Product Description

Directed by Paul Lynch, this cult horror masterpiece starring Leslie Nielsen and scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis paved the way for future slasher films and inspired such blockbusters as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. For six long years, Hamilton High School seniors Kelly (Marybeth Rubins), Jude (Joy Thompson), Wendy (Eddie Benton), and Nick (Casey Stevens) have been hiding the truth of what happened to ten-year-old Robin Hammond the day her broken body was discovered near an old abandoned convent. The foursome kept secret how they taunted Robin - backed her into a corner until, frightened, she stood on a window ledge...and fell to her death. Though an accident, the then-twelve-year-olds feared they'd be held responsible and vowed never to tell. But someone else was there that day...watching. And now, that someone is ready to exact murderous revenge - on prom night.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58791 in DVD
• Brand: ECHO BRIDGE HOME ENT.
• Released on: 2004-03-04
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 94 minutes

Features

• PROM NIGHT (DVD MOVIE)

Amazon.com
When it comes to an expressive set of lungs for horror, it's hard to match Jamie Lee Curtis, who set the standard for nonstop screaming in Halloween. She built her reputation as a scream queen in such subsequent outings as The Fog, Terror Train, and this similarly themed and relatively subpar horror outing. A progenitor of I Know What You Did Last Summer, this film focuses on four high school friends on prom night who are being stalked by a masked maniac seeking revenge for a death that occurred six years earlier. Guess who lives to tell the tale? --Marshall Fine

Customer Reviews

at least this guy has a reason
In watching a wide variety of slasher movies, I have noticed that the killer usually doesn't have a very compelling motive for butchering all those people. In many films, such as Halloween and Friday the 13th, the villain kills people simply because they are there to be killed. Michael Myers, Jason, and Freddy seem to brutalize people as naturally as most of us brush our teeth. It's what they 'do.' On the other hand, most slasher films that provide their killer with a motive usually make that motive so obscure that it's hard to relate to them as human beings. Or, if they do have a reasonable motive, it gets lost in the carnage. In Valentine, for instance, the killer does have a good reason to kill Dorothy, but how about the other dozen or so folks who get the knife? What did they do wrong?
This brings me to the reason why I like Prom Night. This killer has a motive that makes sense. He does what he does for reasons of his own, and only once, with Slick, does he kill someone who wasn't involved in the event he was trying to avenge.And that seemed accidental, in a fashion, since he went out of his way to drop his axe before confronting Slick. (Is it just me, or does Slick give off somewhat of a Meat Loaf aura?) For the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I won't name the killer, but I can say that his motivation is by far the most powerful and logical of any slasher villain I've seen. (Remember-he has no way of knowing that the initial incident was accidental.) And even if it was an accident, the whole thing was still their fault, owing to their bullying the little girl so incessantly. The actions of the killer are perfectly reasonable if you look at matters from his perspective. It is a nice change of pace to see a slasher movie that builds its story around the devotion of the killer to a loved one. For this reason, I would rank Prom Night as one of the five best slasher films I've seen.

IT AIN'T NO HALLOWEEN
..but one has to give credit to PROM NIGHT for being one of the first teen slasher flicks to also attempt to be a compelling mystery. 70s scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis followed up her HALLOWEEN, THE FOG and TERROR TRAIN as the heroine of the film, whose biggest scene is a laughably non-erotic disco dance at the prom. Leslie Nielsen is around as Jamie's principal dad, but he's hardly in the film at all. Annemarie (Eddy) Benton takes on one of her many slutty roles as the bitchy vixen out to spoil the prom for Jamie and her date, who happens to be Benton's ex. The mystery is pretty easy to solve, and the pace is a little slow by today's standards, but PROM NIGHT is representative of what we could expect in the coming years of teen slashers.

Would You Like Some Cheese To Go With Your Horror?
Okay, I was going to give Prom Night two stars, but..come on...any movie that features Leslie Neilson cutting a rug to a disco soundtrack deserves at least 3 stars! Jamie Lee Curtis, riding high as the 80's scream-queen poster girl tackles a six-year old mystery, steals a hot-blond's boyfriend and engages in some of the most hilarious disco dancing seen this side of the Village People in the movie "TGIF". Actually, Prom Night was a bit ahead of it's time in that it not only is a slasher flick, but also creates a pretty decent little mystery as to who the killer may be. Later movies like "Scream" and "I Know What you Did Last Summer" borrowed this plotline to varying degrees of success almost 30 years later. The kills are pretty standard early 80's stuff, not really gory, but there are a couple intense chase scenes that will keep you riveted. Also, this movie may feature one of the ugliest casts in filmdom. The main heel, bad-guy with the unibrow and unfortunate teeth is just disturbing to look at. One of my favorite characters is Slick, an overweight, dork who drives a 70's conversion van, that is just too damn funny to be taken seriously. There are two main drawbacks to Prom Night; 1. How come everyone is 30 years old and still in high school? I mean come on, I can suspend belief for quite a bit, but most of these actors looked closer to middle age than to 18 and 2. Sure Disco was the sound of the time, but man it really dates this movie. I have seen worse slasher flicks, but I have seen a lot better too. If you are a fan of the genre then you should check this out, but I would wait until a $10 version is available before I would buy it.