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Director: Bruce Pittman
Screenplay: Ron Oliver
Cast: Michael Ironside as Bill
Nordham; Wendy Lyon as Vicki Carpenter; Louis Ferreira as Craig Nordham; Lisa
Schrage as Mary Lou Maloney; Richard Monette as Father Cooper; Terri Hawkes as Kelly
Hennenlotter; Brock Simpson as Josh; Beverley Hendry as Monica Waters; Beth
Gondek as Jess Browning; Wendell Smith as Walt Carpenter; Judy Mahbey as Virginia
Carpenter
Before anyone asks, deliberately
skipped over the original 1980 Prom
Night, which is the most well known of this franchise and is a slasher film
released the same year the original Friday
the 13th. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis
and Leslie Nielsen in a serious role,
I will return to the film, but as someone with an ambivalent relationship to
the genre, where there are some that I like and others I don't, I remembering
it being boring and that it didn't have the quirks that I do like in slashers.
In vast contrast, after seven
years being off from a sequel, Prom
Night is interesting when you gander at the direction they went, beginning
with a film which took a radically different direction. In fact, it wasn't a sequel, but renamed into being
one rather than another Canadian horror production by itself. It's quite obvious
as well what the film, whether a sequel or not, was following. By this point, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) became
a juggernaut and, with its template of surreal dream sequence set pieces, that
is clearly what that production wanting to hitch their trailer to and gain cash
through.
I will give the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise a lot
of credit - its later sequels were helped by how much Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) justified the existence of all of
them in a symbolic metatextual way, but the franchise even when it was cranking
out titles with some slapdash results (parts 4 and 5), they encouraged the idea
that to sell a horror film you needed surreal sequences. It didn't necessarily
mean the films would be good, but it meant there was a creativity in the
production staff that is unrivalled as a result of the many eighties films
trying to cash in on the band wagon.
Who is Mary Lou? A fifties high
school diva whose voracious sexual appetite is matched by her desire to be a
prom queen, leading to her prom date to chuck a stink bomb at her in the midst
of the award ceremony, its fuse and the flammability of the dress unfortunately
not accounted for. Burnt to death on prom night, she is awoken in the eighties
and decides to possess an eighties female student at the school, reigning havoc.
The heartbroken lover becomes Michael
Ironside, the veteran Canadian actor, now principal of the school with a
dark hidden part, whilst the other lover stays on in the plot as a priest who
eventually comes to warn him of Mary Lou's return. There's no real message
behind the film in the slightest, though its curious that this anti-religious
and demonic Mary Lou is contrasted by her new host, a girl from a very
religious family, Vicki Carpenter (Wendy
Lyon), who is browbeaten by her mother to be shy and dress down even though
she with her boyfriend, the principal's son, desire to skip college and live a
life of their own.
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It tries to be serious, which in contrast to Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990), where they went entirely for comedy with the same titular character but saps any energy from it as a result. The seriousness of this prequel is one of its best aspects, even looking like it is going into an Exorcist pastiche only to get to something else entirely, fully aware now that entirely not meant to be a Prom Night sequel that, honestly, this was probably a better direction as there's now a titular figure who is memorable, Mary Lou if you want to try to equate a theme to this film a representation of fifties nostalgia gone sour, something in mind that fifties culture became a fixation in the eighties, and was particularly mangled and destroyed perfectly in John Carpenter's adaptation of a Stephen King novel Christine (1983).
Something, thankfully,
exceptionally peculiar also rears its head in this film as it starts with Mary
Lou tormenting our female protagonist. With complete disregard for logic, the villain
can bend reality, and as this is a low budget Canadian film from the era before
CGI was commonplace, they even had to drawn back on a trick, involving a pool
of water shot on the side as if on the wall representing a blackboard, that Jean Cocteau was using in the nineties
thirties. It plays this off in a combination of humour and creepiness, a humour
to have with some of the fifties references, including fully possessed Vicki
Carpenter using slang from few decades earlier and Wendy Lyon dressed like a
member of a Grease theatre
production, but overcoming even the somewhat haphazard plotting by emphasising
the darker underbelly of this world. I will be blunt that this is far from a
perfect film, not in the slightest without its flaws, be it trying to pretend
it's set in the United States to the vagueness of its own logic. But it tries
to cover a lot, and also even makes sure the characters have a bit to them.
Even the prissy wannabe prom queen of the current timeline is given emotional
sympathy when, to cheat for the prize, it leads to an act of humiliation that
is pretty surprising in how it's handled, and that it's even done with heartbreak
for her when she's the stereotype beforehand to hate.
Then there are the generally
uncomfortable sexual undertones, between the incest scene or a rocking horse in
Vicki's bedroom, representing an isolated innocence, coming to life with a
grotesque long tongue. It leads to the best sequence of the film in the women's
shower; no potential gay panic underlying it can undercut how it's a disturbing
and effective scene, involving a locker crushing, made more surprising as, when
the production wanted to be chaste, actress Wendy
Lyon was comfortable going the scene in full frontal nudity, which is not titillating
but in context appropriately more frightening. I remember, when originally
viewing Hey Mary Lou, as forgettable
and silly. In hindsight horror is a curious thing, a genre which has produced
so much garbage yet its inherently greater scope of plasticity, that the
unpredictable can take place by accident let alone on purpose, viewing the
world in a cinema screen as easily distortable. That sequence in I have talked
about in this paragraph makes up for any issues with the film by being absolute
creativity with pulpy horror and its nasty as it needs to be.
In mind to this there are aspects
of the second sequel, The Last Kiss,
which do have the same energy; its unfortunately been only probably available
in most places as the censored TV movie cut, which will remove full frontal
nudity, the graphic violence and swearing but inexplicitly finds
"fag" acceptable for television in the period it was put together,
which says a lot in hindsight decades later of priorities. It's also too broad
without the right balance horror comedy of the Frank Henenlotters of the world would present, a bit too happy to
be silly rather than build a framework of a story to make the humour
connecting. After this the story gets odder, which is why I am interested in
the series - the series returned to a slasher in Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992), and there was a film
called The Club (1994) which was originally
meant to be a sequel until someone unhooked their cart from the immobile trend.
There's also the 2008 remake, which is not held high in the slightest, from the
period where arguably the hatred horror remakes get comes from as that when
they were prolific in number and rarely taking a strange risk, leading to
exceptionally terrible work. You can at least say Hey Mary Lou: Prom Night II was taking a risk, which is why I am soft
on it's like a prom date. A morbid person, but that's part of their
personality.
Abstract Spectrum: Creepy/Surreal
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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