What sucks more than anything about Prom Night is its impressive debut at last weekend's box office: According to Box Office Mojo, it opened number one with an estimated domestic gross of $22.7 million. But my guess is that this formulaic modern adaptation will fade from memory and money quicker than the 28-year-old Canadian film that it's based on. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.
Donna Kipple (Brittany Snow) returns home one evening only to witness her mother's brutal murder. Her father and younger brother had already been disposed of earlier that evening. The murderer is Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech), Donna's former science teacher who transforms the freshman into his idée fixe. Though it is never really made clear, I assume that he had plans to steal Donna and live with her in the mountains or something. Since Donna witnesses the entire incident, Fenton is quickly caught and sentenced to life in prison, 3,000 miles away from her. (In the film's sole attempt at political or social significance, Detective Winn, the officer who put Fenton behind bars, claims that the killer would have been executed, had a sympathetic jury not let him off easy with insanity.)
The story fast-forwards to three years later: Donna's senior year of high school, but more importantly, the eve of her senior prom. Despite her reoccurring nightmares about Fenton, she is finally beginning to make some progress moving on from her immediate family's murder.
Donna, her dreamboat beau Bobby, and an entire crew of her na've bosom buddies stride off the Pacific Grand Hotel in even grander style for their senior prom. Though, in reality, proms usually rank first on the hierarchy of high school socials, this film assigns the event the significance often reserved for weddings or births. Prom Night only enforces the shallow, cutthroat conventions in so many high school movies by depicting the senior prom as the supposed best night of people's lives. It's simply depressing.
It just so happens that the lackadaisical police responsible for keeping Fenton under close watch report his escape from a mental institution three days late, leaving Detective Winn less than ample time to set up proper surveillance at the prom venue and Donna's house. Fenton, who evidently stays abreast of Bridgeport High's social calendar, despite his incarceration, also makes the trek to the Pacific Grand. You can guess more or less what happens from here: He wipes out inept clerks and idiot prom goers alike, in a constant attempt to capture Donna.
The film is set in "Bridgeport," a Springfield-like town located in either Connecticut, Illinois, Alabama, Ohio, California, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, or even here in New Jersey. Film theorists would claim that the nebulous setting is supposed to suggest the situation's ubiquity. But in a movie with this many plot holes, my guess is that it is out of laziness, rather than symbolism.
Director Nelson McCormick's rich background in television production comes through loud and clear: His work blends, in episodic coherence, with all the other uninspired teen-horror mar-fests. The film's PG-13 rating makes clear that NewMarket Films was only interested in stooping to the lowest common audience denominator. You can't even enjoy the gratuitous gore and blood that usually makes these movies worthwhile because there is none: Fenton's victims die from what appear to be pinpricks and scratch marks.
Prom Night is laughable, but unfunny. It relies on shock value alone, beating the "person appears in the medicine cabinet mirror" shtick into the ground. In fact, it is so encumbered by genre clichés that one might find themself willing heinous acts onto Donna and the detectives simply to break the movie's blatant predictability. About the only semblance of authenticity or sincerity in the entire film is the recreation of the awkward pre-ceremony pictures in front of adoring, on-looking parents.
