If you aren’t invited to PROM NIGHT (1980), consider yourself lucky

Posted by Stephen Jannise

Sometimes, I regret adding a film to our calendar when it turns out to be really bad. I’d hate to think you wasted an evening based on our advice, so if you attended the Terror Tuesday screening of Prom Night on our account, I apologize. Is it a bad film? It’s difficult to say in the context of Terror Tuesday. The lighting and frame composition of Prom Night is more professional than, say, Pieces, but where Pieces was a Terror Tuesday masterpiece of the school whodunit (or more accurately, who’s-doin-it), Prom Night has no distinguishing qualities to elevate it above the slasher mire. It’s just dull.

Director Paul Lynch seems to lack the ability to measure cinematic beats; these are the stretches of time that make up the pacing of a film. This is why Prom Night often seems slow and plodding; many scenes are about a minute or so too long. The opening sequence, for instance, in which some kids playing a hide-and-seek-esque game called Killer ultimately frighten one of their friends out a window to her death, lasts about three minutes more than it should, trying desperately to continue an escalating tension that has, in reality, peaked minutes earlier. This failure to realize when a scene has overstayed its welcome is apparent throughout the film, leading viewers like me to yearn desperately for the moment when the killer is revealed, not because I’m curious but because I just want the movie to be over.

It doesn’t help that no one dies until over an hour and ten minutes into the film. This is supposed to be a slasher movie, but for the first hour, it really is not much more than a high school melodrama with a few creepy phone calls. Again, Lynch and his fellow filmmakers seem unaware of the necessities of the genre. Zack, host of Terror Tuesday, noted before the film that, since this movie was made in 1979, the same year that Friday the 13th was being made, Prom Night didn’t have many previous films to draw upon besides the genre masterpiece Halloween, and this definitely shows.

Am I being typecast?

The only thing this film has in common with the much better Halloween is its casting of Jamie Lee Curtis. Though she is not the most beautiful woman in the film, and she’s certainly no Laurence Olivier when it comes to acting, I think this film provides another example of how much the camera loves her. She is in another league compared to the other actors around her, who would never be seen or heard from again. She even makes disco dancing, one of the lamest and most regrettable dance trends in the history of the United States of America, seem a bit sexy. But she ultimately can’t save this film; yours truly leaned over to Daniel to suggest “stupid” as a one-word review around the time a fat guy’s van explodes on the jagged rocks of a cliff face. That, and Curtis’s disco dance practice, were the most exciting moments of this film. Compare that to Pieces, which had more excitement in any single scene than the entirety of Prom Night. Terror Tuesday can do, and has done, better than this.