News flash!

Uma recently watched "Prom Night" -that is to say the necessary remake for the zero calorie CocaCola generation, not the original 80s slasher eh!- and I just... loved it!
Loved it!
Loved it like we all love "The X Factor" on ITV complete with its three advertising breaks and five hand-overs in less than 55 minutes. Loved it like we prefer "Hello Mag" :-)) to the "Financial Times" :-((.

"Prom Night 2008": it's da bomb.


To present it briefly, it's like... totally kewl and completelly awesome. It rrrrrrocks -literally. What it does right? it no less than redefines the nasty "slasher" genre (boooh!!!!!!1) in less than 90 minutes (...pro'bly pushes 1h25 mins at the most, opening and ending credits included); it pushes the boundaries right out of kilter with not a care in the world and takes you for a white-knuckled ride on a veritable roller-coaster as it sashays i'ts way nonchalontly to the PriceBusters' bargain DVD bin like it's nobody's business. We say "yes", we say "dig it".

If you remember anything past last night's episode of "Hollyoaks", the "slasher" genre was like this age-old filum type from the 80s in which a masked psycho usually set about terrorising a young virgin and slaying her friends in a multitude of inventive manners. How boring yeah. Your man would spend his time conjuring ever more gruesome ways of bumping off the cast and, lo! the so-called "torture porn" of later years (i.e. gross stuff like "Saw" and "Hostel") was born -well feck you very much long-haired freakos.
Each time, you would also be guaranteed a -like- massive twist at the end when you realised that -fancy that!- the unseen killer was in fact not who you had imagined ...but like somebody totally else: AMG!!!!!!! I can't beliiiiiiiiiiieve it!!!!!!!?!!
Needless to say boys just loooove that shite. They lap it up like they simply can't get enough of it.
Thankfully, the new "Prom Night" has none of that.


To start with, the murders here are dealt with in about, oh, five seconds each and always according to the same modus operandi (see, I know me Italian me! LOL!! Been watching "CSI" so I have!!). Your man's murders go something like this: killer grabs victim and stabs him/her in the guts, victim dies instantly. A pretty neat trick to perfect I must say though, especially when the serial stabber wears a white shirt that never ever gets stained (like kewl! far out! stick it to Procter and Gamble yeah!)
Sitting through the movie, you quickly realise that this "slasher" flick director has no particular interest in shooting murder scenes.

Oh no, what he clearly digs is... -and here Uma claps her little hands excitedly-:
the "prom queen" plot.
Like helllllo, can we have your attention please, what was the title already? That's right: "Prom Night" it is!! So.
So basically yeah, most of the movie is devoted to the big question: who but who will be crowned Prom Queen of the Year? We need to know, we demand to know, we pay our ten Euro fifty to know! Cue endless scenes of them ladies bitching about who's got the prettiest dress ("champagne" seems to be the colieur de rigieur) and the fattest carnation which their gormless boyfriends have to pin on their pushed up breast.

Talking of breasts... -Uma sure knows how to rekindle flagging male interest heh heh!!!!!!!!1-, I must say it came as a relief to be spared the mandatory five seconds mammary flashing: no nip slip in these Janet Jackson/George W Bush days shall we suffer! (And oops, just as it briefly stirred up, there goes my readership! ROFL!!!!!?!!!1) No no no no no no: this ain't that kind of party. For once -get this- actresses have to rely on their thespian skills rather than their plastic surgeon!
Since we mention acting, I must admit I got a bit confused here though. See, the main blonde doesn't exactly stretch herself in that department. Instead, she like does a great job of sticking to one single expression throughout ...but I'm not sure it's the right one. Watch her purse her thin little mouth real good, go for a nose-forehead combination frown, and look dead worried as she keeps axing empty rooms "hello? is there anybody here? is that you, Willy?"
No it's not Wally, one finds oneself replying to one's telly, it's your motherfucking stalker playing hide-and-seek you air-head!

Anyhoo.

So major quality time is given over to the girls as we follow -in excruciating detail, some total bores might say- their travails during that prom night queen thingy: it is such hard work being rich, American and young! And white too, and white -would it be for the token black couple accompanying them halfway through (look at them! just look at them! aren't they adorable?). My pervert of a other half assures me that the girl looks like "Kiss Promise" but A) he's a pervert and B) I sure don't want to know who this "Kiss Promise" is.
So -where was I?- our heroines work their way through a five-star hotel where the rooms are about as spacious as my entire fecking house. I particularly enjoyed the sight of poor folks applauding the belles as they disimbarked from their stretch limos to enter the aforementioned palace. Brought a tear to my eye it did. Folks who know their place in society... bless.
From then on, the filum concentrates on the main girls attending their prom queen popularity contest disco catfight ritual. Will it be Tabitha Stern, will it be Cordelia-Tara Palmer-Trumpingham, will it be LaTeesha Washington -or will it be virginal heroine Gemma Cheney?

How we laugh when the frumpy (and possibly secretly lesbitarian, we are told for no particular reason) teacher confiscates fuckwit number one's hidden bottle of Bourbon -hark at you, fuckwit number one! (Little note here: Bourbon whiskey... -aren't Americans so like totally 'phisticated? To think that poor souls over here pour Paddy down their throats, ewww!) More power to you sister, like! You tell 'em good and proper!

So anywayz, off go our heroines and we laugh, and we cry, and we laugh, and we cry again as they shake their booty, sip Liebfraumilch, touch their hair incessantly, unfold napkins, check their phone messages, dab at the micro-tears caused by their fuckwit of a boyfriend, exchange pleasantries with their clones, pout, flutter their eyelashes, announce their intention to take it up the arse (no they don't), check their make-up, flick their hair, bitch about who's gonna be queen of the whatchallit, sip mineral water, compare earrings, smile benevolently at DJ Sh*t and MC F*ck who comperes the evening ("yo yo yo I see a lot of honies tonite bwoyeeee! you godda get down gurrl!"), compliment each other on how awesome this evening is ("we'll never forget it"), admire themselves in the mirror, show some teeth when they smile but not too much, discuss their election dilemma in a mutually-supportive-yet-competitive manner ("after you / no after you / oh I say, you so deserve it / you betcha bitch cos' I'm worth it"), fluff their hair, cross their legs when they sit, indulge in over-the-counter medicine, repress yawning, and generally go get slayed at regular intervals.
(Talking of which, doncha love Hollywood filums: Americans have perfected the way to structure movies around a cliffhanger every fifteen minute: ...this is to account for the ads break. Clever huh?)

So here the director makes a concession to the male sadists in the audience and throws in a perfunctory kill scene (big yawn); this is supposed to be a "slasher" flick after all and the -like- total mysoginistic sadists who make up for "sasher" movies core audiences demand their pound of flesh. ...Mind you, these ladies may get brutally stabbed, but even as they do they remain totally acepticised: they hardly make a fuss or ruin the carpet with unseemly blood leakages.
It's just like that you see: class -you either got it or you don't.


But what about the killer some of yous might ax, what about the psychosexokiller? What about him indeed.

Well, we know from the start who he is -cos' it's a he, you see- and, to be perfectly honest wid cha, we don't need to learn much more about him afterwards: your man barely registers on the surface. Minimal characterisation, autopilot acting, and less than ten lines of dialogue in all. "We'll be together!" the Charles Manson lookalike (LOL) mutters a couple of times ...and this is about as far as it gets in terms of motivation/mantra/catch-phrase -like, right, big deal, waow, I'm so quaking in me slippers Mister! He then fiendishly escapes from his mental hospital thanks to one of these handy man-size ventilation shafts and shaves his beard off as a cunning disguise.
Still eh... -and here is a classic sign of serial killing mania oh yes- your man can't even manage a clean fecking shave! Oh no he can't. Just look him -Uma was positively yelling at her telly by then, sputtering popcorn all over the screen-: five o-clock shadow, cheap chinos, baseball cap on indoors, and not a single uniform in this six star hotel comes up to him to ax him what the hell he thinks he is doing here. Bah! sometime I feel I'd make a better copper than these professionals!

...He is a queer fellow though, so is our designated killer.
For the life of me, I still don't get the scene in which he finally confronts our blonde heroine. Picture this. There he is one second, right behind her, reaching up to touch her Aryan hair and............ the next second he's gone. Simply gone. Disappears. Your wan does her usual trick of finally noticing a noise, frowning, looking around in the half-darkness and going "Wee-wee, is that you?" (No for the thousandth time no! it is not Deedee! will she ever learn!!!!) and... guess who now opens the door about thirty feet away (eh???) to step back inside the massive room which for some reason he has just exited? (Maybe he had to answer the call of nature? In which case he was dead fast. ...Huh, even faster than my sorry other half but that's probably a different story altogether grumble grumble bah whatever...)
So anyway your man is back. What for?? Did he forget something inside the room? Did he suddenly remember he's been after our thin lipped blonde for years? What exactly was he thinking? Oh it's all a mystery alright.

At least the filum's writers do not disappoint us at that stage with logically making use of these recurring metal hangers which keep dangling and chiming every time the girls open that goddam wardrobe door (I counted at least four instances, with appropriate sound effect). Pah! This would have been too predictable! Not for whatshername to twist one into the killer's face a la Jaime Lee in "Halloween" (ewwww)! We'll have none of that nonsense thank you. No, rather like the characters, these ever present hangers are not repeatedly featured because they serve any purpose ...but because they are purty. Chekhov once wrote that if you see on a theatre stage a rifle hung on a backdrop wall, the rifle will have to go off in the grand scheme of the story. Chekhov was clearly wrong.

Anyway -and to cut a paper thin story short-, your man does his thing (offing hotel staff and bit parts), baseball caps his way unchallenged through the seven star hotel, surprisingly doesn't achieve his main goal (i.e. get the main blonde with the thin lips and the perpetual frown) ...and finally gets shot by the black cop. Bang, down he goes. Oh, and unlike regular "slashers", he doesn't even get to rise back from the dead in order to get killed a second time by the heroine as they always do. Nope, basic shooting is it and the total freak is done. Curtains! End of the trial!

Top drawer like I said, simply top drawer. Neat. Mercifully devoid of gore and subplots that do your head in. So refreshing in its utter predictability -that's "Prom Night" to you. Like, enough with all these boring conventions (booooo)! enough with the suspense and the shock effects (huh)! enough with the tits and the twists (d'oh)! No gross blood letting when the US are fighting cleaned up wars in faraway lands! "Prom Night" avoids all of that -and really we should be grateful. We should thank the producer like we worship at the altar of Jacintha-Sharlene and her frocked friends (big spoiler here if I may (hee hee): it's Samantha-Geraldeeene wot wins the crown in the end -yikes!).
No, this is a totally different dimension we're talking here, a totally different enterprise. "Prom Night" ain't about serialkillas, it ain't about suspense, it ain't about updating z-movie classics -it ain't about anything at all! What it does yeah, what it does is lead you up the garden path (cf. its first five minutes) and then totally wrong-foot you for the remainder of the experience; oh yes let me tell you, you're in for a bit of a surprise if you were expecting a thriller!?!!!LOLXXX. Fanboys will just hate it.


"Prom Night 2006"? ...good thing I wasn't looking to get scared!

Uma o'Gil May 2009.



So. A few things we learned watching "Prom Night":

-Swanky hotel rooms may be massive, but their doors are worryingly thin Health-and-Safety expert Uma must note. A a tiny weeny fire extinguisher misused as a battering ram will demonstrate that fact at some stage.

-US "college students" -i.e. the stage before university- are all aged around 27 going on 16.

-Putative murder victims will always find a way to wander into the one lonely place in a buzzing palace. Too clever, that's what they are -they clearly deserve to die.

-CCTV? What's that?

-Hotel staff with a subtly connotated ethnic name such as "Maria" are inviting trouble.
-Skintight low-cut dresses do a surprisingly good job at concealing bodyshapes sometime. Your granny would approve.

-Oh, and Hollywood is remaking "Oldboy" with Will Smith -happy days!