It's raining on Prom Night

Hollywood loves to capture the hearts of teenagers throughout the country with its classic prom films. A perfect event to center a movie around, with its culmination of 18 years of memories and the turning of a new page in the lives of its participants. Pretty in Pink, 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s All That or even Never Been Kissed have all captured the essence of this eventful night. Prom Night aimed to do the same thing, but with a twist! They threw in a crazy stalker and made the joyous occasion, as the kids say these days, even more…killer.

What stood out the most in the film was how little they actually tried to fuse these two concepts together. It was as if I was watching two different movies at once, both without beginnings or ends, and both were very bad. When these two stories were combined into one, it created an even worse film. The writing for the scenes was far too sappy and the movie never established a background story for the characters that would make the audience even care about them.

That said, I was not expecting to fall in love with the characters in this movie, but I was hoping to hear some screams from the audience instead of snickers. For a scary movie the plot hardly established any suspense and whenever someone was murdered it happened in about five quick seconds.

The film is centered around the prom and turbulent high school career of your all-American girl Donna Keppel, played by Brittany Snow. Donna, as you learn from the opening scene of the film, had suffered through the murder of her parents and younger brother, who were all killed by her stalker teacher Richard Fenton, played by Johnathon Schaech. Luckily for Donna, Fenton is arrested and put in jail for years, or so she thought. Fenton slyly escapes the jail by opening up a vent in the jail, which leads him directly outside.

Oblivious to his escape, Donna is prepping for prom, now living with her aunt and uncle. Donna and her best friends go to prom and that’s when the random sappy high school story lines start to unfold. Switching back to the horror part of the film, Fenton gets a room at the hotel where the prom is and proceeds to kill a maid to steal her key and gain access to Donna’s room.

Just as this is happening the police get word of Fenton’s escape and send police to the hotel where the prom is to protect all the exits and to try to protect Donna. The rest of the film plays out as the police scenes, high school drama scenes and horror scenes all jockey for screen time in a concerted effort to help ruin the film.

As if the plot and writing of the film were not done poorly enough, many of the scenes and concepts of the film were completely implausible. This film by far has the worst police department in the history of films. The police would have definitely notified Donna as soon as Fenton escaped prison. Fenton would have never escaped in the first place because no prison has a vent leading directly outside.

The police force they placed at the prom was extremely weak and they only asked one person if they had seen Fenton in the hotel. Yes, that person had seen Fenton. No, he did not identify him properly. These types of failures to make the film realistic continued to pile and pile up as the film rolled.

The acting in the film, if anything, was forgettable because it was completely put in the shadows by the lack of quality writing. Although, Johnathon Schaech did have a sufficiently creepy look during the film, and had a fantastic ability to kill people instantly with two stabs wounds and minimal blood loss.

There is no reason that you should ever waste your money or anybody else’s money for that matter on this movie. Prom Night will not be making The Dean’s List, but instead I will give it an F for lack of any semblance of a good film.

Prom Night is 88 minutes long and rated PG-13 for violence and terror, some sexual material, underage drinking, and language.