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Prom Night (2008) Review

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Why’s this poster so awful?? Seriously you can’t tell anything about the film from this and if anything it just makes you want to stay away. Trust me this is not the way to advertise any kind of film. Regardless this is a really bad title though so you will want to stay away. It ends up being a painful experience from start to finish with no real smart characters.

The movie starts off with Donna watching her family get murdered by a psychopath named Richard. We jump to the future where she is now being taken care of by her uncle and aunt. She is still rather traumatized but wants to at least try and enjoy her prom. It should be the perfect day and so she heads out to be with her friends. Unfortunately though Richard has escaped from prison and because everyone is incompetent in this film it took 3 days for the cops to be notified. They let the guardians know but instead of taking Donna out….they decide to let the prom continue since it would be too traumatic to cancel. Okay……how many victims will it take this time before Richard is stopped?

There are so many issues with this film but I think it’s safe to say that the biggest issue you will run into right away is just how depressing and mean spirited the film is. A high body count is to be expected but so many people keep dying and nobody is safe. A lot of these characters had nothing to do with the story and they’re still getting bumped off. Sure that’s technically true for a lot of slashers like this but I think part of the problem with having this take place in the school is you’re basically having a bunch of kids get murdered the whole time. We had an elementary school kid get bumped off in the intro even which is taking things a step farther.

Allowing the prom to continue is also complete insanity. Winn has a moment where he mentions that they don’t see any reason why Richard would come here. Really? They see no reason why the crazy psychopath who made it explicitly clear that he would do whatever it took to go back to Donna would try to attack her now that he’s broken out? That had to be one of the silliest lines in the film without a doubt. I could barely believe what I was hearing. Come on………come onnnnnnnnnnn.

Okay so the prom’s going to continue, but you’re going to let the hotel staff know that there’s a crazy guy on the lookout right? No, the hotel concierge asks the police officer if they should be afraid and he just says “Nah, probably nothing to worry about” and leaves. The hotel staff don’t know anything is wrong until near the end of the film so of course they start to get picked off too. I’d be fuming if I was the sole survivor from the hotel staff because that makes no sense.

Then of course Winn isn’t able to get the villain at the hotel so he tells the two police officers to keep a lookout at the house. Naturally both have to be completely isolated so taking them down is child’s play. Why even stay at the house? The first order of business should have been to take the characters over to the police station. Keeping them in the house that Richard knows the address of is crazy. Even worse is that Donna is kept to her room…where she is right next to a window. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now granted, Richard still shouldn’t have gotten as far as he does but apparently he is so skilled that he can take out virtually every opponent without making a sound. The house is also sound proof I guess because even with the door open and Donna screaming, the parents and Winn can’t hear her while not being all that far away? The amount of plot holes and stretches of imagination here are really pretty insane.

Going back to the tragic part though, it just feels like the film should have let more of the characters get a happy ending. Pretty much everyone was destroyed and the sole survivors are going to have a complex for the rest of their life. It doesn’t stop the film from having a fairly upbeat song for the credits but there’s nothing happy about the ending. There’s nothing really happy about the film in general which is something I have an issue with. A slasher film will rarely be happy of course but the tonal contrast here was a bit much. The film would try to be really happy at times and it didn’t work because obviously you can’t feel that good when everyone’s getting destroyed.

The film’s not as bloody as you would expect but it still tries to be as violent as possible within the confines of not being an R rated horror flick. Characters get stabbed tons of times and the deaths are all rather grisly. Nobody seems able to put up even the slightest amount of a fight against this guy and the whole film feels futile for the heroes. Every scene has so much build up that you see the deaths coming several minutes in advance which is annoying. There are a ton of fake jump scares but they’re always before the real death to the point where you can pretty much set your watch to them.

At one point Dillon even has a dream of the future about what’s about to happen and….she decides to do everything that she did in the dream anyway. A bit of an odd choice if you ask me, wouldn’t you want to not do what you did in the dream even if it wasn’t real? I just don’t see why you would actually try to copy your answers there. Seems like a recipe for disaster by any metric. It’s why hiding under the bed wouldn’t be a good idea since that worked last time so don’t do the same thing twice. It was also rough that she didn’t step in to save her mother. Obviously that’s easier said than done and in the moment it’s hard to make that decision but it’s yet another brutal scene. The cast of characters are all pretty forgettable and the romances are all paper thin. There’s just nothing of substance in this title. The film almost should have just played this off as part parody with the heroes deciding to have the prom party instead of cancelling it.

I keep going back to that because the whole scenario is absolutely crazy. Nothing makes sense in this film, people don’t act the way they should with a mass murderer on the loose with an obvious place of attack. At least in most films the characters reasonably don’t know where the villain will be but this time they actually do know. A whole lot of lives could have been saved if Winn did the responsible thing instead of waiting to see this all play out.

Overall, Prom Night is a film that you should absolutely avoid. There are no redeeming qualities to be found in this film. It starts off rather brutally and ends on that same note. There are no scenes that are actually all that happy because they are happening in the context of ugly things about to happen to the cast. There was basically no escape for them and any victory is a rather hollow one. The slasher genre tends to be doomed right from the jump and this film doesn’t do anything to convince you otherwise. It’s very by the numbers and for a genre like this that’s about as bad as it gets.

Overall 1/10

Prom Night Review

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This review is of the TV-14 version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

It’s time for another school movie where a disaster takes place. There isn’t a huge explosion this time around but there may as well have been as things get really intense here. The movie doesn’t start off on the best note, nor does it end in a great way either. This is really just your dime a dozen slasher movie going through its paces and it never tries to be anything more than that. As a result this movie just isn’t very good at all with a lot of forgettable characters.

The movie starts off with a bunch of cruel children picking on one girl until they corner her by a window where she falls through and dies. They decide not to tell anyone and run off. Years later, someone has decided to avenge the girl. Each of the children who were involved start to get threatening phone calls confirming that they will all be dying at the prom. The heroines are grown up now though and figure these are prank calls and don’t worry about it. As the bodies start piling up they have to be careful though. Can they actually stop this monster before they are obliterated?

Schools really are quite huge so it does work as a big battleground here. For example with the big prom taking place in the main lobby, the rest of the school is completely empty. That gives the murderer plenty of places to hide. It’s a location where you can buy into a cloaked figure even camping out for the whole day. You’ve got several floors each with 12+ rooms plus restrooms and such that are completely empty. Naturally some students leave to go and have affairs and such which makes them easy pickings. In that way the prom was the easiest date to pull this off for because everybody is making the job easier. They split off on their own without telling people intentionally.

Of course it’s also annoying to see them all fall for this by the same token. You just know that the characters are doomed the instant the villain appears. As always they all just don’t know how to fight at all and can’t defend themselves. The only exception to this is a guy named Slick who has a lot of self confidence. It was impressive how he just rode up in his big car and got someone to go out with him immediately although whether it’s a feather in his cap or the lady was too easy is something we can’t say. It’s as rushed a romance as you can get so I’m not exactly going to give that a high score.

Surprisingly Slick actually made this a real fight and went back and forth with the villain for quite some time though. That scene went on for way longer than I had anticipated. Yeah the ending is probably inevitable to be sure but I always prefer when someone puts up a fight rather than meekly going down. When your life is at stake you better find some adrenaline to fight back because if you lose then that’s game over. There is no retry option or anything like that even if it would be cool to have one of those.

The main heroine here is Kim and she does feel bad about what happened. It’s just like 10 years too late but I’ll take what I can get. There isn’t a whole lot to her character though. I mean in a way her character is that she isn’t nearly as desperate as the others who are all either one with the world now or have completely moved on. You just know that they’re all doomed while Kim at least has a chance of figuring things out. Well, she is the main character so that makes sense but she also just seems a lot more reasonable than the others. She feels like your average everyday character if that makes sense.

It’s not a bad thing, I’ll take being a forgettable character over being a really bad one but you can tell that this movie was more about putting the effort in to how everyone would be bumped off rather than the characters. There actually is one side bonus to this although I think it’s probably unintentional. The characters are so forgettable that when they reveal who the villain is, it takes you a minute to remember who the character is. You quickly understand from the context clues but there will be a few moments where you scratch your head and just wonder what’s going on. It all does make sense in hindsight and in a way this is the only culprit that would make sense.

The film does offer an obvious red herring from the start but the movie forgot to be subtle about this so because of that nobody falls for it. Now in a way slasher films are always going to be doomed no matter what setting they take place in but I would argue that taking place at a school puts you at an extra disadvantage by default. First you have all of the drama and poorly developed romances going on. It makes the characters look really annoying and unprepared from the jump. Then you have the fact that the teachers and principal are inevitably not going to help or do much anyway so why even include them in here? If the movie takes place on the mountains or something then at least it’s a unique environment and you have the extra tension of trying to escape from there in one piece.

It won’t solve the core issues but it’s a start. As you’d expect the film suffers from excessive violence and poor writing. There are no really likable characters as it’s really hard to forget that opening scene. I don’t care how young they were, you have to be pretty messed up to attack that little girl the way that they did. It was a really rough way to start the film and unfortunately set the tone for how the rest of the movie was going to play out. It’s really hard to recover from a moment like that.

Overall, At least the principal tried to help things out by putting the pressure on with locating another criminal on the loose. I give him credit for doing his best, he was just doomed from the start and you as the viewer knew it. Some things just can’t be easily stopped. I don’t think there is really anything you can get from this film that can’t be found in any number of other slashers. The movie doesn’t have much in the way of redeeming values as even the mystery of trying to find out who the killer is won’t interest you very much.

Overall 2/10