Prom Night (1980)

just watch it!

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Not a very good film, even by the "standards" of the genre. There was surprisingly little gore, until one particular scene. (This is not a complaint) Very little gratuitous nudity. (Maybe a little bit of a complaint) The acting, sets, direction, etc. place it firmly in the B category, which is fine. Leslie Nielsen seemed to be mailing it in. Jamie Lee Curtis was so young that her craft may not have been well-developed, seeing that she became a fine actress. The director seems to have made his career in television, and it showed. This is kind of a waste of time.

I love Jamie Lee Curtis!!! Anything with her you should watch. ESPECIALLY if it's a horror movie! She is the classiest of all the final girls.Halloween, Terror Train and Prom Night are 3 of the best slashers from the 80's. I have seen them all dozens of times each and still get entertained.Not only do we have Jamie Lee doing her final girl thing but we have the funny old dude from the Naked Gun movies! This is jam-packed with goodness.Watch as soon as you can and obvi ignore the remake!

Pretty much your typical slasher film, this is one that was clichéd when it came out, and that was twenty years ago! Strange to see how films like I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER are still using the same clichés even now, perhaps in twenty years time we'll be watching yet more blonde girls getting stalked through corridors by mad people...Still, as an example of its type, you could do a lot worse, and at least this presents a nice variety of clichés for us to enjoy, such as (deep breath): an escaped lunatic who kidnapped a nurse, cf. HALLOWEEN; some threatening phone calls, cf. BLACK Christmas; a weird cleaner as a main suspect; teenagers having sex and then getting killed, cf. just about any slasher film in existence! Although filmed on a low budget in Canada, the film succeeds by building up lots of red herrings and potential murderers in the cast, before bumping off half a dozen teens in the last third (although it's never explained why the fat guy in the van gets murdered when he had nothing to do with the original accident).The cast is mainly populated by nobodies, headlined by two stars; one up-and-coming girl, one middle-aged actor going through a lean patch in his career; that is, Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen. Curtis was typed as a screaming heroine at this time, having appeared in HALLOWEEN, TERROR TRAIN, and THE FOG, to name but three, and here she performs perfectly adequately - apart from her embarrassing moves on the disco floor, which should have been consigned to cutting room history! It's difficult to watch Nielsen acting seriously - you expect him to start blowing things up accidentally or killing people in a comic fashion. He looks as if he doesn't want to be in this film, and he actually isn't...near the end, he suddenly disappears, never to be heard of again! Where did Nielsen go? One minute he's dancing, the next...people are looking for him but to no avail! Was this some secret hint that there was actually a conspiracy involved that night - and maybe Nielsen was a second murderer? Or maybe the budget ran low and the producers had to quickly ditch the most expensive star.For a slasher film, there are surprisingly few deaths, and most of the film's running time is padded out with endless conversions about the prom, some low lifes at the school fighting, drugs, sex, flashing, and girls putting make up on. Not to mention some obvious spooky scenes, like a window smashing suddenly and nobody being there. When the deaths do come, they're pretty simplistic and disappointing - some blood, throat slashings, nothing spectacular apart from a flying severed rubber head moment at the end of the film (pretty funny, but not exactly worth waiting for). The killer dresses entirely in black and wears a balaclava; personally he reminded me more of a ninja than a murderer.PROM NIGHT was a moderate success, spawning three unrelated sequels to date. There are a few effective stalk and slash moments in the film to enjoy, but not really much horror content. If you want the blueprints of the genre then it's probably a good idea to go with the two most popular slasher films which were responsible for all of these imitations: HALLOWEEN and Friday the 13th (themselves influenced by many other pictures, I know). Or even something gory like THE BURNING. This film falls about the middle of the scale of slasher film quality.

It's tough to rate "Prom Night" this late in the game. Horror flicks were already becoming de rigueur by 1980 - check out the ineffectual parody "Student Bodies" - so you can imagine how trite this material seems almost forty years later!Even if you've never seen a slasher movie, this stuff is familiar: a group of generally oversexed teens are bumped off one by one by a masked assailant, whose identity is revealed at the end of the film. This one also features a traumatic event in the prologue, with the assailant being someone who witnessed it and is out for vengeance, a la "I Know What You Did Last Summer".Don't let the familiarity of the material put you off, though. "Prom Night" is a very well made movie: the death scenes, particularly, make unnerving use of slow motion and camera angles that would have been truly disturbing back in 1980. Most slashers don't even bother with stuff like that: they just go for the gore.The ending also boasts not one, but two surprises: the last death is truly shocking, and the identity of the killer? I must confess I didn't pick it, even after having seen hundreds of these movies."Prom Night" covers VERY familiar ground, yes, but it does it with more style than 99% of its familiars.