Cinema
Prom Night (15) **
NELSON McCormick's frenzied teen thriller, which bears scant resemblance to the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis slasher of the same name, suffers from a curious aversion to blood and gore.
The film's knife-wielding killer pounces on his hapless victims, eviscerating their midriffs with a flurry of stabs, yet the lifeless bodies bear almost no visible evidence of the attacks.
There are no gratuitous shots of a blade plunging into nubile flesh, nor scenes of torture.
Indeed, most of the slaughter is implied through sound effects as the camera focuses on a victim's frozen scream, or glimpsed as blurred refractions through a glass tumbler.
One victim even has the forethought to stand close to some tarpaulin as her throat is slit in order to catch the single arc of arterial spray.
Three years after obsessed teacher Richard Fenton slaughtered her entire family as a twisted declaration of his love, Donna Keppel continues to rebuild her shattered life.
The evening of the senior high school prom beckons, and Donna and her boyfriend Bobby prepare for a night to remember in the company of gal pals Lisa and Claire and their respective beaus Ronnie and Michael.
All six youngsters are blissfully unaware that erotomaniac Fenton has escaped from his maximum-security mental asylum and is heading back to Haddonfield to continue his reign of terror.
When tenacious Detective Winn and his partner Nash learn of Fenton's flight from his padded cell, they rush to the prom venue where death wanders the corridors in squeaky shoes.
Prom Night won't be giving anyone sleepless nights. The biggest shock is how often the youngsters blindly walk backwards into Fenton, or in Donna's case, into inanimate objects like doors and lampshades.
One death sequence relies on a hotel room with perhaps the world's most poorly lit closet, while you can only marvel at the killer's superhuman resolve, travelling the 2,300 miles that separates him from his prey in just three days without a passport or money.
See it at Empire, Odeon
12:09pm Friday 6th June 2008
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