It’s prom night!

Except these students aren’t going to prom.  Instead, they’re going to have a party all their own.  They’re heading out to a house with quite a history, the perfect place to have a night that they’ll never forget.  And a night that they’ll be lucky to …. SURVIVE!

There.  Was that cheesy enough?

If my introduction was a bit over-the-top, it fits the general mood of 2017’s Party Night.  Party Night is a deliberate throwback to the slasher films of the 80s and the early 90s, before the genre started to take itself a bit too seriously.  (The worse thing that ever happened to the slasher genre is that a few of the films started to get positive reviews from critics who praised them for being subversive.  The end result of all that was David Gordon Green changing Michael Myers from a nightmarish boogeyman to just another buffoon living in a sewer.)  As such, Party Night is a film where a bunch of attractive young people go to a place that common sense say they shouldn’t go to.  And then they proceed to the dumbest things possible, like wander off by themselves.  The joy of the film comes from yelling at the screen, “Don’t do that, you idiot!” and then discovering that you were right to warn them not to do what they did.

I’ve made this point before but it is worth repeating.  The common complaint with most old school slasher films is that they feature characters who do stupid things.  That’s a valid comment but, to be honest, most people are pretty stupid.  And when you’re a teenager and it’s prom night and you’re hanging out with your best friends, you’re going to be even more stupid than usual.  In my case, when I sit there and roll my eyes at the girl in a slasher movie who wanders around outside in her underwear in the middle of the night, it’s because I’m trying to forget about all the times that I’ve walked up and down the alley in my sleepshirt, socks, and bathrobe while looking for the cat at two in the morning.  The fact of the matter is that we all do stupid things.  Some people do stupid things because they’re stupid.  Some people do stupid things because it’s just easier and takes less effort.  (In my case, it was more convenient to just throw on a bathrobe before I went out to look for the cat as opposed to actually taking the time to put on …. well, clothes.)  We recognize our stupidity in the characters who populate the slasher films of the 70s and 80s.  And the reason why so many people instinctively make fun of those films is because they know they would not survive an old school slasher film.  Myself, I’d probably be dead within the first fifteen minutes.

As for Party Night, it’s a low-budget film with a simple plot and an enthusiastic cast and an obvious love for the genre.  Fans of old school slasher films will appreciate the way the story pays homage to the films of the past.  It’s a film that understands that, at a certain age, everyone’s too stupid to survive a horror movie.