It typifies the lack of self-awareness that is present throughout the film. They’re not easy on the ear but, again, I’m sure they go down a treat with the One Tree Hill crowd. In between the stalking and slashing we get several emotional, teen-drama speeches. In the world of Prom Night someone can be stabbed to death without shedding a single drop of blood from their invisible stab wounds. It’s also fun to see how difficult a time was had keeping the film kiddie-friendly enough to reach the appropriate age rating. It’s an interesting insight into the ADD generation. The dialogue will seem cheesy, the characters loathsome and the story extremely predictable.įortunately, owing to an astonishingly high number of continuity errors, the film is a great deal of fun. If you don’t ‘get’ shows like One Tree Hill and My Super Sweet 16 then you’ll probably feel as baffled by Prom Night as I did.
It should be said, Prom Night is very much a horror movie for the generation that don’t know that MTV used to play music, that Vinnie Jones used to play football or that Michael Barrymore used to play Strike It Lucky for half an hour in every living room in the country without the insinuation that something untoward was afoot. In the case of Prom Night, the main similarity that the 2008 version has with the original is that neither is particularly good and yet both are still quite entertaining. A more pressing issue for me is whether a film is any good. Personally, I’m not too bothered where a film takes its source material from. No matter, it would appear, as the film took the number one box office spot in the US, raking in over $20m in its opening weekend. This is particularly confusing given that the target audience for this 15-rated horror is unlikely to have even been born when the original was released. A troupe of hilariously self-obsessed theater stars swarm into a small conservative Indiana town in support of a high school girl who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom. So much so, it seems, that Prom Night has taken its name from an 80’s slasher but built an entirely different film around it. Yet for all the online hatred, remakes of old horror movies are bankable affairs. A bad day at the office? Michael Bay is gonna pay for this! You spent your 42nd birthday alone and you still live with your parents? Then fuck Rob Zombie! Hollywood remakes take the brunt of many an unhappy person’s online fury.