The Prom Night Collection:

A review & Retrospective by Nick Peron

Canada. My home and native land, the true north strong and free, and home of some pretty fucking cool horror movies. No seriously. In the past there have been some very kick ass horror films to come out of Canada. I'm talking about a time before most American made movies were filmed in Vancouver or Toronto to save a buck (Like a lot of the latter Friday the 13th films) or in the now when just about anybody can go out buy a HD video camera and make a movie either. In the late 70's early 80's there were a lot of great low budget horror films that came out north of the boarder, and these movies belong in a class all their own. They had the artistic je ne c'est quoi that all horror movies had at the time, the kind of cinematography that relied on lighting and style to make a movie look good and scary. In this day in age of digital cinema it seems like a lost art.

I'm talking about your early Cronenberg flics (like The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome), Black Christmas (the original slasher movie), My Bloody Valentine, and Terror Train to name a few... Then there were some flops, like Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare.... In the mix was Prom Night, a movie that recently went through a Hollywood reinvisioning which horror movies (for better or worse) seem to be going through these days. No surprise that when the remake of the original came out, the rights holders to the Prom Night franchise decided to release a special collectors edition of the original film and it's three sequels in a box set. This box set, so far as I know is only available in Canada.

Naturally when I saw it, I decided to pick it up, and as a service to you, my adoring public I decided to do a review of this set, and give you a Canadian perspective, of a Canadian film franchise which you may have a vague recollection of seeing once before... Maybe at 3:00 am on Cinemax or something.

The DVD Set itself:

Before I go onto reviewing the movies themselves, I want to take a moment to talk about the presentation of the collection itself. In a way I have to say I'm disappointed. Firstly, the set is one of those double sided cases that holds four discs. You know, the kind where the they're stacked half on each other, and most times you have to take out the bottom disc just to get the second one out to view? Yeah, it's one of those. I understand that it's a cost saving measure, but fuck does it ever piss me off. Okay, keep the price down, but find some other method, I don't care if you stick me with four blank slim cases, just stop that annoying shit.

The transfer process appears to be a direct transfer of whatever master copies the company had, with no remastering, as a result the first Prom Night film looks the worst off of them all in terms of quality. Either they used a very old Beta tape version of the film (which would have suffered some degeneration over the years) or they had a film master that wasn't stored properly. It's muddy, and dark, and watching it on a plasma screen makes all the flaws in the source material plain to the naked eye. On the other hand, it looks like a well viewed VHS copy of the film, which is kind of nostalgic in a way. Remember when you'd go to a mom and pop video store and rent some old horror movie and it has that "viewed a million times" look to the film? It looks like that. I'll get into that later. The other movies have decent quality.

In terms of the DVD production, there are no special features. None. I'm not usually one to care about that sort of thing, I never listen to the commentary tracks and usually I have a passing interest in bonus features. All I ever really care for are deleted scenes if I care at all, but the lack of any bonus features strikes me that it was a rush job that was done to cash in on the release of the Prom Night remake. The DVD menus are as bland as you can expect, and have all the skill to their design as a first year media and graphic arts student could churn out, or at least with the same quality you could find from one of those cheap nine dollar DVD's you find at gas stations, and dubious mom and pop stores.

However, I have to say that the price was decent. For a four disc set, I only paid about $26.00 (Canadian) for it. So you're pretty much paying the same price for four movies that you would usually pay for the latest piece of crap to come out of Hollywood (like, say, the remake of Prom Night.)

The Original Prom Night:

The original Prom Night, begins with four children (Wendy, Jude, Kelly & Nick) playing hide and seek in an abandoned high school when their taunts of classmate Robin causes her to smash through a window and fall to her death. They promise to never tell anybody, and Robin's death is blamed on a psycho path in the area who is quickly locked up.

Fast forward six years in the future, and the now teen Wendy, Jude, Kelly & Nick are all getting ready for Prom Night, which happens to be the anniversary of Robin's death. Add a bit of interesting plot points to the film: That Nick is dating Robin's sister (Kim, played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and the killer who was blamed for killing Robin years ago had escaped (this my friends, sorry to spoil it for you, is a red herring.) There's the usual "psycho killer makes obscene phone calls" (Gee, you think somebody watched Black Christmas?) and there's a subplot involving Wendy getting stuck with bad boy Lou as a date for the prom because she is rejected by Nick, but wants to get revenge on him on Prom Night.

Prom Night comes to pass, and in between footage of kids dancing to some of the most annoying disco music ever to be put in a movie (It's more obnoxious than regular disco music, because it sounds like Canadian disco-bands just trying to do the same thing as their American counterparts... only very badly. Fellow Canadians, when it comes to singing disco, sing about what you know: Hockey, dog sleds, and Tim Hortons coffee... Please!) we are treated to some of the poorly lit scenes of a slasher violently stabbing people to death one by one.

This is where the films pay-off just doesn't fulfill the audience. We have to sit around and slog through about 80 minutes of character development and plot building for this: Very dark scenes, with natural lighting (Which those of you who use film can attest, almost never looks good) of a guy stabbing people to death who offer no resistance, all in between shots of people disco dancing in a school gymnasium. The fact that the film to DVD transfer wasn't the greatest in the world makes what your watching that much less comprehensible. I mean, you see the killer, you see the victim, there's some kind of struggle and there's certainly some blood, but it's very hard to follow. It's not hard to put it all together in your head, but god damn is it annoying to watch.

Then we cut to the killer going after Nick and Kim, who tag team the killer in an extensive fight scene on a disco dance floor (Disco may be dead, but it's horrifying legacy will stay with us for generations to come) until they smuck him in the side of the head with an axe, they take the mask off and we find (Wait for it, wait for it...!) it's Alex, Kim's brother, who we find out witness the death of her sister six years before, and was the killer all along, getting revenge on those who were really responsible for his sisters death.

This was the first time I've seen the first Prom Night movie, and after watching it, I can hardly tell what the hype was. I mean, the only things that were going for it were Jamie Lee Curtis, and Leslie Nielson were in it (And Nielson's jokes weren't that funny!) and not a bunch else. It had all the staples of a slasher film, but there was certainly something missing to it. The movie was released in 1980, shortly after a number of successful slasher films, notably Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978) it strikes me that the movie was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of slasher films at the time. The fact that they were able to snag Jamie Lee Curtis and have her play the role of the woman-who-beats-the-slasher doesn't give the film much defense on trying to be unique or original. The Prom Night motif, also appears to be mimicking previous slasher movies in that the killer goes on a spree during a significant date (IE, Christmas, Halloween etc.) it's also hard not to consider if they had gone with the prom theme because it was the subject of the 1976 film Carrie as well?

What I'm getting at is, while the slasher/teen killer film was no original idea at the time, Prom Night seemed forced in it's attempt to be a shocking tale of a slasher killer. Comparing Prom Night to another slasher film that came out the same year, Friday the 13th (which was released two months prior to Prom Night) and you can see an example of taking a popular concept and making it your own. The original Prom Night seemed more content with recycling previous plot ideas as opposed to creating their own.

However, for a movie that only cost $1,600 to make it raked in $14,800,000 in the box office, but I don't think that was due to the quality of the film, I think that had more to do with the time in which the film premiered. Remember, it came out two months after Friday the 13th, which was a pretty big deal back then so it's no surprise that when people heard about Prom Night coming out, they all flocked to their local cinema and checked it out hoping for another quality film.

The original film would spawn three sequels, the first in 1987 and the last in 1992, before they made a remake just this past year in 2008... If you dare to follow me further, I'll get into the other sequels in the Prom Night series....