Census Bloodbath: I know what you did last prom night

PROM NIGHT

Thirteen years.  That's sinister, don't you think?  And that's how long we've been crossing over with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture in the Old Switcheroo, where for the duration of October he puts aside his ever-burgeoning encyclopedia of the slasher, Census Bloodbath, in favor of taking over our own wholesome 50s sci-fi feature Cardboard Science, while I get the sharper end of that bargain here.

1980

Directed by Paul Lynch

Written by Robert Guza Jr, William Gray, and John Hunter

Spoilers: man, you could say "moderate," you could say "high," but I would say "it doesn't matter much anyway"

In the beginning, there was Halloween, and it was good.  This is, of course, slightly ahistoric—but if there was one singular moment that we could say that "the slasher" emerged from the primordial darkness, then that moment came in 1978.  And anyway, it was good.  And profitable.  In 1979, the slasher rested—frankly, I expect 1979 has slashers that don't get tabulated, since if you could knock off Jaws in eleven months, as Grizzly managed to great success, somebody ought to have been able to knock off Halloween in eleven weeks—but by the end of 1980, it was back, and the first slasher wave was on.  Amongst those exploiting the success of Halloween was director Paul Lynch, who'd come to Halloween's producer Irwin Yablans with an idea about a murderous doctor, which Yablans rejected, but with a piece of free advice: that Lynch should make a slasher about a holiday, given that, at least in his experience, these were all the rage.  Lynch took this to heart when he next met with Canadian producer Peter Simpson, yet Lynch had found the idea of re-doing Halloween with different decorations to be too unimaginative even for bandwagoning exploitation, so what he pitched was merely close to Halloween, not a film about a "holiday" per se, but rather another film about another annual ritual held dearest by the young.  This was Prom Night, and considering that some fraction of the film's ultimate success must be attributed to Halloween's own star, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Curtis probably wouldn't have been that excited about doing a straight Halloween rip-off (even Halloween II wasn't a straight Halloween rip-off), his decision to make his concept at least slightly distinctive was undoubtedly a wise one.  Removing things even further from Halloween, Lynch's film was going to be a murder mystery, rooted in a sin of the past, affording its story specific victims for a vengeful killer.

This is actually going to be one of Prom Night's problems, but for now we're cast back to 1974, where we find an abandoned school and four children—Kelly (Joyce Kite for now), Jude (Karen Forbes), Wendy (Leslie Scott), and Nick (Brock Simpson, Peter's son)—playing an amped-up brand of hide-and-seek, evidently called "the killer is coming."  Their macabre game becomes much less figurative when the Hammond siblings stumble across them, for while the younger fraternal twins Kimberly and Alex (Debbie Greenfield and Dean Bosacki) demur, the eldest ventures inside, and we won't need to laboriously return to Robin (Tammy Bourne) in order to credit her adult actor: they chase and frighten the child so hard she falls out a window to her death.  And Wendy makes them promise to never tell; when a local pedophile is blamed for the death, with shockingly little evidence that any foul play was involved (in this case, it really is not the crime, but the cover-up; Robin practically jumped her own ass through that window, and I'd barely be willing to award the Hammonds civil damages), any suspicion that might have fallen upon the quartet is dispelled entirely.  Thus do they grow up, and their deadly transgression fades into the painful memory of a dimly-recalled nightmare, which is exactly how this opening feels, especially in Robert New's 1980-on-the-dot photography, that's using the era's filmstock's penchant for outrageously blown-out highlights, and overexposed and I assume hypersoftened on top of that, to give us this vision of smudges wandering through the passageways of a setting that's already been dead and gutted, playing at consequences they couldn't comprehend until they are suddenly confronted with the horror of the real thing.  It would be an intelligent way to shoot a traumatic shared memory whose bearers have done all they can to push it into a place of dreamlike unreality so didn't really do what they did.  Even moreso if every subsequent daylight scene of the film—of which there are perhaps surprisingly many in a movie called Prom Night, that says it's a horror film—also didn't look like the Earth is ten seconds away from falling into the sun:

So six years later, it's 1980, and they've all grown up to become teachers at Alexander Hamilton Senior High.  I'm obviously kidding, though I will point out that Kim (who is, of course, now being played by Curtis), the younger daughter of the Hammonds, can't even be a senior, and while this is most pronounced with Curtis (which I say without any cruelty, even: like many women who look weirdly 30 in their 20s, she stayed "30" for about that many years), even for a slasher this one singularly unpersuasive collection of high school kids.  In any event, it will turn out that the anniversary of Robin's death and the date of the high school's prom coincide, which is a little awkward for its principal, whom you'd think would have some control over this, as he turns out to be Robin's father (Leslie Nielsen, mystifyingly top-billed given that Curtis is not only the heroine but was already, to some degree, "Jamie Lee Curtis").  It is not as much a problem for Kim, but after all it was six years ago.  It's even less of a problem for Kelly (now Mary Beth Rubens), Jude (Joy Thompson), and Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, also mystifying in that during this phase of her career she worked under the name "Eddie Benton"), the former of which have even become best friends with Kim; so Kelly's problem right now is that her boyfriend Drew (Jeff Wincott) is putting undue pressure on her to put out, and Jude's problem is that she needs a date for the prom, who arrives in his chariot this morning anyway, a mid-00s Jonah Hill character who improbably declares himself "Slick" (Sheldon Rybowski) and, frankly, it is hard to argue with his results; and Wendy's problem is that Kim has, so she perceives, stolen her boyfriend out from under her.  And that boyfriend is Nick (Casey Stevens), who has at least noticed that it's the anniversary of Robin's death and that he's presently banging the girl he killed's sister, and he does have some conflicted feelings about that, which is why the movie is mostly about Wendy enlisting brutish and unibrowed "juvenile" delinquent Lou (David Mucci) to ruin the prom for her nemesis.

So let's extend our congratulations to Lynch, and scenarist Robert Guza Jr, mainly known for soap operas (this checks out) who came up with that "sins of the past" angle before there was any Prom Night to put it in, and also to credited screenwriter William Gray and uncredited script doctor John Hunter: you successfully avoided ripping off Halloween.  You did so by ripping off Carrie more than most slashers rip off Halloween and more than most Carrie rip-offs rip off Carrie, and in the process of doing so you removed everything that made Carrie mythic and heartrending by turning it into a high school drama revolving around two characters who barely have personalities and who barely interact.  What personalities they do get comes from being played by the single best actor in the cast (gee, who else was that likely to be?) and, at least going by this, its second-best, though what their enmity has to do with the already-established premise of this slasher film is "essentially nothing," so while there are even hints that a high school drama with these figures could work—the one time they do interact, Martin offers herself as a nice wall for Curtis to bounce some great flinty "good girl bitch" off of, and Lynch has staged it well—using high school drama as horror flick filler doesn't always work out, and in these circumstances it might be worse, for this feels so much like filler, especially when the thriller that this filler is meant to pad out isn't, and can't be, any real part of the movie for nearly an hour.  There's a cop subplot about that pedophile escaping, this nifty coincidence hanging upon, I suppose, the egregiously thin reed of it being the anniversary of the day he was falsely blamed for Robin's murder, and this event is never mentioned to our heroes, or outside of this subplot at all, and the guy is pretty transparently a red herring anyway; there are the anonymous threatening phone calls that apparently aren't detailed enough to jog anybody's memory, and the one who might've remembered on his own doesn't pick up the phone; there's the vaguely threatening signs they're being stalked, which do not penetrate their skulls even slightly, and are barely a matter of concern even during the scenes where those signs pop up, so, remarkably, the most freaked-out by them winds up being Kim.

But, fundamentally, Prom Night is ass-backwards: the only reason in the world you'd ever make Kim the protagonist of this story is if Kim were the killer.  And let's "spoil" that, though you should realize pretty soon that it's logistically impossible Kim to be the killer—it's logistically impossible for Nick to be the killer, too, although that's the only other interesting possibility, and interesting possibilities were not contemplated by this screenplay—and while she could be working with the killer, that didn't occur to them either.  Nevertheless, it does pretty much have to be a Hammond, either Daddy Hammond, Mommy Hammond (Antoinette Bower, also suspiciously high up in the cast list), or Alex Hammond (Michael Tough).  (So, as a brief aside, Tough is about the only member of the high school-aged cast that they put any effort into physically matching with his juvenile performer, and while holy shit, this particular pair was an all-time coup of two actors resembling one another on each side of puberty, it doesn't much make up for the rest, one of whom is so much more a lookalike for somebody in the tertiary cast that I was confused why the little blonde girl with braids whom I presumed grew up to be the blonde "teen" with braids was only getting about one line every twenty minutes.)  Anyway, it doesn't matter which other Hammond it is because they're not even characters (it's Alex, MCing the prom, and though he doesn't look that tough, so to speak, he's the most physically plausible, considering the alternatives, and given that our killer knew the truth all along, this also relies on that very same thin, thin fucking reed of "Robin's sixth deathiversary" to explain why they didn't do this ages ago).

So we have a movie about kids who did a real bad thing, and it's come back to haunt them; they couldn't even realize this when they're murdered.  Wendy's the only one who survives long enough to have any thoughts on it, but also with Wendy practically anybody could want to kill her.  Meanwhile, the greatest narrative focus is on a burned girlfriend's revenge, which means Curtis is wasted on a character who has no particular story of her own so she's just playing whatever works in the moment (even her established slasher skillset is wasted on a character who's only even aware there is a killer for five or six minutes; though it's no structural gamesmanship because she's marked for death as hard as any slasher character ever has been, the classical "final girl" sequence belongs to Martin), and it means that Martin, to the extent I'm not just responding to evil blonde typeage, is wasted on a character who doesn't leave those rails for a microsecond, but also doesn't get to do anything cool with it in the end.  Of course, this would be the same movie where the actress with the nudity clause was placed in the unpleasant sex drama subplot while the actress without such a clause was placed in the rompy sex comedy subplot.  It's just bad personnel management all around.

It is not unwatchable, but you constantly hear the wheels spinning.  (This is made literal once the kills start: Jude and Slick's rompy sex comedy subplot is certainly better than the startlingly long and repetitive vehicular action scene, regarding Slick's cool sex van, which their joint death sequence degenerates into.  While we're on the subject, I wonder how slasher scholars impose their "sex equals death" reading onto a movie where the girl who says no dies, and the girl who says yes dies, and the explicitly wasn't-a-virgin-before-she-ever-appeared-onscreen final girl does not.)  Still, it makes up a lot of ground, very quickly, and the movie snaps into focus—at least a lot more—basically as soon as night falls.  Above everything, New's filmstock no longer has access to sunlight, which is a great boon to how his photography is going to look going forward, and it's ultimately a fair trade.  Not all of the last third is amazing, but it's remarkable that I watched thirteen this years ago and publicly complained looked like the lenscap was on half the time, now looks, in the light (ha-ha) of our contemporary photographic trends in those thirteen years since I saw it, I've switched around completely on Prom Night, so that what I'm here to praise are its night scenes, even to a very, very measured degree Wendy's functionally-a-final-girl sequence that sees her chased through the whole school before she meets her end, and even has a shot like this to recommend it—

(Good enough to be reinterpreted for the soundtrack album, and that the soundtrack album artists saw this B-movie gratifies me in some inarticulable way.)

—while also expanding the "amazing" part even out into the school corridors decked out in supremely garish prom lighting, so while it could've been easily pushed to an even more unmotivated place, let's not complain about the shadows cascading out of doors opened to a hell-red hallway that we get.  I've said Lynch has directed this reasonably well throughout, including some over-the-top editing fillips that salvage a modicum of tension from the, but this is most true of the last third.  (Not necessarily that hilariously gratuitous shot of a not-a-character-in-the-movie-at-all putting on her lipstick and the camera dropping down to her ass.)  So that's mostly to what we'd have to agree one pretty bodacious prom that this school's thrown for its students, the theme being "Disco Madness," which is well-founded upon several "original" songs by the film's composers, Paul Zaza and Karl Zitter, that Simpson half-cleverly had them do in open imitation of preexisting, copyright-protected songs, which worked out well enough for him (he settled the lawsuit for $50,000, not exactly a financial deathblow against a $15 million gross) and worked out quite well indeed for his movie.  Of course's, it's even better-founded upon the in-sane lighting budget for this senior prom.

For what we have here is the maximum disco prom, full of coruscating colors across a light-up floor, providing the stage for the movie's single best act of combined choreography and camera direction—in this thriller, in this slasher movie, so maybe that's also a complaint—in the form of Kim and Nick's maximum disco dance, putting on an exceedingly well-tuned "semi-talented high schooler" show, even if I should quibble about some devastatingly bad continuity editing attending it (but it even shakes that out by the end).

And that's not the truest contribution of the prom here, and in a film that has been not only relatively goreless in its kills, but not even able to make frightful suspense out of their lead-up, at the last possible moment it makes a credible go at ripping off Carrie effectively for once, with one superlative decapitation at the disco that's intensified to phantasmogoric levels by an array of seizure-inducing flashing white lights.  This does conclude the "especially good" part; if you wonder what Kim thinks of her boyfriend's involvement in her sister's death, keep wondering, because as a story this is just misshapen and wrong-headed throughout, but there's a visually audacious and even good twenty minutes of movie inside it, and at least those twenty minutes are in the right place.

Killer: Alex

Final Girl: Kim Hammond

Best Kill: oh, Lou's beheading at Disco Madness, this isn't in question, and it still would be even if it didn't so enormously benefit from using a "fake floor" gag rather than a prop

Sign of the Times: Principal Hammond learns a student's been sexually assaulted at school, and is satisfied with suspending her assailant—okay, yeah, but the student was his daughter

Scariest Moment: When I thought they were going to drive that van around in circles for the whole rest of the runtime 

Weirdest Moment: that blonde who isn't part of principal cast moons the creepy groundskeeper (intelligence-insulting red herrings all over this movie, incidentally)

Champion Dialogue: "An obscene call—and not very obscene, at that."

Body Count: 7, including the killer so I'm told

1. Robin, brave Robin, falls through a Goddamn window after being frightened by a game of hide-and-seek

2. That escaped pedophile kills a nurse in the complete narrative dead air dimension

3. Kelly has her throat slit (the best part of which is a dissolve to one extremely red punchbowl)

4. Jude, who tumbles halfway out of the back of Slick's sex van to also have her throat slit

5. Slick is forced into driving off a cliff, explodes

6. Wendy is edited to death (the horror is the body discovery of Kelly, but anyway she presumably takes an axe to the chest)

7. Lou, for his sins, is sent to disco inferno

8. Alex, dying of a wound, according to both Brennan and Wikipedia, though I genuinely understood them to have survived

TL;DR: Structurally inadequate as a mystery or a thriller, it doesn't even have the benefit of being an especially good example of life colliding unexpectedly with death in the usual slasher tradition, thanks to most of its principals kind-of having it coming and, more pressingly, most of them being boring; but its "prom" conceit offers significant compensations.

Score: 5.01/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1957) The Amaizing Colossal Man (1957) Journey To the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) Earth vs. the Spider (1958)  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Visiting Hours (1982) Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988)