.
4. Dave is killed offscreen.
5. Jonathan is stabbed in the chest with a crucifix.
6. Laura is scalped with a crucifix. 
7. Jeff gets his head crushed.
8. Mark gets a crucifix thrown into his chest. 

TL;DR: Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil is a disaster, but a pretty fun by-the-books slasher film.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1292

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)

Mary Lou Too

Year: 1990
Director: Ron Oliver, Peter R. Simpson
Cast: Tim Conlon, Cyndy Preston, Courtney Taylor
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever seen somebody with such a terrible haircut you wonder what prompted them to get it in the first place? Has that haircut ever been made of lime green Jello with gummy snakes swimming around in it playing miniature saxophones? Well this movie is a little bit like that.

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss marks a less than venerable Canadian institution's descent into Direct to Video Hell, and with the concurrent drop in quality came a burst of incoherent colors and shapes that some mad intern seemingly decided to convert into a screenplay.

I know this opener makes literally no sense, but I just needed to get you in the right mindset to think about this movie.

Prom Night III starts off with as much normalcy as it can muster, opening with a singularly bland title card. It's literally just the name of the movie in plain white font. They really broke the bank on that one. And then. And then.

We are transported to some sort of Prom Hell Dimension where chained zombies do the can-can. Mary Lou files through her shackles and escapes, zooming through the halls of Hamilton High in a giddy Steadicam sequence straight out of Evil Dead that proves that these movies weren't quite done strip-mining other people's horror properties.

She lures a janitor into a boiler room (Phew, we're back to ripping off Nightmare. I'm glad they left Evil Dead well enough alone) with a juke box of all things and steps into the light revealing... she's not the same Mary Lou from before. Cassidy and I cry tears of sorrow. This Mary Lou looks like a cardboard cutout and talks like one too. No life. No joy. Only anguish and pain forever and ever.

The eighth circle of Hell is the eternal duckface.

I apologize for the low quality of my screengrabs, but the movie is very low quality.

Anyway, she blows up the janitor's pacemaker and says "Mama always said I'd be a heartbreaker." Here it is, folks. The Prom Night series has finally gotten so desperate and strapped for ideas that we've reached the Quipping Point. You see, this film is a horror comedy, but what attempts to pass for comedy is usually downright abysmal, while the funniest moments can be leached from unintentional terribleness. 

In actuality, it's totally my kind of movie.

Mary Lou Maloney is the only returning character in the entire five movie franchise, if you can even call her that. Mary Lou is virtually unrecognizable from her previous incarnation, both in looks/performance as I mentioned earlier, and in overall motivation and, well, everything that makes a character. Instead of wanting to be prom queen and bandying about her lady parts, she's content with stalking a cute boy and channeling late period Krueger.

And you thought I was kidding.

Young Alex Grey (Tim Conlon) is your typical average American* teen (he has a monologue to this effect that actually channels the "Christmas sucks" monologue from Gremlins quite favorably). His final year of high school is drawing to a close, and he must decide whether to spend the summer road tripping it up with his best friend Shane (David Stratton) or staying on a farm with his shrewish and needy girlfriend Sarah (Cyndy Preston).
*Remember when I said that Canadian slasher movies liked to pretend they take place in America? Boy you're in for a treat.

Sarah and Alex get into a fight, and at a romantic candlelit drive-thru dinner he admits that he's stressed out because his guidance counselor told him his grades are too terrible to pursue his dream of medical school and he should just learn how to fry burgers now because that's how he's gonna spend the rest of his life. Sarah isn't very helpful because she's the worst, and when he goes back to school to collect his Biology book to study, he encounters Mary Lou in the flesh. Well, ectoplasm.

Like any normal pair of high school-aged strangers, they start making out, ripping an American flag off the wall and boning on top of it while the national anthem plays. America, guys.

Because she's apparently a Na'vi from Avatar who mates for life once they have sex, Mary Lou falls instantly in love with Alex and uses her magic powers to protect him, mostly by killing people who are hurting him, like his Biology teacher who flunks him or the guidance counselor who catches wind of his grades being altered.

The kill scenes are so utterly outlandish and bizarre that it seems like the screenwriter watched A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and saw the scenes that were relevant to each character taking place on garish setpieces (an anorexic model is fed until she explodes, a comic geek is transformed into a paper drawing and slashed to ribbons) and only took away the setpiece part without realizing they all had something to do with the nature of the character being killed.

Instead of killing the Biology teacher with, say, a ton of animals or some weird hanging skeleton or whatever, she just jams her own weird-ass setpiece in there - in this case an ice cream parlor.

You know, like every Biology classroom has.

She kills the guidance counselor with a Battery Acid Hair Salon Torture Chamber™, shoves an entire 50's-era kitchen into a lab room, and even possesses a Sex Ed video.

The movie continues on like this for a while with Mary Lou killing to Alex's benefit in super ludicrous ways and him burying her victims in the football field, then boning her a little bit more to cheesy saxophone music. There's also a couple jump scares thrown in, almost like they think this is a horror movie.

The movie ends at a prom, when Alex finally realizes he should stop having people killed and breaks up with Mary Lou, who seeks revenge. The prom part is mostly only there because they must have realized the title of the movie and decided they had to include one in there somewhere. Although the ending is a solid ten minutes too long at least, there is a comic relief cop (Brock Simpson) who is the only element of the movie that's intentionally funny that lands at all. So hats off to him, a two time veteran of the franchise. What a depressing distinction.

Although I guess things could be worse.

Prom Night III is the cheapest movie yet in the series and it wears that badge proudly. The DVD I was watching was clearly a bad VHS transfer with weird fuzz that obscured the image from time to time, and it's not even the actual film. The DVD is a ripped copy of the edited for TV movie that censors some of the language and nudity, neutering an already very uneven film.

The behind-the-camera work is particularly shoddy and anonymous, and I get the feeling the sound department entertained themselves by playing a private game called Boom Mike Apocalypse. I swear, there was a boom at the top of half the frames. The ones that weren't obscured by other means, at least. One shot has a small black cloth diagonally jutting through the top of the screen.

It's not well made. It's not scary. It's not funny. In fact, it's so dizzyingly incoherent that I can barely write about it without descending into primitive madness. But in spite of its massive problems, the careless low budgetry of the film lends it a vibrancy and life it wouldn't otherwise have, and the terrible acting paired with the cheesy quipping and inscrutable kill scenes all add up to a tremendously wonderful B-Movie masterwork.

Killer: Mary Lou Maloney (Courtney Taylor)

Final Girl: Sarah Monroe (Cyndy Preston) with Alex Grey (Tim Conlon)

Best Kill: Alex's biology teacher is stabbed with ice cream cones, gets an egg beater to the face, then is split open and filled with bananas, cherries, various flavors of ice cream, and miniature American flags, accompanied by the Yankee Doodle song. Seriously, guys. We're in America. We can agree aboat that.

Sign of the Times: The word "daddy-o."

Scariest Moment: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Weirdest Moment: When Alex calls his parents on the pay phone at school, they sound like they're speaking in simlish. This is hilarious, and the turning point when you realize this movie has zero hope of getting any better.

Champion Dialogue: "Firstly, you really gotta stop killing people."

Body Count: 9

1. Jack is electrocuted by a jukebox.
2. Mr. Walker is stabbed with ice cream cones and gets a blender in the face.
3. Ms. Richards is locked in a hair dryer and drenched in battery acid. 
4. Andrew is impaled with a football drill.
5. Shane's heart is ripped out of his chest.
6. Policeman #1 is electrocuted.
7. Policeman #2 is electrocuted.
8. Leonard is hung with magnetic tape.
9. Sarah gets punched through the chest.

TL;DR: Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is batsh*t insane, and I love it.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1531

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)

Census Bloodbath: Disco Madness

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Cassidy leaves on Friday. 

Please take a moment to find your tissues, then return to reading this post. We were trying to decide what to do to give her a proper sendoff when I mentioned my love of the Prom Night franchise, with its increasingly bizarre storylines that get more and more divorced from the original concept. She was enthralled and it was decided that one day before she left, we would watch all of them in one gigantic marathon.

Well it happened, and as luck would have it, the next film on my Census Bloodbath list is (by the hammer of Thor) Prom Night! It was meant to be.

For the next week or so, I will be posting a film-by-film retrospective of the Prom Night series, starting with the 1980 original! Let's get crackin'!

Year: 1980

Director: Paul Lynch

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Stevens

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Legend has it that Canadian director Paul Lynch was struggling to find a backer for Prom Night until Jamie Lee Curtis signed on to the project. He got an offer from Paramount to put it in 300 theaters, but ended up teaming with Avco Embassy as their offer of 1200 theaters was too good to refuse. Instead, Paramount pushed out another film, a low-rent Halloween knockoff called Friday the 13th.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Despite accidentally enabling the Voorhees Dynasty, Prom Night does have its fair share of fans among slasher buffs and sane people alike. This is palpably for one reason above all - Jamie Lee Curtis. Other than that, you see, Prom Night is a pretty tame and exceedingly average Dead Teenagers movie. 

It is of interest mainly as a sort of slasher textbook. Here you can see the pieces of the genre fall exactly into the places where they will remain until the slasher's first decline. The mysterious accident that occurs in flashback, the masked killer, branches being pulled back out of frame during long shot stalking scenes, sex and death and the virgin reigning supreme... They're all here in the purest, most distilled form.

The DNA from this frame can be traced to Scream, Valentine, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and countless others.

The second point of interest - one only devout followers of the genre are aware of - is that this is a Canadian production. It is a general agreement that Canadian slasher movies, despite their intense desire to pretend that they take place in America (Prom Night's high school is called Alexander Hamilton High despite the Canadian license plates in the parking lot and the repressed accents bubbling beneath the surface - "Sorey aboat that. We'll fix it to-more-ow.") are just plain better than their American counterparts with characters that tend to be more fleshed out and better handling of the material.

Though Prom Night is a lesser example, Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, and My Bloody Valentine support that theory, among many others.

But enough dithering. This is a review, after all.

The film opens on a group of four children playing a game in a building that is the most menacing character in the movie. Halfway between an abandoned mental institution and some sort of old monastery, this is clearly no place for young ones, no matter how Canadian they are.

They're playing a loosely defined game that mostly involves hiding, then running around and chanting "KILL! KILL!" at the top of their lungs. The three Hammond siblings approach and Kim, the eldest, goes back to get a book she forgot (You can tell she's going to grow up to be Jamie Lee Curtis, because she has the slipperiest fingers when it comes to school supplies. And sharp weapons for that matter.) leaving her twin siblings Alex and Robin to play with the others.

The game gets a little too intense for Robin (Tammy Bourne), and she bolts, pursued relentlessly by the four. As they chant "KILL! KILL! KILL!" and back her into a corner, their words come true as she falls through a second story window to her death. The four vow never to speak of this again, and a local sex offender is accused of the crime. After a botched police chase, he is badly burned (this tends to happen. Again, this is a textbook example later to be found in The Burning, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and many of this film's sequels) and slides into a coma so the kids get off scot-free.

In an effort to disguise her identity, the one on the left dyed her hair black and was adopted into the Addams household.

Cut to six years later. The kids are all grown up and are preparing for their senior prom. Jude (Joy Thompson) is funny, smart, and single. She's quite a catch. Unfortunately she has such low self esteem that when she is catcalled on the street by this creep

she not only takes him up on his offer of a ride to school, but agrees to go to prom with him. She even puts out and enjoys it despite evidence to the contrary. All the Oscars to Joy Thompson.

Wendy (Eddie Benton) is rich, gorgeous, and an all-around terrible person who you want to die from the very bottom of your heart the first time she walks into frame.

Nick (Casey Stevens) has gone through puberty and learned a couple life lessons, has dumped Wendy and is now deeply in love with Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis). To top it all off, they are Prom King and Prom Queen! Little Kimmy's done well for herself since her sister's death. During the procession, the announcer even says (literally) that they have been chosen as the most popular kids on campus.

Kelly (Marybeth Rubens) is also a character in the movie.

This is all established quite quickly, but Lynch isn't anxious to move on just yet, and these characters just sort of jangle around for about an hour before the prom sequence (and the killing) begins in earnest.  While it's not necessarily boring, it's also not really... well, anything.

High school drama ensues and the four grown-up kids receive obscene phone calls and hear strange noises when they're alone. After what I can only imagine was an intense discussion, the filmmakers decided to keep most of the focus on the high school drama. This would be welcome in another movie - one with characters that aren't Dixie Cups with faces drawn on, preferably. It was a team effort to even be able to tell the girls apart.

It all just feels very indulgent, almost like Jamie Lee funded the movie herself in order for us to see scenes of her being awesome at tennis and disco dancing and to show us how great her boobs are.

Clothed, of course. This is still Jamie Lee we're talking about.

The first real Body Count killing begins at the one hour mark, and it still leaves something to be desired. As does the second. And the third. Really, they're all pretty toothless especially when you consider that the Tom Savini-led Friday the 13th was still blowing through theaters at the time.

A prowling man in a ski mask whispers vaguely threatening... well, threats, as he mows down the core four and anyone who happens to get in the way. And let me just take a moment to say that whispering killers are hard to keep from crossing the line between scary and silly. Guess which side this one landed on?

Throats are slit, guts are stabbed, and a head rolls onto the catwalk (that one's actually pretty cool), but it's all playing second string to what they clearly thought was the most important part - the mystery.

Who is the killer?

There are a number of clear-cut suspects including Lou (David Mucci), a dirtbag who Wendy hires to pull a prank at prom; Principal Hammond (Leslie Nielsen. Yes, that Leslie Nielsen.), Kim's father who is understandably upset - prom is on the anniversary of his youngest daughter's death; the man who was wrongly accused of Robin's death and who has since escaped his mental institution; and Sykes (Robert Silverman), the groundskeeper who can't help but stare at the high school girls as they walk by. Mostly because they moon him, but still.

Once Lou is killed, the escapee is caught fifty miles away, and Groundskeeper Willie is exonerated, it's pretty clear who the killer is.

Or is it?

But first, some disco songs.

Prom Night frequently cuts back to the dance, not to establish time or keep up pacing or whatever, but rather to show off Jamie Lee's fancy moves. Full of super on-the-nose original songs like "Prom Night (Everything is Alright)," "Love Me Till I Die," and "Time to Turn Around," that it's keen to show off, the film's weak killings are interspersed with some truly bizarre scenes straight out of the outtakes to Saturday Night Fever. Keep an eye out for composer Paul Zaza. Just like Jason Voorhees, he keeps coming back movie after movie (Recent credits include Baby Geniuses and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. This guy's a winner.).

In addition to being totally bananas, these scenes are indicative of a bigger problem, editing-wise. The scenes just don't make any sense in the order they're displayed. They frequently end too soon, leaving the audience with a weird jolting feeling, and at one point a couple is seen at a drive thru and then immediately in the middle of class.

OK yes, this movie has flaws. Allow me to alleviate some of the pain though.

With some experimental shots that work sporadically, like a series of smash cuts from telephone cord to the receiver or the high-vaulted ceiling shot that follows a little girl around a corner, it is clear that, for better or for worse, there is some sort of directorial hand involved in this movie. Most slasher films are cheap cash-ins, completely devoid of personality and despite its shabbiness, Prom Night is not one of them.

As I mentioned before, the obvious greatest strength the movie ever had (and they knew it) was Jamie Lee Curtis, the Scream Queen herself. While she's not exactly at her Laurie Strode Gold Standard, she fully immerses herself in the role and brings such natural charm it's impossible not to love her. Despite its myriad flaws, through whatever miracle she is in this project. She's the real takeaway here.

And you know what they say:

It's not who you go with.

It's who takes you home.

Killer: Spoilers [Alex Hammond (Michael Tough)]

Final Girl: Kim Hammond (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: A kid is strangled behind the wheel and his van flies off a cliff, hitting the bluffs and exploding.

Sign of the Times: Dear Jesus all of this

Scariest Moment: The opening scene, in which the camera pans around a creepy abandoned building as children chant "The killer is coming!"

Weirdest Moment: There is a prolonged disco dance sequence that lasts for 3 minutes and 7 seconds. I counted every microsecond of it. Let Prom Night go down in history as the only slasher movie to ever need a choreographer.

Champion Dialogue: "For a guy so fast on the disco floor, you are the slowest."

Body Count: 8; 1 nurse murdered on the sidelines, 6 on Prom Night, and 1 six years before.

1. Robin Hammond falls to her death during the children's game.
2. Kelly's throat is slit.
3. Jude is stabbed in the throat.
4. Slick falls off of a cliff in a burning van.
5. Nurse is killed offscreen. 
6. Wendy is hacked to death with an axe offscreen.
7. Lou is decapitated with an axe. 
8. [Alex Hammond is hit on the head with an axe.]

TL;DR: Prom Night is a shabby but earnest by-the-book slasher, and the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis knocks it up a couple of points.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1997

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)