Classic Horrors Club

We’ve made horror film smoothies before; let’s do it again… Throw Halloween (1978) into a blender with Carrie (1976.) Sprinkle a little Saturday Night Fever (1977) on top and press “Chop” for one minute. Wait! I said, “Chop,” not “Puree.” Now we have pure liquid with no real substance. Such is Prom Night (1980), the little slasher film that could. Perhaps due to the participation of Jamie Lee Curtis as Kimberly Hammond, it made a profit quickly and spawned three “sequels” (in name only) and a 2008 remake.

This was during Curtis’s scream queen era. Hot off Halloween, she appeared sequentially in The Fog in February of 1980, Prom Night in July, Terror Train in October, and Road Games in February of 1981. After Halloween II later that year, she took a break from the horror genre. She supposedly wanted this role and replaced the original star, Eve Plumb (aka Jan Brady), later claiming this was the first movie for which she made any money.

The Halloween ingredients come from an escaped psychopath named Leonard Murch. I don’t mention who played him because we never see him… at least not without bandages covering his face. He was the likely suspect in an incident six years ago in which young Robin Hammond (Tammy Bourne) fell out a window at an abandoned convent. Trying to outrun the police, he was badly burned in a fiery car crash.

The Carrie ingredients come from Wendy Richards (Anne-Marie Martin) who conspires with the suspended thug Lou Farmer (David Mucci) to humiliate Kimberly on… prom night. They’re pale comparisons of Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and Billy Nolan (John Travolta.) They show promise, but we don’t know what they’re planning until the climax and we never get to see their plot enacted. That’s because that pesky killer interrupts the prom king and queen’s coronation.

Finally, the Saturday Night Fever ingredients come from the theme of the prom: “Disco Madness.” The belove/despised genre features heavily in footage of the event and they’re the type of songs that sound familiar, but when you use Shazam to learn what they are, there aren’t any matches. That’s because they’re replacements for actual disco hits for which they had no rights to use and composers Paul Zaza and Carl Zittrer wrote in only five days. To be fair, three songs were identified: Dancin’ in the Moonlight, Love me Till I Die, and Tonight is Prom Night.

It’s no spoiler what really happened when little Robin Hammond fell out the window. Her “friends” backed her against it while playing a version of Hide & Seek called, “Killer.” They make a pact never to tell. Since an unknown somebody stepped up behind her body and cast their shadow on it, it’s conceivable, but highly unlikely, that Leonard Murch saw what happened and, because he’s a psychopath, escaped six years later to kill the children, now in high school and going to… prom night.

It’s even less likely, though, why Lt. McBride (George Touliatos) thinks of staking out the school in case Murch appears. He would have no idea of the killer’s real motive. McBride is also the father of Nick (Casey Stevens), Kimberly’s date, freshly broken-up from Wendy, which is why she conspires with Lou. And to wrap-up the relationships all in a bow, Mr. Hammond (Leslie Nielsen) is Kimberly and her brother, Alex’s (Michael Tough), father.

If you don’t buy that Murch is the killer, there are red herrings. One is Mrs. Hammond (Antoinette Bower), who can’t seem to accept the fact that her daughter is dead. Plus, the killer wears a sparkly black body suit and seems to have a woman’s face under the black ski mask. Another is Mr. Sykes (Robert A. Silverman), the creepy, yet sad, custodian who’s the victim of a mooning from Wendy. Is that enough to spark a killing spree on… prom night?

This is one of Nielsen’s final dramatic roles after a late-career boon starting with Airplane!, released just two weeks before Prom Night. I say he’s “good” in this, only because he combines his dramatic and comedic talents for some dance movies that demonstrate the worst disco had to offer. Which brings us back to the maligned genre of dance music. Prom Night was filmed in 1979, and disco was not dead. If Nielsen can’t prove it, Curtis sure can!

I like Prom Night. Even though it arrived two years after Halloween, slashers didn’t start multiplying exponentially until the early 1980s. This is one of a handful of the first few, although it could be argued that Friday the 13^th (1980) was just as responsible for launching the “golden age” of slashers. Prom Night is relatively gore-free, though. What it may lack in suspense is compensated by good production values, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s not the final girl in this one.