Mary Lou who? Never heard of her. For in this film’s 1957, Prom Night was
ruined by some crazy, possibly possessed priest named Father Jonas (James
Carver) ranting about “sluts”. Holy misogyny, Batman! Not that he’s against
killing men too, mind you.
Anyway, after his deeds, the Church keeps Jonas drugged into a coma,
imprisoning him somewhere down in the cellar of some church or other, where he
doesn’t seem to age but grows a fierce beard. All is comparatively well until he
gets new a minder. This new guy is that most frightening of things – a priest
with a conscience. Conscientious priest (Brock Simpson) decides to cut it out
with the whole drugging business, and soon finds himself garrotted for his
efforts.
Jonas then goes on a very timid killing spree, concentrating on four teens
(Nicole de Boer, Joy Tanner, J.H. Wyman and Alle Ghadban) who have skipped their
prom night to shack up in a luxury hut in the boons. So yes, the final Prom
Night film doesn’t even feature a prom night.
Other things Clay Borris’s slasher movie doesn’t feature are excitement or a
way to get the time back I spent with it. I don’t have any problems with the
fourth prom night film featuring yet another different killer, and in fact, a
misogynist, probably demon possessed killer priest was (and still is, really)
quite the big gap in the slasher pantheon, but in practice, he’s a guy who
breathes really hard, makes anonymous threatening phone calls of the most
generic kind, and needs a whole film to kill off four teenagers and a couple of
bonus victims.
Now, a low number of victims does not need to be bad for a slasher, but to
avoid boring the audience, a low body count slasher needs something to
fill the time: interesting characters (nope, though they are not totally
hateful), huge wallops of sleaze (nope, because the sleaze here is so prudishly
polite one can hardly stop oneself from making Canada jokes, eh), spectacular
gore (see sleaze), or just a director who is really, really good at facilitating
suspense (ha, nope). Not featuring any of these things, Prom Night IV
ends of quite the bore.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
The reason PROM NIGHT's sequels are so different is that they were gonna go the HALLOWEEN III route of making a loose anthology of films with the linking device being Hamilton High's 1957 prom. Each installment would revolve around a different tragedy that somehow related to it.
Despite my phrasing, I guess this did end up a reality, however truncated it may have been. The only oddity being that the Mary Lou story was either remade or got its own sequel, depending on how you view the inconsistencies between parts 2 and 3. I wish we had gotten more installments though. I'd be interested to see just how hilariously over-the-top they could've taken tragedy-level of what surely must've been the worst. prom. ever!
Well, at least they could use that as the plan for the inevitable streaming series.
Post a Comment