ScreenWize

Prom Night is a fairly tedious and orthodox teen slasher film, no doubt eeking out a few box-office dollars on the big-screen before targeting its intended market on DVD. A remake of the 1980 film of the same name, it’s competently rendered by director Nelson McCormick using all the standard horror tricks – many used more than once - but fails to build any real thrills or develop any pathos for anyone involved. The story is most frequently driven – in another standard horror strategy – by characters developing a sudden urge to go off on their own in search of something they have forgotten, or to look for the last person who went off on their own looking for something they’d forgotten. We know what happens to them.

Donna (Brittany Snow) is about to leave high school and is looking forward to her prom night at a nearby hotel, along with a bunch of teen friends and boyfriend Bobby (Scott Porter). She lives with her uncle and aunt and is plagued by bad memories of the death of her parents at the hands of a psychotic killer Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech) who is fixated on spending the rest of his life with Donna. Fenton is supposed to be safely locked up in a mental institution but manages to escape and make his way to the town where the high school teens are celebrating the end of their school days. After checking into the hotel where the prom party is taking place, Fenton gets his hands on a master key that enables him to roam freely around the hotel, and ever so steadily hones in on Donna and her friends. Always just one step behind the killer is ponderous Detective Winn (Idris Elba), who conveniently gets the message about Fenton’s escape as the prom gets underway, but who fails to make any world-class decisions about what to do about it.

Apart from a more strongly paced sequence when Fenton and Donna finally make contact in the dark shadows whilst parallel action of the police at work takes place, it’s an unimaginative affair. It’s shot as if for television with frequent close-ups looming large on the wide screen and there are no stand-out performances, no dramatically stylish editing nor any cinematic flourishes of note. Horror-lite 101 providing more yawn than scream.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon