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Topic: Prom Night (2008)
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Stu Jamieson
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 524
From: Buccan, Qld, Australia
Registered: Jan 2008
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posted 04-12-2008 08:49 PM
The stalk'n'slash genre just hasn't been the same since Wes Craven's Scream took the piss out of it in 1996, but this hasn't stopped a steady stream of slasher flicks ranging from the half-decent I Know What You Did Last Summer to the more recent (and god awful) remakes of the classics like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now it seems, however, that even the lame 80's slashers are being remade which brings us to Prom Night, a reimagining of the 1980 film which contributed to Jamie Leigh Curtis' earning of her "scream queen" mantle.
You can just picture the scene: a nubile and (with any luck) scantily clad teenage nymph rummages through the contents of her bathroom mirror cabinet searching determinedly for a psychosis-alleviating prescription pharmaceutical or maybe just a tube of toothpaste. Upon closing the cabinet, her reflection comes into shot, as does the grim visage of the psychopathic killer standing behind her. From here there are two options: either the fiend promptly attacks our fair maiden or the damsel swings around to find that the brute was merely a paranoid delusion. Actually there is a third option: fully anticipating the reflection of said fiend, the girl may close the cabinet to find there is nothing there at all! This device has been a horror staple for many years and increasingly the challenge has been to discover innovative ways of thrusting this one trick pony upon the audience while still producing the desired result. Sadly, "innovation" is not in Prom Night's (the new one) vocabulary, a principle made worse by the fact that the "mirror" trick is ineffectually utilised not once, not twice, but three times!
But this film is no stranger to implementing the tried and true clichés of 80's horror cinema and it duly ticks them off one by one: pretty girls wandering around alone inquiring, "Is there anybody there?" (anybody who's seen Scream knows this is a veritable death wish); a creepy man standing on the opposite side of the street disappears after a bus passes in front of him; flocks of startled pigeons suddenly fly across the frame for shock value (a cliché made even more ridiculous here by occurring inside a building!); every scare is signposted by a string quartet picking up their bows and collectively scraping them across their strings - screeeeeeeeeeeee!; and it all culminates in the predictable strobe lit climax. It's telling of the quality of a slasher flick when even the kill scenes are boring; innovative kill scenes are a staple of this genre!
The banality of the film continues into the performances. The boys bristle with machoism while the girls giggle, flutter and squeal at all the appropriate points. As "final girl", Brittany Snow fritters away the credibility she earned in last year's Hairspray while much of the rest of the cast appear to have been chosen because they look like somebody more famous (i.e. unaffordable).
Proceeding with textbook predictability, this 80's knockoff would appeal only to someone who had never seen a slasher film in their life.
4 out of 10
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