More than a few reasons to skip “Prom Night”

“Prom…“Prom Night” Directed by Nelson McCormick Starring: Brittany Snow, Jonathon Schaech, Dana Davis

NO PEPPERS out of

Among the most terrifying concepts a horror film can address is the corruption of the familiar.

This theme is best exemplified through the zombie movie – in which both familiar places and people suddenly become tainted and monstrous – but it also traces back to films like Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” where a carnival becomes the site of a gruesome murder.

“Prom Night” attempts to follow Hitchcock’s lead by adding a maniacal killer to the typical high school prom experience, but it simply drowns in the waters of stereotype and predictability.

The film opens with Donna (Brittany Snow) reliving the brutal murder of her family by her deranged teacher Mr. Fenton (Johnathon Schaech) via a dream.

This intro sets the film’s tone perfectly, but it then ruins a scary, suspenseful scene with the revelation that it’s just a dream – and it only goes downhill from there.

The story takes place three years after the murders. According to Donna’s psychiatrist, a criminally underused Ming-Na, Donna has made “extraordinary progress,” which conveniently enables her to plan for her prom just like any normal high school girl, conferring with her friends Lisa (Dana Davis) and Claire (Jessica Stroup) about boyfriends, dresses, corsages and other horrifically boring things.

In case that wasn’t exciting enough, Mr. Fenton – still completely obsessed with Donna – breaks out of prison (without explanation, of course) just in time to ruin the party.

He also finds a way to travel thousands of miles in the three days it inexplicably takes for someone to warn Detective Winn (Idris Elba), the man who put Fenton in prison three years prior, that he’s escaped.

These plot holes and completely illogical decisions are what “Prom Night” depends on to build tension and fear, and therefore the movie fails on both counts.

The film also portrays its female characters as idiotic and helpless, and it manages to throw in a dash of homophobia with a disparaging joke at the expense of the girls’ lesbian gym teacher.

There’s more to the movie’s utter failure than just a poor script, though. The cinematography is clean but unexceptional, save for one absurdly comical moment that might be the most inappropriate and unnecessary use of a “Matrix”-style freeze ever.

Even the music just comes in and out in time with the “scary” moments and adds nothing to the film.

The biggest problem, however, is that “Prom Night” induces no actual fear. Every “scare” in the movie is based around waiting for something to leap from the shadows, and the fake “gotcha” frights – involving things like birds flying away and a character bumping into a lamp – are somehow scarier than when Fenton actually shows up.

On the more positive side, Snow puts forth an admirable effort as Donna, successfully displaying the paranoia and fear that her character should be feeling. Schaech is appropriately intimidating as the crazy Mr. Fenton, but he is given little room to be anything other than an absurdly unbelievable killing machine.

Jessalyn Gilsig also gives a startling performance as Donna’s adoptive mother, showing more realistic emotion than all of the other secondary characters combined. However, these few good performances don’t even begin to salvage the film overall.

Every single scene feels torn directly out of terrible horror movies of the past. There’s no attempt at having a cohesive or believable plot.

It even takes itself so seriously as to avoid minor traces of humor or camp value. As such, there’s not a redeeming moment in the whole film. In the end, “Prom Night” offers nothing more than the same terrible “scares” that have been plaguing the horror industry for decades.