A Prom Night the audience won't want to remember
Donna (Brittany Snow) returns home one night to find her brother, father and mother all murdered by a teacher who's obsessed with her. The teacher gets arrested, and Donna tries to cope with what happened. 3 years later, Donna and her friends are getting ready for their Prom Night, but the teacher has escaped, and is determined to get Donna, ready to kill anyone who gets in his way.
The cast really fail to actually act in this film, giving half-assed performances that only help to make you care less about the characters and want the villian to succeed in his massacre. Idris Elba is pretty much the only person who manages to act above average in this film, but Elba isn't given much to work with here, so you really only end up half-caring for his character, but its still a hell of a lot more caring than you do for anyone else in this film.
Every single one of the teenage characters were just utterly basic, and very generic. I half-expected to see a teen geek with glasses talking about Star Trek, just to show how unoriginal the film is. But it isn't just the teenage characters who suffer, just about every character in this film is forgettable and you won't give a damn about them. It doesn't help how the film tries to stress the importance of the romances between these forgettable characters, by mentioning how distance strains relationships, trys to have meaningful conversations and showing off an engagement ring. Frankly, this just manages to empthasise how dull this film is.
The writing is problematic, to say the least. To say the most, the writing is weaker than watered down piss and if it was a person, it's I.Q would be a negative number. It appears that logic was one thing missing from this film, as shown when Donna's guardians chose to not bring Donna home when they hear that the killer has escaped. So you really believe that Donna is safer at a prom with the man who murdered her family out there, rather than at home with police protecting the house? Speaking of the killer, why is he so obsessed with Donna? We never know. It isn't hinted at, we don't hear it's because he connected with her on an intellectual level or because she was nice to him, they just leave this out, trying to get us buying him making all of these unnecessary killings just because he's obsessed. That's rubbish even M Night Shyamalan wouldn't write. And the story seems to just a pick and mix of B movie slasher flicks that barely anyone knows about, resulting in a less than standard predictable slasher flick that any studio in their right mind wouldn't distribute.
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| Why act when you can show off your Blue Steel impression? |
The main problem with this film is that it claims to being a horror film, but it doesn't act like a proper horror movie. I mean, sure, there's a serial killer, deaths and cliches, but the film is missing one thing all the crappy horror movies nowadays have, and that is gore. We get occasional spills of blood, but nothing so vivid that you'd know it's a horror film from this day and age. Also, there is no tension at any point in this film whatsoever, and the film makers tried to make up for this by trying to frighten the audience with never-ending jump-scare tactics attached to every single horror movie cliche there is. Well, almost every, no character checked their cell to see they had no signal.
Prom Night is a dull, cliched ridden, goreless film that tries to be horror, but it's constant jump scare tactics leave this flick to be as much of a horror film as the Scary Movie franchise. It also doesn't help how the characters are a forgettable and lifeless bunch thanks to the cast acting half-assed, except for Idris Elba, and thanks to the shoddy writing. This film is Exhibit A as to why both horror moves and remakes are generally lauded within society.
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