Since today is technically still Canada Day, I figured why not share one of the greatest dance scenes ever filmed? This scene is from the classic 1980 film, Prom Night,and it features Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens showing what they can do on the dance floor!
Well, actually, it shows Jamie Lee Curtis showing what she could do. According to David Grove’s Jamie Lee Curtis, Scream Queen, Casey Stevens claimed that he could dance but, when it came time to shoot the scene, he turned out to be rather awkward and the responsibility for selling the scene pretty much fell completely on Jamie Lee Curtis’s shoulders. As Prom Night co-star MaryBeth Rubens put it, it was impossible to imagine Casey and Jamie Lee ever being a couple in real life, despite the fact that they were during the making of this film.
Interestingly enough, Prom Night would later bring Jamie Lee Curtis her first acting nomination when she was nominated for a Genie Award for Best Foreign Actress. (Indeed, one of the interesting thing about the early history of the Genie Awards is just how many slasher films were nominated. Apparently, during the early 80s, the Canadian film industry was a bit less robust than it is today.) That said, Jamie Lee does give a really good performance in this film and dammit, she deserved the award!
(Or, at the very least, I assume she did. I’m not really sure to whom she lost and I’m too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia.)
(Okay, screw it. I felt guilty for being lazy so I decided to look it up. Jamie Lee Curtis lost to Susan Sarandon, who won for her performance in Atlantic City. Since Sarandon’s role was actually a supporting one to Burt Lancaster’s, I still say that Curtis should have won.)
I cannot let this Halloween end without recommending Jamie Lee Curtis: Scream Queen, David Grove’s biography of one of horror cinema’s most iconic stars.
As you can probably guess from the title, the focus of this book is on the start of Jamie Lee Curtis’s career, when she was almost exclusively appearing in slasher films. Beginning with her starring role in Halloween and going all the way through films like Terror Train, Prom Night, Road Games, The Fog, and Halloween 2, the book shows both how Curtis dealt with suddenly being a horror icon and how she eventually left the horror genre behind in an effort to show that she was capable of doing more than just screaming and running. Eventually, as the book details, she reached a point where she could return to horror with Halloween H20 but, for a while, her horror work was truly a double-edged sword. It made her famous but it also kept her from being considered for the type of roles that she truly hoped to play.
That said, this book takes refreshingly positive look at her early film career, providing both serious analysis of and fascinating behind-the-scenes details about all of Curtis’s horror films. Yes, even Prom Night.
In fact, the two chapters devoted to Prom Night were probably my favorite part of the book. Though Curtis herself was not interviewed, several members of the cast and crew were and their recollections of their work on this not-very-good but oddly watchable film provide an interesting portrait of life during a low-budget movie shoot. Of course, everyone focuses on how in awe they were of Jamie but, at the same time, they are also open about their own personal feelings and recollections about the shooting of this movie. Their hopes and dreams, many of them destined to be unfulfilled, come through just as vividly as their memories of watching Jamie Lee Curtis film the famous disco scene. The passages dealing with Casey Stevens, who played Jamie’s Prom Night boyfriend and subsequently died of AIDS, are especially moving. In the end, Jamie Lee Curits; Scream Queen is not just a biography of Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s a tribute to both movies and the people who make them.
If you’re a lover of the horror genre or a student of film history, this is one of those book that you simply must have. It’s got just about everything that you could possibly want.
From the minute I learned that Val would be reviewing Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, I knew that I simply had to rewatch and a post a review of Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil. I mean, considering that I had already reviewed the original Prom Night on this site, it only made sense. Now, I just have to convince Leonard to review Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Leon The Duke to review the Prom Night remake and we’ll have the whole series covered!
Anyway, most reviews of Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil will tell you that it has absolutely nothing to do with any of the other Prom Night films but that’s not quite true. For one thing, all five of these films take place on Prom Night! Also, they all deal with students who go to Hamilton High School. Now, seriously — considering how many proms at Hamilton have ended in death and disaster, you would think that the school would just stop having a prom. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a popular decision but lives are at stake!
Like Hello Mary Lou and Prom Night III, Prom Night IV also opens with the 1957 prom. Now, of course, the 1957 prom was famous for the fiery death of Mary Lou Maloney but apparently, that wasn’t the only death that occurred that night. While Mary Lou was getting ready to be named prom queen, two other students (one of whom is named Lisa — agck, it always freaks me out when a slasher movie victim has the same name as me!) were making out in the parking lot. When a homicidal priest named Father Jonas came across them, he stabbed them to death a sharpened crucifix.
35 years later, Father Jonas is hidden away in a church basement. He’s kept in a drug-induced coma. Father Jaeger (Kenneth McGregor) is his guardian but when the Jaeger passes away, the young Father Colin (Brock Simpson) takes his place. Foolishly, Colin decides not to give Jonas his daily injection. Jonas wakes up, murders Colin, and then sets off for his old church. While Jonas is out murdering sinners, the Cardinal tries to cover up any evidence of his existence.
(In case you hadn’t guessed, Prom Night IV is probably one of the most anti-Catholic films ever made. That said, speaking as someone who was raised Catholic, I was never really offended by the movie. I mean, it featured a killer priest and a sinister Cardinal but it would still be wrong to mistake Prom Night IV for a Luis Bunuel film.)
What Jonas doesn’t know is that the old church is now a summer home. Four teenagers — virginal Meagan (Nikki de Boer), her boyfriend Mark (J.H. Wyman), his best friend Jeff (Alle Ghadaban), and his girlfriend, the adventurous Laura (Joy Tanner, who later played Fiona and Declan’s mom on Degrassi) — are spending the night at the house. After all, who wants to waste prom night by actually going to the prom? Mark’s younger brother, Jonathan, is also hanging around outside the house, secretly filming everything that happens inside. Or, at least he is until Jonas shows up and kills him.
There really aren’t any big surprises to be found in Prom Night IV but the film is still a step above the average slasher film. Director Clay Borris keeps the action moving and does a good job maintaining a properly evil atmosphere. Some of the shots of the snow falling over the isolated house are actually quite stunning. As played by James Carver, Jonas is a truly menacing and ruthless villain. Seriously, Jonas is so mean! Even the fact that he utters a few regrettable one liners does nothing to diminish Jonas as a threat.
Prom Night IV may be missing both Jamie Lee Curtis and Mary Lou Maloney but it’s still a surprisingly effective little horror film. And remember —
It’s not who you come with … it’s who takes you home.
Earlier tonight, I read on twitter that veteran character actor and Prom Night co-star Leslie Nielsen had passed away. While people seem to know him best as a former “serious” actor turned deadpan comedian, it is forgotten that Nielsen was — during the 70s — an exploitation and grindhouse mainstay.
Along with playing Jamie Lee Curtis’s father (and no-nonsense high school principal) in Prom Night, Nielsen was also the star of the kung fu classic Project: Kill and the bad guy in Day of the Animals.
The clip below comes from Day of the Animals and it shows Nielsen at his exploitation best:
Here’s a little bit of the movie history trivia that I live for: In 1959, along with famously auditioning for a role in Ben-Hur, Nielsen also came close to being cast in another iconic film. He was among the finalists for the role of Sam Loomis (eventually played by John Gavin) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
As I mentioned in another post, my sister Erin and I spent Tuesday night watching the Killer Party Marathon on Chiller. One of the movies we saw was the original 1980 Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by Paul Lynch. Prom Night, of course, was remade two years ago with cross-eyed dumbfug Brittany Snow as the star. If, like me before Tuesday night, you’re only familiar with the tepid and bland remake than the original Prom Night is a surprise indeed.
The original Prom Night is an old school slasher film, one of the many that came out in the two years immediately after Halloween. It even stars the star of Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis. Prom Night also stars a lot of Canadians because it was one of the many low-budget B-movies that was made in Canada in the early 80s. Apparently, Canada was offering tax breaks to film companies willing to shoot up north. Several web sites have said that the setting is obviously Canadian but I couldn’t really tell. Of course, I’m from Texas. Anything above Arkansas looks like Canada to me.
Plotwise, the film is pretty much your traditional old school slasher film. There’s a terrible tragedy in the past, an innocent man is blamed for it, and ten years later, teenagers end up getting killed at some communal event. In this case, the tragedy is the death of a young girl who is killed during a truly demonic game of tag. The children responsible for her death lie about what happened and a disfigured drifter is convicted and imprisoned for her murder. As for the communal event, in this case, it’s prom night. The killer stalks the prom, which is what I suggested my classmates call our prom way back when. They disagreed and that’s their loss. The Killer Stalks The Prom would have been a story to remember.
Anyway, here’s a few random thoughts about the original Prom:
1) As with all old school slasher films, it’s interesting to see just how much of the early products of this all-American genre borrowed from the Italian giallo genre. Everything from the elaborate, past tragedy to the black gloves worn by the killer to the attempts to keep audiences guessing who the killer actually is to even the supporting character of the burned out cop simply screams giallo. The main thing that the Americans brought to the giallo format was the idea of having the murders revolve around a previously innocent gathering or holiday.
2) Especially when compared to recent “slasher” films, Prom Night is a relentlessly grim film. Prom Night’s killer doesn’t waste any time with comic relief or one-liners. He’s too busy savagely killing people. And our victims aren’t the usual collection of bimbos and soulless jocks. No, this is the type of movie where even the token virgin ends up getting her throat ripped out with a gigantic shard of glass. There’s not a lot of deaths in Prom Night, just six. But they all hurt.
3) I usually just think of Jamie Lee Curtis as the crazy woman selling Activia on Lifetime but this movie shows that she’s actually a pretty good actress. Even working with a script that isn’t exactly full of brilliant dialogue or multi-faceted characters, Curtis is a sympathetic, likable, and most of all, believable heroine (which is all the more remarkable when you consider that she, like everyone else in this film, appears to be far-too old to still be worrying about the prom). She even manages to make the film’s ending rather touching and even poignant. And how many slasher films can you say that about?
4) Prom Night is as much about tacky — yet insanely catchy — disco music as it is about spilling blood. Seriously, if I owned the soundtrack to this film, I would listen to it 24/7 for two years straight. I’d force all of my friends to listen to it too and eventually we’d all go insane and just spend the rest of our lives wandering around going, “Prom night! Everything is alright!”
5) One last thing — Prom Night showcases what has to be the most believable, cheap, and tasteless prom ever put on film. The theme is Disco Madness and the students are all very chic in that way that even they know will be painfully dated in another two years. Indeed, this is one of the rare films that understands that the perfect prom is nothing less than an unintentional camp spectacular. For someone like me who, as the result of seeing too many episodes of Saved By The Bell: The New Class, grew up with an unrealistic expectation of what the senior prom would be, the original Prom Night remains a refreshing breath of fresh air even 30 years after it was made.
And always remember: “Prom Night! Everything is all right…”
So, it was Tuesday night and me and Erin were watching the Killer Party movie marathon on Chiller and what should happen to come on but Prom Night? No, not the really crappy Brittany Snow film that came out two years ago. This was the original Prom Night, the one from 1980 that starred Jamie Lee Curtis.
As we watched this movie, me and Erin discovered two things. Number one, the original Prom Night is seriously one grim movie. And number two, there’s an awful lot of dancing. It makes sense. The movie only kills about four people so obviously, there had to be some serious padding to get this thing up to 90 minutes. And most of that padding is musical.
Included below is one of my favorite new scenes that I love. As Jamie Lee says, “Let’s show them what we can do…”
Through the Shattered Lens 