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What do proms and psycho killers have in common?
Nothing, but they’re both in this movie.
Prom Night is a remake of the 1980 film titled (surprisingly
enough) Prom Night. It centers around a
girl named Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow), whose
family is murdered when an obsessed teacher
raids her house while she is out at the movies.
Life goes on and the teacher goes to prison. Now,
a few years later, it’s prom night, and the psychotic
teacher has escaped. He wants what he
came for before, and will stop at nothing until he
can hold Donna in his arms.
Plot-wise, this story was more of an equation
than a structure:
Pyscho in prom hotel + Character A that goes to
get something from their suite upstairs = Psycho
kills Character A. (Repeat with remaining cast.)
Things you expect happen exactly the way you
expected them to happen. The only “scariness”
in the film is the result of shock value, an easy
cop out for any director with a bad script in
their hands.
What isn’t bad in Prom Night is genuinely cliché.
From the Hollywood Club-style Prom at
an extravagant hotel to the feuds between the
popular and not-so-popular girls to the hip
hop music that drones out any chance for the
characters to say anything remotely intelligent,
this film seems to be geared toward making
America look cool to overseas audiences, or
for fifth graders who just can’t wait to get to
high school. So if you’ve never stepped foot on
American soil, or have yet to go through puberty,
no worries, you’ll have an easy time following
this story.
If you’re a gore fan who hasn’t missed a sequel
of Saw yet, you may want to pass on this movie.
The effects are weak and unrealistic. If you’re
into the thriller stuff, come for the last ten minutes.
If romance is your thing, this movie isn’t
that either. The relationships of the characters
in this story are superficial and unnecessary
to the plot.
Basically, the main flaw of this film is that it lacks
any kind of focus. The movie is like a high school
teenager trying to find their own style by borrowing
from what has already been done (including
a total rip of Kill Bill: Vol. I in the opening scene).
There is nothing new here, only remnants of other
movies collaged together to cover up a gaping
hole where originality should lie.
On a positive note, if you were a huge supporter
of the day “The OC” went off the air; you should
definitely check this film out. Sure, you have to
sit through about an hour of OC-like characters
blabbering about the same old melodramatic
garbage, but they all get stabbed to death in the
end, so, in fact, it’s a lose-win situation.
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