10/23: A Prom Night Double Feature

10/23

In an attempt to catch up on movies since falling woefully behind, I spent a Friday night doing a themed double feature: Prom Night and Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou. Largely forgotten, bizarre, campy-as-hell entries in the slasher genre, I'll review each separately, but... lord knows why. These movies are silly as hell.

Prom Night

A movie clearly made in the wake of Halloween but not able to capture any of the sophistication, Prom Night takes the Halloween ripoff game to the extreme to the point of even casting Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead. Rounding out the cast is Leslie Nielsen in the weirdest casting ever, first as the school principal and dad of one of the main characters and then as a strong allusion to being the killer. Surely, try as Prom Night might, I just can't take the star of Airplane and The Naked Gun seriously.

Guys... this movie is so damn weird. It's like the director really wanted to make the next Saturday Night Fever but could only get funding to make a slasher, so he kinda just squished the two together. There's an 80/20 thing happening here, with the first hour or so of the movie being a disco movie complete with choreographed Jamie Lee Curtis dance scene and then for the last 20 minutes the director remembered he was making a slasher. It stands as one of the more bizarre, campy slashers I've ever seen... that is, until I watched Prom Night II.

5/10

Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou

Following in the steps of such brilliant sequel titling as Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou trades the disco trappings of the original for a Carrie-style supernatural element. Why? Because b-movies, I guess? Other than happening in the same school and the murders happening around prom, nothing connects these movies. In fact, apparently during filming there wasn't any idea to make this a sequel, and it was only after when they wanted to rake in the cash (apparently the first one was a success?) that they slapped on the the sequel title. 

I will hand it to Hello Mary Lou: this movie is so silly, so over the top, so ridiculously dumb, that it's a riotously good time. The plot revolves around a sexually free young woman from the 50s who is named prom queen then killed a stink bomb (it sets her on fire, but still... she's killed by a stink bomb). Her spirit is released in the 80s and she returns to wreak sexually-free havoc upon the school, and prom, that killed her. That about sums up what you can expect from this movie: it's camp at camp's best and unlike the original doesn't even make an attempt to take itself seriously. I'm shocked this isn't mentioned in the annals of camp classics more often.

As a side note, I first heard about this movie on the How Did This Get Made? podcast, which I would highly recommend as a companion to this movie. Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron guest, and it makes Hello Mary Lou even more fun.

7/10