Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis head up cast of long-in-the-tooth "teenage" nobodies in slasher flick about four high school seniors preparing for prom night, still haunted by a prank six years earlier in an abandoned building that resulted in the death of a curious younger girl. The teens have vowed never to breathe a word about the accident, but a witness at the crime scene is now stalking the kids (as if their guilt isn't enough, they have to pay for their collective silence with bloodshed). "Halloween"/"Carrie" combination features excellent cinematography for the genre by Robert New, but nothing of interest plot-wise. The police business on the side is colorless, a segue to principal Nielsen's office is a dead-end, there's a rich bitch who tries intimidating Curtis (who doesn't look rattled). We also get a few outlandish deaths that fail to top the opening sequence, the only well-directed moment in the picture. Followed by a handful of in-name-only sequels and a loose remake in 2008. *1/2 from ****

Every year in October, I use the Halloween season to enable my horror movie addiction. I've seen so many in my life I'm starting to work my way into the B-level and forgotten horror movies. In my opinion, this one can stay forgotten. First, a bit of context. 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre and 1978's Halloween changed horror. Gone was the horror of Rosemarys Baby, The Omen and The Exorcsist. Now, it's about teenagers running around naked and getting chopped to bits. Slashers, when done right, can be a blast. A menacing killer, sometimes shrouded in mystery. Friday the 13th if the same year did this well, feeling like a Hitchcock or Argento Murder mystery. A memorable weapon is a plus, a la Nightmare on Elm Street. Good chases, or suspense are a must, as In Halloween. And then you have the t&a that permeates the slasher genre. The problem with this one, for me, is that it came too early to understand what makes a good slasher. The Killer is not interesting or supernatural, the weapon is forgettable. Scenes that could be seen as exploitation are boring. The acting, even from Curtis, is passable at best. Granted Acting isn't a high point in slashers, but blood guts and breasts tend to distract horror audiences enough. This didn't. The camera work, never a high point of slashes, is especially bad, with day time shooting seeming overexposed. The sound is an issue too. I shouldn't have to make myself deaf to hear the dialogue. The biggest problem for me is the pacing. The killing takes too long to happen, and the mystery that is supposed to hook you doesn't stick. Skip this. Want a good slasher? Watch Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare in Elm Street. This is not original or interesting enough to warrant sitting through.

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.

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.