PROM NIGHT
The Prom Night franchise is a truly wackadoo collection of completely unrelated movies. There is barely a hint of a thread tying any of the five Prom Nightstogether – one of the movies doesn’t even have a prom in it.
There’s the original Prom Night where the killer is a human man. The sequel Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II where the villain is Mary Lou, a 1957 prom queen who possesses people. Then Prom Night III: The Last Kiss throws in zombies and a visit to a different dimension. Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil tosses in a murderous priest who hunts a group of kids who don’t even attend their own prom.
This Prom Night is the 2008 one that popped up in that 00s run of rebooting old horror franchises. Gone are the evil priests, and zombie realms, and ghosts of prom queens past, instead we’ve got Idris Elba playing a detective in that period of his career between The Wire ending and him getting real jobs. Elba is trying to track down a former teacher who is murdering students on prom night.
How would I fit into Prom Night? Well, a bit of real life prom-related backstory.
No proms in my life, only high school formals. A Year 10 Formal, and a Year 12 Formal. We had the Year 10 Formal in the gym of Quakers Hill High School. And we had our Year 12 Formal at the Hilton in the city, which for us Western Sydney kids felt like the fanciest thing in the world to able to jump on a bus out the front of our school and drive close to an hour into the city for a night that did not live up to the high expectations of She’s All That.
The big thing about the Year 10 Formal was what car people showed up in. It seemed like everybody had a fancier and longer car than the last person. Not me and my friend Tim though, we walked to the school, got there, saw everybody else rocking up and thought “Oh that gives us an idea for our next formal”.
We thought it would be the funniest thing to drive up to our Year 12 Formal in a golf cart. So we did. We hired one. It cost a fortune. There was a mix-up with our arrival time to the school though and by the time we drifted around the corner on a golf cart expecting a standing ovation, we found that most people were already on the bus and didn’t even see us pull up. We spent the rest of the night having to tell people what we did. “Yeah, we drove to the school in a golf cart, you know how like everybody else showed up in a fancy car?” “Fancy car? Nah, that was a real Year 10 thing, we didn’t even do that this year.”
How would I fit into Prom Night? By righting history.
IF I WERE IN ‘PROM NIGHT’ I WOULD: SURVIVE BUT HAVE A FLURO LIME GREEN DRESS SHIRT IN MY CUPBOARD FOR WELL OVER A DECADE BEFORE EVENTUALLY GIVING IT TO CHARITY.
