looks like I picked the wrong week to stop murdering teenagers

I will circle back to my initial notation that a blood oath amongst 11 year olds is just a bad idea all around. The extremely casual nature by which these children impose death on a little girl by aggressively chanting "Kill! Kill! Kill!" until she nervously backs out of a window and dies with virtually zero reaction actually makes all four of these murderous pre-teens insane sociopaths. Only one girl even remotely reacts but they all seem far more concerned with not getting in trouble. The fact that they are very much directly responsible for the death of a peer does not seem to phase them at all. That is a red flag in the first minutes of this movie. Ok so I need to tap the breaks and try and find the good stuff before I just demolish this movie. So lets move past the death secret and find the silver lining to Prom Night.

I think it's basically Leslie Nielsen. And his screen time is maybe 3 minutes? Jamie Lee Curtis is fine too. She's in it more. But it's painfully obvious she's in demand from her Halloween fame but probably not expensive enough to demand a reasonable paycheck for her role in this movie. But this is it. I'm not going to stretch things. The fact that Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis appear in this movie are the highlights. Nielsen is in that phase of his career where he feels like he's dabbling in other genres. This predates his brief role in Creepshow a couple years later but it does appear that he had a couple other roles in straight horror flicks before he fully embraced his more comedic roles later in his career. He didn't add a lot. He played the father to the dead girl at the beginning of the film and her two surviving siblings, the elder played by Curtis. Again, Jamie Lee was fine, but she was just kind of there. We followed her around just doing what a normal twenty something year old high schooler would do. That is where the positive elements of this film conclude.

I don't even really know where to start with this movie. The murder pact is an outrageous way to kick this film off. Then the fact that it was basically just a buffet style rip off of the cinematic elements of Halloween without any of the actual movie parts just made it borderline unwatchable. There really wasn't even fun build up like with Michael Myers. There was a red herring of the crazed sex offender blamed for the murder escaping from prison to make you think he's the killer. Then there's a handful of obscene phone calls that feel more like a toned down Chris Farley bus driver in Billy Madison. Just a weird amount of frustrated mumbling, heavy breathing and beleaguered scratching out with a pencil over the phone. Nick doesn't even get his call which really seems to frustrate the killer. That's all the build up. We're basically told there's a killer from these scenes, which we already know. No one watches this movie and is unaware of what is going on from the get go. It's a horror movie. There's a killer. That's the anticipation. Boom. Roasted.

Then we get one of my least favorite things from some horror movies, especially ones from the 70's. Now I know this movie came out in 1980. But it's wildly apparent all throughout the film that the culture of the 80's had not made it's way to Canadian sensibilities by this point. The prom is HEAVY disco. Most of the "students" appear to be folks who gathered in a gymnasium for an insurance convention because none of them even look close to their 20's let alone 17 year old high school students as they are made out to be in the narrative of the movie. I think this is also probably the perfect time to bring up the extended disco sequence two thirds of the way through the movie. I watched several minutes. Got up and went to the bathroom. Went into the kitchen and got a beverage. Sat back down and they were still just dancing. It wasn't spliced in with scenes where the killer was lurking somewhere. It was just Jamie Lee Curtis and her date doing a highly choreographed disco dance. It almost really IS the second act of the film. So the 70's motif of just lingering on nonsensical filler was on full display. The original Dawn of the Dead had this as well. Once the inhabitants of the mall really clear out the remaining zombies and go about living life in their shopping mecca, it's just that for the longest time. Prom Night does the same thing. The set up is just a whole day at school. There's some drama between Curtis and the girl who plays "Wendy", I believe her character's name was. There was bad blood because Curtis's date was Wendy's ex. It felt very ripped off from Carrie. But it still didn't really materialize into anything. It just was. We just watched them go about their business. That's basically the movie.

Eventually, with maybe 20 minutes left in the movie, they remembered it's a horror flick and decided to find a slim 5th grader to dress in all black and pretend to stalk some adults moonlighting as unconvincing teenagers. There was zero menace to the killer and he just sort of showed up in places because that's what the script (pretending there was one) said to do. So he put on his black loafers, slacks, and turtleneck and then they heavily implied he was murdering people. I think my favorite one may have been when he killed the girl with her boyfriend nicknamed "Slick" when they were out in his van in a nearby field, I think. He leaps in and quickly murders the girl, to which Seymour decides to slowly drive in circles in the grass while attempting to make it looks like he's trying to not make out with the slim fellow in the ski mask. That goes on for a few minutes before the van is driven off a nearby cliff and immediately blows up because that's what vans do. I think more people would balk at the idea of owning a van if they new how likely it was for full combustion and explosion. Beyond that he stalks Wendy around the entire school. She keeps running away from him to find every door to the outside of the school not just locked but fully chained closed. This is another of my favorite tropes where running and hiding is the modus operandi. Where will you run? Who knows. Sure, it's your high school and you've been there every day for years on end. But with the stakes this high, the general layout of the school is maddeningly difficult to negotiate. Since when do we have a science lab? I've never even SEEN this hallway before! Eventually she hides in a car in the auto-shop garage because that used to be a thing schools did. She just lays across the seat hoping the killer doesn't have eyes and forgets how to use the axe he's been carrying for the last several minutes. Unfortunately for Wendy, his eyes DO still work and he sees her through the windows of the car because they are clear and she's a person lying across the front seat. Oddly enough he smashes the window with the axe and now her foolproof plan for staying alive has somehow been thwarted. Oh no!

In the end, he accidentally decapitates a bully from earlier, confusing it for Nick, the guy he actually meant to kill. It's an honest mistake though. Sure, the two characters look nothing alike, but who has time to look at peoples faces or heads or bodies when you've got a schedule to keep! So he lops the bully's head off and it goes rolling down the runway right before the big Prom King and Queen ceremony. It takes a moment but once everyone sees the severed head, the prom really starts to break up pretty quickly. Everyone casually exits the gym except for Jamie Lee Curtis and her date, Nick, who apparently now has a limp. There's probably a reason for that but by this point we're less than 10 minutes left in the movie and I'm hanging on by a thread. A big fight breaks out, with not a quarter of the choreography that the disco dance had, and it lasts for about 17 seconds. Then, the kid who played Minkus on Boy Meets World, or someone with a strikingly similar body type, goes cascading out of the lone set of school doors not vigorously chained up, to a crowd of people and police officers. Then the big reveal. It's Jamie Lee Curtis's little brother! I could have put spoiler alert there but there'd have to be something there to spoil. I was just happy it was finally over.

This movie is easily a D. Maybe a D- just because it's bad. Knowing there are actually still somehow worse horror movies out there like Gingerdead Man and Terror Toons, I can't fully commit this movie to an F but it's just not good. There's nothing about it that's redeeming. It's ripe for the MST3K treatment as the whole film ends up being this hastily slapped together fever dream of nothingness. It's bland and even when we get to the "scary" part, it's very subversive in presentation. Several things are alluded to and not shown, despite a claim to fame for this movie being how much they "pushed the envelope". It's the remnants of a handful of other, far better horror movies of it's time frame just meant to seem like this one should be in the mix. Adding Curtis to the cast is a big get for them because it makes it seem like this should be regarded as a classic horror flick. But there's nothing to it that makes it even remotely appealing. There's almost zero build up. The banality of normal life takes up most of the movie's run time with precious little to show for it. And even when you do get to the part where the murders start happening, there's a good bit that's implied or even heard but not seen. Not that I'm big on gore, because I'm not. But its just really not good. I'm happy I watched it because it's definitely the low point of the 31 so far. I was able to know early on that it was going to be garbage as well. So I just suffered through it with my own sarcastic commentary throughout. So don't watch Prom Night. I know there's a sequel that really has nothing to do with this one and there was a remake in 2008 that was presumably much better than this one. So if you've got a prom themed horror itch to scratch, go check one of those out and leave this Canadian disaster alone. That wraps up day 9. Tomorrow we hit double digits so we'll see what strikes the fancy tomorrow. Hopefully its going to be something much better. Who knows, we'll find out tomorrow. Until then, I'll catch you on the flip side.