HELLO MARY LOU : PROM NIGHT (1987)

HELLO MARY LOU : PROM NIGHT (1987)

So in this one Hamilton High's Prom Queen of 1957, Mary Lou Maloney ends up accidentally getting killed by her boyfriend who seemingly does not understanding how fire works. The reason for this is because she was cheating on him with probably several other dudes given the opening confession in the movie. Now Bill (played by Michael Ironside) is the principal of Hamilton High because apparently either no one caught him killing Mary Lou, or he got charged and let off or some crap like that. The movie isn’t here to grant your wishes on all that. So now Mary Lou’s soul or whatever is trapped in a trunk in the schools basement and Bill’s son’s girlfriend Vicki (played by Wendy Lyon) is an idiot so she is just going to open that sucker up and become a possessed maniac. Now the whole damn school is going to have to pay the price for Bill’s insolence. 

Okay so outside of the performances which are pretty decent in this movie everything else feels very A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET-ish. Like someone watched the first 2 movies in that series series and then said….you know what, lets screw up that PROM NIGHT movie with a sequel that is fun but has nothing to do with anything. Heck, it's 1987, and all the kids are doing the Freddy thing. What we end up with is a movie that mostly isn’t fun or all that good. I found myself grasping for some air just trying to dive into some sort of enjoyment out of this but couldn’t find it. Not even if I was still a teenage boy. 

I am guessing that writer Ron Oliver must have a stick up his butt around this time about the Catholic faith, and so this movie goes out of its way to involve religion (painting it maliciously)when they could have been on to something creepy, campy and delightfully horrifying. It looks like he might have remedied this in 2016 writing lighter fare, like Christmas movies. I’m not Catholic by the way, that just tells you how un-necessary the inclusion of that part of the story line was. 

I get that this is horror, so moving on to my next complaint, I wish we would have gotten more actual Mary Lou in this movie. She’s a crazy woman, but I think it would have been a lot more fun and creepy seeing her doing all the damage, rather getting her for the short time we did. Vicki is an okay character in her place, but the movie title kind of set up an expectation that never really happens. It reminds me of everything I hated about JASON GOES TO HELL, and why I still consider that the “movie that never happened”. I have to give this movie some credit for being imaginative, but it’s nothing we hadn’t seen before. Only now we are getting it with less quality. 

For those reasons, the best I can do with this thing is a 3 out of 7 and that might be a little on the high end. I still haven’t determined if I will bother watching PROM NIGHT III : THE LAST KISS, given the fact that it’s by the same writer. 

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