Davis P This is probably the worst horror film I've ever seen. I love Jamie Lee Curtis but this was a mistake in her career.... it's not that she's bad in the film but she's not the star, and everything else in the movie is bad. The acting is extremely over the top cheesy and cliché, the story is pretty weak... they had a chance to make a longer more substantive horror movie, but they resorted to boring cliché material that leaves you feeling like this was a huge missed opportunity. The story centers around 4 kids who were involved in the accidental death of a little girl (Jamie's sister in the film), and now six years later a killer who knows their secret is coming after them... sound kinda familiar? (I know what you did last summer). Watch that one instead of this one if that kind of plot summary sounds interesting to you because it's far better than this disaster. The killing scenes aren't suspenseful or scary, hell none of the scenes in this movie are scary.... just boring and more boring. This is a flop! I recommend you keep looking if you run across this one. 1/10.

jadavix It's tough to rate "Prom Night" this late in the game. Horror flicks were already becoming de rigueur by 1980 - check out the ineffectual parody "Student Bodies" - so you can imagine how trite this material seems almost forty years later!Even if you've never seen a slasher movie, this stuff is familiar: a group of generally oversexed teens are bumped off one by one by a masked assailant, whose identity is revealed at the end of the film. This one also features a traumatic event in the prologue, with the assailant being someone who witnessed it and is out for vengeance, a la "I Know What You Did Last Summer".Don't let the familiarity of the material put you off, though. "Prom Night" is a very well made movie: the death scenes, particularly, make unnerving use of slow motion and camera angles that would have been truly disturbing back in 1980. Most slashers don't even bother with stuff like that: they just go for the gore.The ending also boasts not one, but two surprises: the last death is truly shocking, and the identity of the killer? I must confess I didn't pick it, even after having seen hundreds of these movies."Prom Night" covers VERY familiar ground, yes, but it does it with more style than 99% of its familiars.

BA_Harrison An unintentionally hilarious disco dancing scene featuring scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis is the improbable highlight of this early '80s slasher, which gives some idea of just how disappointing Prom Night is as a horror movie, the film achieving nowhere near the level of carefully crafted scares to be found in Curtis's classic genre outing Halloween, nor delivering the exploitative thrills of its far more gory contemporary Friday the 13th.Just about as formulaic and predictable as the genre gets, Prom Night sees a killer bumping off a group of oversexed teenagers who were responsible for the accidental death of a young girl six years earlier. Who could the murderer be? The weirdo working as a handyman at the high school? The disfigured sex offender originally blamed for the girl's death? The dead girl's father (played by Leslie Nielsen) Or someone else? Seriously, it's not hard to figure out who killer is, so the film doesn't even work as a whodunit. No atmosphere, very little splatter (a decapitation is the only decent death; the rest is too dark to make out), the barest minimum of T&A, a simple to solve mystery, and Jamie Lee grooving it up on the disco floor: hardly the stuff that nightmares are made of.4.5 out of 10, generously rounded up to 5 for IMDb.

Anonymous Andy (Minus_The_Beer) Starring then scream-queen (and current yogurt peddler) Jamie Lee Curtis and a pre-goofball Leslie Nielsen, "Prom Night" is one of the first in what would be many holiday-themed slasher flicks meant to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter's seminal "Halloween." The concept is at once simple and yet convoluted: a gaggle of tweens playing a rather odd and slightly sadistic "hide and go seek"-type game in an abandoned warehouse accidentally drive another child to their death. Because it's always a good idea in this sort of movie, the kids all vow never to speak a word of this to anyone. Fast- forward six years later, and the kids are now teenagers getting ready for their prom. Only somebody saw what happened that fateful day, and somebody is going to make them pay.Like its fellow brethren in "My Bloody Valentine," "Prom Night" is a low-budget production straight out of Canada. Director Paul Lynch works the meager concept into a rather sleek and efficient blaze of tension, bloodshed and disco. For better or worse, not much blood is shed until about 2/3 of the way through the movie. For at least the first half of the movie, we are treated to a lot of obscene phone calls, botched hook-ups in locker rooms and student-on-student pranks. There's also adequate time to set-up the somewhat stock characters, which is handled surprisingly well. Jamie Lee Curtis sticks out from the bunch as the innocent by-stander who, before becoming the de-facto survivor girl, gets to bust out in an obscenely long dance-number that almost gives a similar scene in "Airplane" a run for its money. The kill scenes are then, somewhat ironically, less memorable than all the stuff that comes before it, which is perhaps a testament to Lynch's unheralded skill or maybe just dumb luck.Either way, "Prom Night" is a great example of the '80s slasher. All the tropes you've come to expect -- revenge, premarital relations, bratty teens, recreational drug-use -- it's all here. Perhaps not as refined as its predecessors, "Prom Night" remains an entertaining and somewhat endearing experience all these years later. It even inspired a pair of silly yet throroughly entertaining sequels in "Prom Night II: Hello Mary Lou" and "Prom Night III: The Last Kiss," along with a somewhat forgettable fourth film and an absolute piece of garbage remake. But if you're looking to hit the dance floor with a well- worn semi-classic of its era, you couldn't pick a better date than the original "Prom Night."