Movie Review - Prom Night (2008)

Prom Night (2008)



When a film is touted a "remake," I don't generally think that the movie will have the exact same plot as the original. However, most of the time the film follows some sort of premise from the parent film (see the remake of Psycho: pretty unnecessary because it's exactly the same as the first one), and though not a replica by any means, it is reminiscent of its predecessor. In the case of the remake of Prom Night, the only things that link the remake to the original are the facts that both have teens getting killed on their prom night and there are DANCE SCENES!!


2008's Prom Night was directed by Nelson McCormick, who has been involved with mostly TV series and is the director of another remake, the upcoming film The Stepfather, based on the 1987 film of the same name. Brittany Snow stars as Donna Keppel, a teenage girl living with her aunt and uncle after her parents were killed by a crazed psychopath, high school teacher Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech) obsessed with Snow's character. It is prom night for her school, which seems to be ginormous considering how many students are at prom and the magnificent hotel that the school has booked for the night. With that aside (my jealousy rages now that the movie made my prom look like a birthday party at the bowling alley), Donna, her date Bobby (Scott Porter), and her friends all head to the festivities with fun, dancing, and "love" in mind. Later on, Donna is plagued with visions of Fenton's return, and it seems she must be skilled in some sort of divination, because the killer is in fact still Fenton and he is at the hotel where the prom is being held. I think you know what happens from here.

One of the overall problems that Prom Night suffers from is the fact that it does nothing to distinguish itself from the monotony of all of the other tame remakes that have been thrown out these days. The film can be replaced by any number of other slasher films that have done this same sort of thing: Red Eye, When a Stranger Calls - you name it - Prom Night is more of the same redundancy that has been plaguing theaters as of late.

The cast is quite bland and there really is no feeling for any of the characters. Brittany Snow does what she can with her cookie-cutter role, a girl who has been traumatized by her family's death but seems normal enough, but there's just not enough substance to any character to care about their deaths - or the painful seperation that the living characters must go through. It was obvious from the beginning that Donna would be the "final girl," as the plot spent so much time hinting at Donna's past.


Speaking of Donna and her relationship with the killer, the film made it so low-key that it was actually confusing as to what happened when Fenton killed her parents. The audience is given little hints that can be easily missed if one is, say, reading a book to pass the time because of the movie's predictability. Since the original film had a fairly straightforward plotline, it would make sense for Prom Night to build off of that one somewhat, but instead, it decides to create its own story that feels as though it is just a jumping-off point to slaughter teens.

I have no problem with horror movies being a bit tamer in order to cater to a wider audience, and in fact I think it's a great thing that movies are accepting the fact that they do not need a lot of onscreen violence to scare the viewer. But Prom Night is a slasher, a form of horror which requires tension and at least some violence to succeed. With this remake, director McCormick has decided to leave out almost all blood, and even in the "unrated" version that I viewed, there was a severe lack of blood that scenes called for. When a person gets stabbed several times, they are going to bleed, but the film tends to leave out this detail to the point where the death seems humorous. Of course, the comedy is enhanced due to the fact that Schaech's performance as Felton is over-the-top and too campy.

Along with the lack of violence, McCormick tends to layer on the fact that he is making a movie that, at the top of the film's goals, is to cater to the teenage girl with the use of trendy pop music spliced throughout the majority of the film. The argument that the movie is set at a prom helps to explain the use of music, but throughout the first third of the film, there is almost a constant loop of background pop music that detracts from the action at hand. (Did anyone catch a clip of a This Will Destroy You song during a beginning scene in the bathroom?) It's not really a fault of the film per se, but the fact that McCormick so bluntly shows what his target audience is almost turns away the other parts of the demographic.


At the close of the film, most will have lost interest in any little entertainment value they saw in the film in the beginning. Prom Night's allegiance lies in teenagers who scare easily or who just want to fool around at the movie theater, and the impact of the movie is slim to none. There is no mystery of who the killer is or what his motive of killing was: most slashers have a surprise twist, a shock or explanation, that ties the film together, giving the viewer a purpose as to why they watched the movie. Throughout Prom Night, we are already exposed to these answers, and so we could have already imagined the ending, and it probably would have been better than the actual one. All Prom Night does is take already established slasher films, jumble them up into something more predictable and a little bit uncohesive, and then fail miserably at what is essentially a simple setup. And for Prom Night to pull in $22.7 million worth of ticket sales, and end up #1 in its opening weekend at the box office, tells me either that this new batch of teens are really digging how simple and cliched these new remakes are, or that people like me went to see it hoping for something better than their biases told them and instead realized what a grave mistake they had made.

Come on, filmmakers. You can do better than this. Otherwise, with the batch of remakes coming out lately, this site is going to be festooned with scathing reviews.

Prom Night (2008) on Rotten Tomatoes

***

Sorry for the lack of better stills, but if you couldn't tell by now, I have been having problems getting photoshots and I still have not succeeded. The quality will just have to stay low.