Flick Picks 16: Prom Night (2008)

Prom Night. A Movie to sleep through...

 Hello again, Streakers! Boog here, with the 16th Flick Pick: 2008's Slasher kinda remake Prom Night. I say kinda remake because there was a 1980 slasher film by the same name, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, in the tail end of scream queen heyday brought on by John Carpenter's Halloween, and Leslie Nielsen, of all people, as the killer. However, plotwise, I Know What You Did Last Summer, the borefest of a slasher starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is closer to being a true remake of the 1980 film than this. Not that that helps this film any. Most of the plot elements remain intact, the only changes are the number of teens in the main cast, and the killer's motivation. SPOILERS! Although, if you watch the first ten minutes of this film, most of it's already spoiled for you anyway. Counting the credits, this film comes in at just under 90 minutes, although to get to the beginning of the movie, we have to sit through 3 minutes of opening credits, just to go through a laughable opening sequence, setting up the plot of Donna, played by Brittany Snow, who you might have seen in the 2007 musical Hairspray, or heard while playing Kingdom Hearts 2, where she voices Namine, as she comes home from the movies to find her father and younger brother covered in ketchup, which greatly distresses her. I guess she was really looking forward to an after movie hot dog or something. Then she hides under the bed just in time to see her mother get liberal amount of ketchup applied to her stomach and chest, and the crazy ketchup man leaves the room. Did I mention the blood in this sequence is terrible? She gets out from under the bed, only to have ketchup man find her, and apparently begin her application process, only to have it turn out to be a flashback, Donna reliving the murder of her family some three years prior. The killer was caught and put away "for good", just so we know he's coming back. But none of that apparently matters, as we Donna being incredibly well adjusted while living with her Aunt and Uncle, played by Jessalyn Gilsig, or the crazy ex-wife from Glee, and Linden Ashby, who will forever only be known to me as the actor who played Johnny Cage in 1995's Mortal Kombat. None of the five other teens are all that memorable to me, but, for the sake of completeness, one of the girls is Jessica Stroup, who I believe at this time is still? in the current incarnation of 90210. One of the guys is Collins Pennie, whom I only know from watching 2009's movie reboot of 80s TV show Fame.

This is about as animated as some of them get, too.

Now, with all that out of the way, we start seeing the cliches and idiots come out of the woodwork. You see, PROM is coming up, so all anxiety about watching her family die takes a backseat to being with a boy! Three couples, Donna and her boyfriend Bobby included, are going all out, renting a limo, getting a ginormus, and very awesome, hotel room, the works. This is of course overshadowed by the fact that they mention in conversation that the prom itself, went $10K OVER budget. I don't know about you, but my high was relatively large for a small town. It had a larger graduating class than this fictional one does, by about 100 kids, and I don't think we spent five grand on the senior prom. It only gets more implausible from her folks. They get to the prom, and when you see it, you wonder where the ten grand went. They start partying, and we see the killer for the first time, as a completely ridiculous level of coincidence happens, letting the killer know what hotel room Donna will be staying in. As the teens get their groove on,  Ketchup Man heads upstairs, and kills a housekeeper by applying some jelly to her stomach. The now named Jelly Man then pockets her Master keycard. Things get more ridiculous as only now do the police find out he's escaped, as it apparently took the MAXIMUM SECURITY facility he was locked THREE DAYS to notice he was missing, and report it to the local authorities. This makes even less sense with explanatory scenario the audience gets shown, which involves him slitting the throat of another inmate, and climbing into the ceiling through a loose grate. Of course, now is where the film falls apart, if it hasn't for you yet already. Now, the main police detective, played by Idris Elba, who was 28 Weeks Later, RocknRolla, and the yet to be released Thor, explains the killer's motive. He's a stalker. He, as a teacher, fell into psycho love with Donna. Her family put out a restraining order on him, and in response, he committed the opening flashback. Despite the very real threat, there's "no evidence" he'll come back to try again, and so the only things the police do are precautionary measures in case he does come back. Oh, and when the hotel manager is given a picture of Jelly Man, who he only checked in maybe an hour before hand, he doesn't recognize him.

Not really hard to miss, what with the obvious killer face...

So then we get treated to the cliched bit of teens from the group getting offed by Jelly Man, one by one. One of them even gets the long, drawn out cat and mouse type death, while an award she would have won gets announced elsewhere. Oh, and the worst hotel manager ever gets a room service man killed by sending him up to find the missing housekeeper, despite being tipped off by the police presence that something might be wrong. The death of the third teen friend is the first one in this film that has somewhat realistic looking blood in it, but it is also very darkly shot, making a lot of the tension disappear simply by making it hard to see. Jelly Man starts getting real annoying here, pulling out superpowers from the cliche slasher villain playbook. He can teleport, or at least use semi-super speed, as he gets around far too quickly. He can move as silently as ninja at those speeds, too. He can kill damn near anyone he wants to silently as well, as no less than five deaths, counting the opening flashback, happen without raising any kind of alarm or suspicion. and considering that three of those deaths are throat slits, that's just too damn hard to believe.

Also a bit like a steel jalapeno pepper.

They try so hard to make him this iconic evil, giving him a specific look(brown blazer, dress shirt, ball cap, slacks, and new patent leather loafers, that squeak, a lot), giving him an admittedly wicked looking knife, albeit one that looks a bit like a larger cousin to those wildlife picture knives all boys get from an uncle or other father figure when they turn 13(mine was a buck). But I will say this. Jelly Man is by far the best actor in this piece. He comes as genuinely creepy, the script giving him plenty of chances to ham up the the sleaze and danger of the character, and he does it well. The pacing of the film is almost exact, averaging a death every six and a half minutes. The problem there is that half of those deaths are in the first and last ten minutes, so most of the middle of the film is padded with jump scares(10), and fake outs(5), meaning, at end count, there are moments trying to be scary then actual deaths and tension.

She just realized what kind of film she's in.

So, in closing, 2008's Prom Night to me encapsulates everything wrong with post-Scream slasher genre. The cast is either unlikeable, idiotic, or too bland to give a crap about. The villains motives are too shallow and undeveloped, and a few of the deaths don't even fit into the killer's motive until the editor wakes up and realized the plot has written him into a corner. This film isn't terrible, but it sure as hell isn't good either. Avoid it if you can, unless you can find a group that wants to watch it and tear it to shreds. On a side note, the sets were quite good, and the film opens with a rather good cover of The Zombies' "Time of the Season", played by Ben Taylor. But those aren't enough to save the film. If you get invited to Prom Night, do yourself a favor and just stay home.