Bella Donna

Year: 2008

Director: Nelson McCormick

Cast: Brittany Snow, Idris Elba, Johnathon Schaech

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Not that any of us should be surprised, especially considering that it's a remake, but Prom Night has absolutely nothing to do with its titanically offbeat predecessors. It is only nominally a remake, so much so that not a single one of the franchise staples - Hamilton High, Brock Simpson, a score by Paul Zaza, secretly being Canadian - are present.

Literally the only thing it has in common with the rest of the movies is that it takes place at a prom, which isn't even true of all four (remember Prom Night IV? We just talked about it).

Enough complaining. Remake culture is what it is and nothing I can do will be able to change that. And some remakes were even *gulp* kinda good. Although I can knock one out of my good esteem right now.

When Cassidy and I sat down to watch the entire Prom Night series, we both vaguely remembered the remake as being a tolerable but forgettable affair. Not a stain on the underwear of humanity, but actually a halfway decent horror flick despite its PG-13 lack of gore.

And the ferociously bland supporting cast.

We were dead wrong.

Prom Night opens with Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow) coming home to find her father and little brother with their throats slashed by a maniac teacher (Johnathon Schaech) who has developed an obsession with her. She hears a noise in the other room and hides under the bed as the killer throws her mother on the floor, demanding to be told where she is. Her mother refuses to say and, glimpsing her daughter cowering feet away from her, stands her ground, only to be brutally murdered. Right in front of her daughter.

In five minutes Prom Night has already covered darker subject matter than the average war movie, and it is exceedingly unpleasant.

Unpleasant.

Get used to that. You're going to be hearing that word a lot tonight.

It's not exactly rainbows and puppy dogs down here.

I don't know why both Cassidy's and my memories were so cloudy on this account. Maybe we weren't old enough to understand the full impact of what we were seeing. Maybe our thought processes regarding movie watching have grown more sophisticated after our first year of college (Psych 101 does wonders, I'm telling you). But this scene, and every one that proceeded, was unmistakably vile and.... unpleasant.

Slashers very frequently depict scenes of pain and death (obviously), but never has a slasher movie been so mean-spirited or told a story that was just so very sad. It's not that the characters are developed more than the average movie or even that the deaths are more visceral. And it's definitely not intentional. But every single death in the movie is like a punch in the gut - one more reason to consider turning the film off.

It's not fun, like the cheesy gore pictures of the 80's. It's not a fable of evil the likes of Halloween. It's not even trying to glean some sort of feeling from the painful (and bloodless) deaths. It is inhuman and mechanical, without conscience, trying to replicate the tropes of the slasher genre and obeying the letter of the law without ever once comprehending the spirit.

Honestly and without exaggeration, if there is a single slasher movie that could be constructed by the forces of pure evil, it would be this one. Not one moment of this film is redeeming, from the wealth of terrible jump scares (the Abominable Mirror Scare is used at least three times along with a litany of other genre standards, notably the Backing Into a Friend and It's All a Dream) to the utterly stupid even for a horror movie slate of Meat to the completely inappropriate and grotesque main villain to the truly staggering number of characters sent to the killer's domain for no reason but to be gutted.

One by one we watch everything Donna loves get taken away from her.

Her family? Tortured and gored.

Her friends? Throats slit and bodies shoved into closets.

Her prom night? An utter nightmare of torment, blood, and latent pedophilia.

Her boyfriend? Stabbed in the throat as he lies in bed with her.

This movie is a conveyor belt of tortures for this poor girl who is sweetness embodied. And who could expect anything less from Brittany Snow?

I don't know why anybody would expect that we should want to see this film, and I can't even adequately explain to myself what magical quality this film possesses that makes it so utterly immoral and venomous, but I know bad juju when I see it and this movie needs a cleansing. And fast.

I don't care about recapping the rest of the plot, because I don't want anybody else to ever have to watch this movie ever again.

Killer: Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech)

Final Girl: Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow)

Best Kill: N/A. If you'd read even a single word in the preceding article, you'd know why.

Scariest Moment: Donna has to watch her mother die defending her, unable to help or cry out.

Sign of the Times: "I'll go request some JT." Also the size of the digital camera the girls bring to prom.

Weirdest Moment: The entire thing took place in Portland. Poor Cassidy.

Champion Dialogue: "If he were any dumber, I'd have to water him."

Body Count: 14, the highest in the series.

1. Mr. Keppel is stabbed to death.
2. Joey Keppel is stabbed to death.
3. Mrs. Keppel is stabbed to death.
4. Inmate has his throat slit.
5. Maria is stabbed to death.
6. Claire is stabbed to death.
7. Michael is stabbed to death.
8. Simms is strangled.
9. Howard's throat is slit.
10. Lisa's throat is slit
11. Detective Nash's throat is slit
12. Bobby's throat is slit.
13. Officer Hicks is stabbed to death.
14. Richard Fenton is shot seven times in the chest. 

TL;DR: Prom Night is a vile and grotesque creature, possessing a nearly unexplainable but overwhelming quality of being the most immoral and vile film I have ever seen.

Rating: 1/10

Word Count: 1028

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)

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)

Level Two

Again, thanks to Freddy in Space for the inspiration to to this challenge. On with the next questions!

11. Most Ditzy [sic - this is from Twitter, sorry] Character: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt)

The girl who somehow survives both I Know What You Did Last Summer and the insipid I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. During the course of the two films, Julie spends her time running full speed down the wrong track after red herrings, refusing to get out of the way when a killer is after her, and once even manages to get herself locked in a tanning bed. In fact, the entire plot of the second film is based on the fact the she doesn't know the capital of Brazil.

12. Favorite Horror Movie From the Past Year: You're Next (2013)

In my rave review for You're Next, I talked about the butt-kicking Australian lead, the whip smart dialogue, and the pitch perfect balance of terrifying and hilarious. This is all still true.

13. Best Impalement: Final Destination 3 (2006)

Just when it seems like everything is safe and a girl is saved from accidental lynching, a flag pole is sent launching straight through somebody's abdomen. The clincher? The flag says "Liberty or Death." God, I love these movies.

14. Killer Who Has the Best Weapon: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

No need for a second thought on this one. I barely needed a first thought. Freddy Krueger's razor glove (designed by Wes Craven to emulate the common fear of animal claws) is one of the most creative and terrifying inventions of the horror genre. I have so much to say about A Nightmare on Elm Street, but you guys are just gonna have to wait on that. We've got a big day planned.

15. A Horror-Love Story: Cold Prey (2006)

The beautiful Jannicke (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) is hesitant to move in with her boyfriend for fear of moving things too fast. The awkward and single Morten Tobias (Rolf Kristian Larsen) has been nursing a crush on her for quite some time. When their snowboarding group gets attacked by a deranged mountain man, the truths come out, but unfortunately Morten Tobias doesn't live long enough to see his dream realized. One of the only times my heart has been broken by a slasher film.

16. Best Throat Slicing: V/H/S 2 (2013)

Another one that I have previously talked about. In the segment "Safe Haven," directed by Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, a documentary crew visits the compound of a cult on what happens to be their Armageddon day. Things don't quite go as planned and the throat slitting is one of the most visceral and exciting gore effects in the entire film, which is chock full of bizarre and off-putting sights.

17. Favorite Sequel to a Horror: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

I love this film, and the whole Prom Night gang. While the original was a fairly run-of-the-mill slasher flick (although it did feature Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis and seven minutes of disco dancing), its sequel is an absolutely nutso balls-to-the-wall post-Nightmare on Elm Street special effects extravaganza that owes just as much to Carrie as it does to Freddy Krueger.

18. Best Horror Movie in the Woods: The Burning (1981)

I know I'm snubbing my beloved Friday the 13th series, but even I know they're bad movies.

With special effects by Tom Savini and a raft massacre scene that landed it on the Video Nasties list in the UK, The Burning is a surefire slasher classic. The first time I saw this film was at a midnight movie in LA with Shannon. I was expecting to show her first dumb slasher movie. I was disappointed. This movie is fantastic.

19. An Actor You Enjoyed to Watch Get Murdered: Michelle Trachtenberg

I. HATE. DAWN. SUMMERS.

The remake of Black Christmas was a dream come true.

20. Most Attractive Horror Movie Killer - Adam Carr (David Boreanaz)

Sorry about spoilers but mmmmmmmm....

I'm pretty sure David Boreanaz is an actual undead vampire because he has aged maybe three months since Buffy started in 1997. 

Valentine is an absolutely fabulous movie because of how much it sucks. Despite coming out after Scream and Buffy, two genre-bending self aware horror genre tentpoles, this film is still just a straightforward slasher flick, which I have a lot of respect for despite the stigma that comes attached to that.

Word Count: 746
Reviews in This Series
Horror Lover Challenge Part 1 (August 16, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 2 (August 25, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 3 (August 28, 2013)

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: A Nightmare at Hamilton High

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

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)

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)