Prom Night (2008)
Directed By: Nelson McCormick
Starring: Brittany Snow, Johnathon Schaech, Scott Porter, Dana Davis, Jessica Stroup, Collins Pennie, Kelly Blatz, Idris Elba
Subgenre: Slasher
Synopsis: Years after an obsessed teacher slaughters her family, Donna is getting ready for her senior prom. Little does she know, the teacher has escaped from prison and is ready to crash the party.
Thoughts: Everyone knows there has been a glut of remakes the last ten years or so, and most of us have grown more than a little tired of it. Now I am not inherently against remakes; the horror genre has been built on them. Just look how many times Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and the Phantom of the Opera have been on-screen. In the 80s, we were treated to The Thing and The Fly, two amazing films that happened to be remakes, and recently Dawn of the Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have been remade to some success as well.
Well, they say to make an omelet; you gotta break a few eggs. Consider the Prom Night remake a shattered egg. I have long thought that Prom Night could be remade with great success, sadly the Producers elected to generate a piece of shit that showed no love to the original and pandered to teenagers in an attempt to balloon box office numbers. I get that studios are in a business to make money, but there is a fine line to be drawn here. The habit of putting out slightly amped up episodes of the OC as horror movies has to stop.
The Prom Night remake feels a lot like a television episode, with maybe a little more blood thrown around, and that is part of the failure. On top of that, the acting stinks. I didn’t like any of the main characters, even worse; I didn’t really have any feelings towards them at all.
I think if I were going to start putting together a list of the worst remakes out there, this would be in the top 5. This might be something I have to think about and come up with…
I rolled through the entire Prom Night franchise in a short period of time, and there were some really bad moments in the first four, but I can’t come up with a single reason to watch this remake. Do yourself a favor and pass.
Cenobite Me 