Prom Night III: The Last Kiss

 

The poster art for Prom Night III: The Last Kiss says it all-Alex eventually becomes a rebellious dude on a bike with a leather jacket, sunglasses, a hot brunette on the back and flames torching everything in his path. It's one of the times in horror film history where you get what you see because the marketing for whatever movie it is actually sells you what the film really embodies, and everything here encompasses just that. Except there's so much more. How does Alex make it there? How does he get everything that is shown on the cover on the box art? It happens because Mary Lou Maloney from Prom Night II still isn't all the way dead yet and she still has unfinished business with Hamilton High, so she breaks out of her chains that are keeping her in hell, dancing and jazzercising for all eternity. The main overall crimp with Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is that it's a fucking goofy movie. The tone has a heavy layer of cartoony humor about it and I'm always up for something off center like that and I will fully admit right away that I really enjoyed this one for it. My favorite so far in this franchise still has been Prom Night II, but Prom Night III is a very close second. I have a really strong feeling that Prom Night IV isn't going to be this way-it's probably going to end up being a try-hard return to how slow and rigid the original was, and there's nothing wrong with that either. I just hope it has some kind of energy behind it to keep things moving. Okay, so I'm not here to waste your time with my predictions about the next sequel though-I'm here to focus on Prom Night III: The Last Kiss and this honestly was a great time. I loved that Mary Lou came back full force and was the main enemy here, pulling Alex away from his girlfriend Sarah and his friend Shane to frame him and make it look like he was murdering people all around the school. There's only four main kills that take place during it's runtime, but they sure are great and the special effects are fantastic here as well as being campy as all hell which just compiles onto the already off-center nature that this flick embodies in the first place. I mean Mary Lou (played by Courtney Taylor this time around) is way hotter in this next sequel than she was in part II, but she wears a really sexy ice cream vendor outfit and ends up killing the biology teacher with two ice cream cones which pin his hands to the serving table at her creamery stand and then proceeds to shred the guys head and face with a blender sort of appliance that looks like it would be used for mixing said frozen treats. Sounds fun, right? It is a fun gag in the film and it also ends up being really damn brutal. Also, the other kill that I want to point out is that she ends up tossing a football to the captain of the football team at one point and half of the football randomly turns into a drill bit styled thing where it impales the captain onto the bottom pole of the field goal in the football field. All of the kills here in Prom Night III: The Last Kiss are like this-just ridiculous, over the top shenanigans that could only be employed into a fun, lower budgeted romp built specifically for the home video market back in the very early 90's. But that's the main basis-Mary Lou still wants revenge for what happened to her back in the second film, so she comes back and uses Alex as a scapegoat for all of her killings, hatred and vengeance. She kills anyone that annoys her, gets in her way and makes out with (and has sex with at one point) Alex just so he keeps coming back her to to keep her spirit going. This flick really is a riot and if you've never seen any of the Prom Night movies like I haven't until very recently and for some crazy reason you decide to start with Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, I really don't think you'd be let down. Unless you just don't have a taste or pre-disposition to watch a film like this anyway. Then I'd probably just say that you're a boring lump that needs to lighten up and learn how to have fun with this shit once in awhile. By the way, for the guys out there-towards the end there's a scene where Alex is already in jail and Mary Lou randomly appears to bail him out and she's wearing a really hot police uniform. Or at least, I though she looked great in it. I just had to throw that out there. May part IV be as entertaining as II and III. Now I just want a cone with strawberry ice cream. At 9a.m.-what a world.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2

 

Right out of the gate I'm going to say here that Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 has energy for days which is the polar opposite compared to the original Prom Night flick starring Jamie Lee Curtis. The intensity, electricity and vibes just seething off of the edges of this sequel are so strong that if you bother sitting through this one, you'll be damned if you try to look away. It's mesmerizing to say the least and I'm also going to state here that the special effects, gore and sexual levels of tension here reach heights that I really didn't expect them to go to, but then again this film was put out seven years later which is insane to think about and it shows because this entry is so far removed from the first one that it could have just been titled "Hello Mary Lou" or "The Burning of Mary Lou" or maybe even "Possessing A Killer Prom Queen" or anything to that effect and it probably still would have worked. But since I don't know anything about marketing or any sort of business line like that it was just slapped with Prom Night 2 as the sub-title to boost attention and sales at the time to lure in more potentially burgeoning horror fans and teens of the 80's. Get those asses in the seats. But what happens here in Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 is that in 1957 we have a high school prom commencing. There is a very naughty bad girl among the ranks named Mary Lou who loves to booze it up, lie, cheat on her boyfriend and is just a general wild child. Billy Nordham (Michael Ironside of all actors which I did not expect to be in a film like this) is in fact the boyfriend that Mary Lou is cheating on with some dude in a backroom of the high school during the dance and Billy is having none of it. Some jackass in the men's bathroom is preparing some kind of a handmade stink bomb of sorts to try and prank the dance-which ends up looking like a really shitty quarter stick of dynamite-tosses it in the trash because he was going to get caught be a teacher or the principal. Billy is in the bathroom while this takes place and takes it upon himself to climb the rafters with it, light it and drop it down on Mary Lou right as she's on stage accepting her crown as prom queen. The flames from the wick get out of control and burns her ass alive on stage in front of the whole school and she is presumed dead of course afterwards. Multiple decades later, Billy himself ends up being the principle for the very high school that he burned Mary Lou at, and now his own son is a senior there and is dating Vicki who is the daughter of a very strict, staunch catholic couple. Plenty happens in between getting ready for the prom and the ending where in the third act Mary Lou actually physically comes back in a brutal way where she is basically born out of Vicki's chest a la' Aliens style where she just bursts out and still is covered in third degree burns all over her body to terrorize everyone. I mentioned this before but the special effects here honestly are incredible and I'd really have to say my favorite scene in the entire film has to be the scene where after Vicki is possessed early in the film by Mary Lou, she follows her friend into the shower after gym class, they're both nude and she starts kissing her on the face which is already weird in and of itself, but then she stalks her through the area where the lockers are and she drags her nails along them slowly like Fred Krueger to create that insane screeching sound and then proceeds to literally crush all of the lockers together to kill her friend because she was hiding inside her locker so Vicki wouldn't be able to see her. Brutality at it's finest if you ask me. If I'm going to sit here and choose which of the first two Prom Night flicks is better, I'm choosing to burn Mary Lou with a handmade stink bomb all over again. This second entry honestly was a riot and I had a great time this morning with it. I've seen and rad other reviews about how this sequel surpasses the original in basically every way, and now that I've seen it myself I completely agree. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2 just sets the bar for the rest of the franchise so much higher that I'm now expecting them to be just as good if not better. Unfortunately I've been disappointed many times before and I just need to temper my expectations for part III. Who knows what level that one sits at. I'm crowning myself prom king because at this juncture it's the right thing to do.

Prom Night (1980)

 

There isn't a whole lot to spew here about the original Prom Night from 1980 because it's a slasher classic that pretty much everyone knows about these days or has seen at least once because of it's pedigree-except for me of course. It's kind of weird because I did in fact have a print of this flick compiled in with a bunch of other seemingly random films when I was still engrossed in buying up and hoarding physical copies of horror movies, and at one point I did try to sit through this one way early in my collecting days-except I never made it to the end. Mainly because whatever print of the film that was used to make the version that I had was so fucking dark that I could barely make it past the first five minutes or so because I just couldn't see anything on screen. So I just never watched it and never bothered to seek out a better way to ingest this piece from the beginning of the 80's. I always thought that the poster art was really cool looking with a young Jamie Lee Curtis standing in a dark high school hallway with a crown, bouquet and a bloodied axe looking like she did some shit to someone that deserved it. And with what happens here in Prom Night, there are a few people that get what they deserve, albeit at the opening heralding all of our main characters which couldn't be anymore than maybe ten or eleven years old. They are all playing a game of tag or "killers" if you will, and one of the girls basically falls out of a window while the rest of them are chanting "killer" over and over again, building her paranoia and anxiety as she feels the need to escape further by falling to her death. The rest of the kids get scared of being caught or accused, so they make a pact to never tell anyone about what happened at the abandoned school and ride their bikes away like nothing ever happened. Seems like a solid plan until six years later when they're all juniors in high school and the time comes to start getting dates and stoking the hype for the biggest dance in school history for any hormone riddled teen-the prom. I did everything I could when I was in high school to not go to prom, and I somehow was still bamboozled into going because of various girls and other things that changed my mind-but I'm not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about a Black Christmas-esque weirdo (the killer calling them also made me think of the bizarre phone shit that takes place in the film Night Killer) calling all of the surviving girls one by one to tip them off that someone is watching them and is planning on snuffing them out. I will have to say that having Leslie Neilsen as Jamie Lee Curtis' father here (and the principle of the high school) is kind of off and funny at the same time because every time I saw him on screen I was expecting some kind of hilarious bit from Airplane! or Naked Gun or Dracula Dead And Loving It or anything like that-but he's as straight as he can get here and it almost brings the energy of the entire film down. Prom Night does take it's time dragging itself to where it wants to be and makes the viewer slime their way to the third act which is when things start getting hectic and electrifying-especially the scene where Lou is about to go onstage to claim being the prom king with Jamie Lee, although he wasn't supposed to because he knocked Nick's ass out backstage and stole the crown out of hatred and jealousy. He's just standing there like a chump waiting for the cue to go on and shock everyone when all of a sudden the killer shows up with said axe that is being held by Jamie Lee on the poster art and chops his head clean off in one strong swipe. His head lands perfectly on the lit up runway where Jamie Lee and Nick are supposed to be crowned prom king and queen, and everyone loses it because Lou actually lost his head (literally) and it's just sitting there in a pool of blood for all to see. That scene alone is worth the price of admission here in my opinion because it's the biggest stress release valve you could of possibly opened with how slow the first two acts were, and it brings the viewer exactly where they need to be with the final fight on the empty dance floor between Nick, Jamie and the killer. I'm not even going to remotely hint at who the killer ends up being, but you can take a pretty good guess and you'll probably end up getting it without little outside help. Now that I've finally seen the original Prom Night, was it worth my time zits and zombies? Yes, absolutely. It's not perfect (very few slashers are) and the first two acts tended to be on the sluggish and lethargic side, but if you can get through that and make it to act three when everything starts ramping up, this ends up being a fun early 80's slasher that does deliver. I hate disco music, but I do have to say that it does fit here very well and the soundtrack is just great. I'm going to continue on with the franchise and just put out reviews for all of them so I will be watching part two soon. Tear it up on the dance floor and punch Lou in the face. That unibrow having bastard.