we're on a mission from god wendy so i got that going darling i picked the wrong way to quit sniffing blue light of my life we enjoy your films i thought they smelled bad on the outside [Music] welcome to vintage video where we're re-watching the 80s so you don't have to we'll be reviewing every major film release of the 1980s in real time over analyzing what you've seen and spoiling what you haven't i'm patrick o'reilly i'm jesse bayless and i'm richard wells and today marks the 40th anniversary of the release of prom night on july 18 1980 it was written by william gray based on a story by robert guza jr directed by paul lynch and released by avco embassy pictures which thus far this year has distributed the fog death ship and baltimore bullet and they still have the exterminator and hopscotch coming down the pipe this year director paul lynch developed the film after a meeting with halloween producer erwin yablanz whose brother frankia blanz left this year's the big red one and turn around when he stepped down his head of paramount lynch had initially planned to make another don't film called don't go see the doctor which is a terrible title about a psychotic gynecologist but they told him that was probably distasteful in general and so it didn't happen uh yablanz suggested centering a horror film on a holiday probably because you see an annual return on titles like that and so lynch went with prom which isn't technically a holiday but whatever lynch was acquainted with a film student named robert guza who gets story credit here and a slasher story that he had written was retrofitted around senior prom by screenwriter william gray as a co-production with canada prom night fell under the same tax shelter as death ship and nothing personal earlier this year originally eve plum television's jan brady was to play the kim hammond character and the production was having trouble securing funding until jamie lee curtis signed on and they went real quick into production nielsen was cast as her father because he was one of the most well-known and experienced canadian actors at the time this would be one of his last serious roles before he went full comedy to be fair it's the only serious problem of his i don't think i don't know what other movies he's been in that have been serious airplane poseidon adventure oh yeah i forgot about that one okay something to be fair doesn't even literally say i am serious in an airplane uh and stop calling me forbidden planet yeah there you go i have not seen that after production they realized that the music used in the prom scene went way over budget and so composer paul zazza was given five days to write disco sound alikes to replace all the songs they couldn't afford they were sued anyway for 10 million dollars but settled out of court for 50 000 which is probably less than the music would have cost them so that's fine we start the film in the reflection of a large mirror in a yard and we see what i thought was a dilapidated school i don't know what this building is some kind of a building and we pan up to the actual building to see all these broken windows and we hear kids voices inside playing a game called the killer is coming i think at one point they called it a convent oh okay maybe that's what it is uh i might call it school again later because that's what i was putting in my notes for a long time okay um but the killer is coming game that they're playing is basically like an edgy hide and seek the difference being that when you find someone that they also become a seeker with you and have to go find everyone so the first person when they're looking for people says the killer is coming the killer's gonna get you and then when they find someone they say and so they spread out and try and find people in every direction but apparently whenever you bring a new member into the game you just gang up on them and literally murder them after the first round wendy is it and starts counting so everyone runs to hide and outside a few kids are heading down the path i just realized the picture is a little foggy here because this is probably a flashback i at first uh because of the like fogginess i was like is this shot on video interesting i i i couldn't tell what it was shot on because like everything had it was so blurry like ethereal quality well i realized here because the three kids start coming up the path and the one in the middle i was like that girl kind of looks like jamie lee curtis but it's not jamie lee curtis and i was like oh she's supposed to be young jamie lee curtis and so when they called her kim i was like checking the cast list yep yep kim is uh kim is jamie curtis so that makes sense one girl with a stutter named robin sees these kids playing in this abandoned convent one of them is climbing around the outside of the upper floor of the building this is nick and she points him out to kim who calls him an idiot for being as dangerous as he is but she remembers then that she left a textbook at home or something and so she just turns around to leave at the beginning of this film i don't know if they mention it here i didn't realize these were siblings the three of three of them are yeah yeah yeah i don't know if they make it clear at the beginning or if it doesn't come up until later i feel like it becomes clear when uh we've we've flashed the future in the future okay that's what i thought yeah but but here anyway in my notes i was just like a third friend says the third kid is alex and uh he says that they probably won't let robin play with them anyway so they should just leave come on they don't want you in their game and she heads into the building without him and searches for the other kids alone as she moves through the building she knocks over a big door by accident making a loud noise other kids in the house think the quote-unquote killer is nearby but when they notice it's robin and not wendy they seem just generally annoyed robin finds nick and screams at first when she finds him which draws the killers in their direction no he finds he just grabs her grabs her and she screams and he gets mad at her [Music] but suddenly robin is surrounded by all these kids and they're all saying the killers are coming the killers are coming just shoving her hard in a circle at each other she runs away from them and they move to chase her and i'm already getting a to all a good night vibe yeah they chase her all the way up to a bay of windows on the top floor of the building shouting kill kill kill until she backs up and through a window and lands a couple of floors down in the mirror that we started the film with you would think once she's up on the windowsill you'd be like oh whoa whoa whoa whoa oh yeah hang on hang on we were just just goofing i don't know why it's a trope in horror movies but even specifically in this one multiple times that people move backwards to get away from something dangerous it's like just turn around there's stuff behind you but she's dead on this mirror on the floor looking up at the window with these four kids in it and a girl in pigtails kelly starts crying immediately nick offers to get help and wendy says we can't go get help we murdered this kid and no one's gonna believe this was an accident probably because it didn't seem like it was an accident you were all shouting kill at her yeah and basically pushed her out of this window like it didn't seem super accidental all four of them agree instead to just go home and never tell anyone what happened not because they don't think that this girl's gonna get found but that they don't want to take credit for it so the four kids jude kelly nick and wendy all agree never to say another word about it and they all get on their bikes to ride home leaving this bloodied corpse in the yard of the building and they grow up completely untraumatized yeah like no they're just normal kids like they don't i don't it's weird like they're all sociopaths yeah someone's shadow falls over the body though outside the building and we cut immediately two hours later leslie nielsen is looking down out of the window she fell through to where she landed and an echoey voice is suggesting that this was a sexual attack probably the victim of a sexual attack she must have resisted we think we so this is probably something the police told him earlier it was an echo i thought he was remembering a conversation that he had this this confused the crap out of me because i was not clear that this was six hours later i thought this was years later and something else happened in the same place okay i could not figure out what was going on and who was who yeah well because later they also do a weird echoey like mental narration yes but i think here it's it's literally him hearing the cops downstairs but it's echoing through the building but when the shot right before this was someone's shadow over the body on the yard and the implication is that someone saw this happen but we don't know who yet but also you can tell there are tests and examinations that you can do for a section right but what the guy says is that it was a sexual attack but that she died resisting so like maybe she wasn't actually penetrated but someone approached her with with that intention and in shoving him away she ended up falling out of this way but like filmmaking wise i'm really bothered by the fact that we transitioned from broad daylight either i don't know if this was early morning or afternoon like it was either before or after school and then we're in the middle of the night and yeah and we didn't have any indication of like how time has passed here and that we're at the scene of the crime still yeah so i thought that we were like reliving something that like happened again in this place yeah that's yeah i don't know but they in addition to saying that she died resisting this they also think that they know the person responsible because there's uh a known sex offender in the area and he's being brought in for questioning it's not obvious who's saying this because nielsen is upstairs alone when he's hearing it but it's probably just one of the cops working in the yard below he has tears in his eyes so maybe he knows the girl maybe this is specifically his daughter at first i thought he was like a cop investigating the scene but we will learn later that this actually was his daughter a car pulls up and a woman named vai is let out of the back violet probably and leslie nielsen sees this happening and calls down to her to stop because he doesn't want her to see the body he gets to her just as a pair of emts are loading robin's body into an ambulance and she cries over his shoulder we cut to six years later and we're looking at the headstone of robin ann hammond her mother puts flowers on her grave while her probably father leslie nielsen watches also in attendance are kim now played by jamie lee curtis and a haunted looking alex who i suspect was the shadow that i saw i've never seen this movie so if that's a spoiler whoops but mr hammond checks his watch apparently impatient with this remembrance and tells vai it's time to go just realizing that kim alex and robin were siblings and this is the whole of the surviving hammond family kim drops a flower on the grave and turns to walk away at home mrs hammond cries with her husband some more and he says come on now trust me in the kitchen somewhere kim asks alex if he has a date to prom and she suggests jude but alex isn't interested he's in charge of the sound system tonight and doesn't want to take jude on a date after he saw her murder his sister unless i'm wrong and that isn't what happened cut to alexander hamilton's senior high school which i'd never heard of apparently a senior high school is just a high school with no freshman class is that true apparently that's that's what my googling turned out but it's a senior high school because it only has a sophomore junior and senior year 10th through 12th grade okay which i guess would mean that alex and robin would have been in the 10th grade because right now kim is in the 12th grade um are we saying that alex and robin were twins they are twins oh it's not mentioned in the movie but it's in a deleted scene okay i was gonna say i didn't follow that at all then yeah mr hammond pulls up to the school with alex and kim and we get our first red herring mr sykes sykes as in psycho the groundskeeper is psych you thought it was this guy oh that works too actually that's probably better uh the groundskeeper is trimming the hedges we don't see his face immediately but alex calls him a wacko and kim says he scares me he's always looking at me i don't know apparently kelly says he spies on girls in the locker room but mr hammond insists that psych passed his background checks fine because apparently mr hammond works at the school oh it turns out he's the principal at the end of the scene we get a quick shot of his face just staring at them and he basically it looks like justin long's face but with like a comb over and tape on his glasses see i was leaving more tobey maguire on this kid okay interesting uh we get a lot of really strange inserts of a phone line snaking through an office and several angles on a rotary phone as someone is dialing the caller puts a pencil to paper just as jude answers the phone and we get quick cuts of young jude in case we already forgot the name this is the only time that we do this when he's calling the people we don't like show everybody's faces as they're getting their phone call i kind of wish they had though because i kept getting confused as to who was who in this movie yeah but uh jude is the one who didn't really say much when the killing happened other than agreeing not to talk about it but she's the first one to get a call and the voice says yes can you come out to play tonight i'll see you at the prom and she's just smiles and hangs up because she's she's decided that this is just an obscene caller the caller strikes out jude's name on a yellow legal pad with a list of names the next name on the list is kelly jude leaves her house and crosses the street just as a van pulls up being driven by seymour crane who calls her beautiful and offers her a ride he's kind of a tubby guy but he has a lot of confidence in his corner and he clearly has game he pulls the van literally onto the curb to block her path and he says they call me slick and she says i can see why she agrees to a ride straight to school and hops in so we don't understand that that they don't know each other or never it's correct which is why you get in a van with a complete stranger which i felt like is this already uh red herring number two here considering that this is a senior high school which i imagine has fewer students yeah you would know this guy yeah yeah unless he's like new to town or something it could be from a neighboring school no yeah you can go to a prom if you're from a neighboring school yeah it's not illegal no not anymore now kelly's kitchen phone is ringing and she moves to answer it this time the caller says been a long time tonight it's my turn the killer is saying it not he that's clearly a man's voice right voice modulation you know we don't know maybe it's a raspy woman maybe kathleen turner killed all these kids although i i would say this message is less recognizable as an obscene phone call so uh either way she hangs up and she seems a lot more freaked out by the call than jude was the doorbell rings and she leans out looking for drew her boyfriend but there's nobody there and when she turns around he surprises her from behind because apparently the back door was open to the house when she tells him about the call he jokes that she was probably hot for the voice nick's dad hopefully a cop is loading a revolver in their living room and uh he tells nick to get going does this guy ever come back he's the lieutenant who's on the case who's looking for that uh i remember that character i just didn't really i thought it was two different characters no no yeah that's that is that is nick's father i i got confused with nick because nick and alex both have really short curly hair and the same build and and depending on the lighting they're either brunette or clearly blonde yeah i was so confused why jamie curtis was making out with her brother throughout this whole movie yeah it's weird but i don't dislike it nick's dad on their way out of the house says for a guy so fast on the disco floor you are the slowest which is the weirdest sentence i've ever heard from anyone ever he also has his own phone and phone line when the killer calls oh right but he doesn't answer it as they're leaving the house though because the phone's ringing he's like oh your phone's ringing and he tells his dad oh it's wendy she's mad because i'm trying to break up with her and she won't take no for an answer is it weird that i forgot that multiple phone lines like landlines was this thing yeah that like really special kids had their own phone lines yeah i have my own phone line so i could be on the internet without interrupting oh you had to petition for that though right it turns out that nick is going to prom with kim and mr hammond is the school's principal so uh this is where we're learning that kim has in the ensuing years formed an actual relationship with the kid she thought was an idiot out on the out on the outside of the building the caller scribbles out nick's name on the list uh his name was third despite not technically having completed the task of calling him and warning him about what's going to happen lieutenant mcbride is in his office looking over a file a voice from his past says we only wanted him for routine questioning and we're getting flashbacks of a police chase and an upside down flaming car i think it's him asking why did the police have to chase him it turns out this character in the car is merch he is the suspect that they referenced at the scene of robin's murder and evidently in trying to track him down as a known sex offender who lived in the area he was spooked and consequently badly burned in a car crash after a high speed chase with the police we see merch in a full body cast after sykes and crane this guy is now a third red herring fourth if i'm wrong about alex dr fairchild interrupts mcbride's flashback and mcbride shows him a fax they just got apparently merch escaped from the state hospital last night and took a nurse hostage in her car the man mcbride is speaking with was apparently familiar with murch's case at the time that he was institutionalized but that was six years ago right and he says that he's a catatonic schizophrenic so anything i knew six years ago is irrelevant because this person is impossible to predict the phone rings on the desk and the authorities have found what sounds like the remains of the nurse near enough that it's clear he's back in town wendy puts on her makeup at home as her phone rings and the caller asks do you still like to play games oh get lost lou in the school's main hall kim jude and a third girl whose name i don't know meet up jude admits that she has a prom date now but won't say who clearly slick is living up to his name lou in the background is disappointed to see these girls flaunt their relationships around him a fourth or fifth red herring in these slasher films i feel like they try to give literally everybody with a line a reason to remember everybody well i i felt a lot of connections here to scream and i think because i had not seen this movie before i watched it for for this episode and i'm sure that this was influencing a lot of screams but i i really felt that the idea of having a lot of a lot of killers as options like came from this movie yeah that's possible as they're walking away from him because they don't like him he tells them listen you guys ever get tired of each other i'm always around know what i mean and after they ignore him some more he runs up and swats kim's ass bizarrely and she basically just tells him to [ __ ] off they come up on nick kissing wendy in the hall but they laugh it off surprisingly fast she doesn't seem super upset about her prom date kissing this other girl well i think she knows wendy well enough to know that wendy is just doing this against nick's wishes but he's not shoving her away and i feel like it would definitely be at least a conversation between the two of them like hey can you not kiss people in the main hall if i'm going to the prom with you unless the people you're kissing are me i guess kim feels pretty confident that she has nick yeah the body was discovered in the same abandoned building where robin died which is for no apparent reason still standing like it's been abandoned for a long time and a kid got murdered there or potentially just fell out of the window they don't know what happened so i don't know why this building would just be left standing uh with all these broken windows and everything it's also unclear how they found the nurse in this building but the search is already on for her beat up vw bug which he stole from the hospital the doctor on the scene seems pretty confident that with murch's scars that they'll be able to track him down before nightfall without prompting a citywide panic so there's no need to tell anyone that there's a psychotic murderer on the loose because that's how you find somebody who's really you know easy to find anybody to look for the guy who's got a bunch of scars yeah uh the caller rips faces out of a yearbook luckily they're all right next to each other apparently it's also alphabetically it's like what is this their their junior year yearbook like i don't understand what the what message you're sending by giving them their own photographs it should have been them as kids it should have been it should have been from 100 in line at the cafeteria suddenly a masked man shouts at kim and asks like me better now it's lou again and when she says it's an improvement he grabs her and forces a kiss on her heart like a goddamn maniac alex rushes in to fight lube it gets tangled up with lou's friend and eventually a school employee breaks up the fight and walks alex and lou to the principal's office nick tries again to break it off with wendy in a windowed corridor and a boom mic is clearly visible in the reflection of the window she is not willing to accept being dumped and when she sees lou getting walked past her to the principal's office she calls to him because she needs to talk to him probably intending to use him as a prom date considering who we already know wendy to be i'm surprised that she hasn't threatened nick with telling kim that he killed her sister i kept waiting for that to come up yeah they never ever talk about it yeah like well that was the agreement right but even like with like the the anniversary of the death you think like they would say i can't believe six years ago so yeah it's like shut up like like like there's nothing other than between the killers yeah other than nick's almost confession yeah i i don't it really bothered me that that it just never comes up yeah that they don't they don't seem to care as much as they should here in mr hammond's office he's wrapping up a call with his wife when she suddenly hangs up presumably they've been made aware that the suspected killer of their daughter is back in town lou is suspended indefinitely and threatens alex on his way out of the office i was super confused in this scene because i still hadn't established that there were two blonde dudes curly haired blonde dudes in this movie and i was just like okay wait so hammond is the principal his daughter is kim and his son and he just said he's gonna let his son off the hook his daughter is dating his son and they're taking each other to the prom this is weird well the prom isn't like a sex festival it's just a dance and then they have sex after hammond sees a bug driving past his office after the kids leave doesn't phone it in or anything he just watches it i got the impression the only reason he was looking at us because he knew that that's what they thought the killer was driving we see mcbride and his office going over the details of the case in going over murch's motive in this killing he has settled on revenge which is the first step to admitting that he was wrongfully accused of the murder in the first place tonight is the anniversary of robin's death apparently so she died on prom night four years ago assuming prom was on the exact same day of the year [Laughter] six years ago that's the problem with a non-holiday six years ago you're right it's that it's not the same every year this would have been her first prom because she would have been a sophomore this year nick tries to tell her about his involvement in her sister's death but he just can't put it into words before she has to go anyway yeah i was confused about that it would have been her first prom if she was a sophomore because that's not how proms work at regular high schools well maybe she would have been a junior maybe alex and her would have been juniors maybe i don't even remember if our school had a junior prom i think we just had a senior prom but juniors could be asked to it oh ours i think juniors and seniors were invited and they could ask whoever they wanted oh okay so you could conceivably go to two proms yes i guess you could go to 100 proms you just have to keep getting asked they keep getting older and i say the same issue exactly i stay the same age that's a weird vampire mcconaughey you know what i like about high school kids from the 1920s they keep getting older and i stay the same age wendy drives her sweet car to a drive-in and orders food for her and lou actually she just orders a small diet soda for herself she watches him staring at a waitress and asks how she knows that she can trust lou to take this plan seriously and lou ank really shouts at her that he hates the hammonds and the whole [ __ ] school and she doesn't need to worry about whether or not he's gonna do this right she says she doesn't want to hurt anyone too badly and he says look i told you i'll take care of it but we don't know what exactly they're plotting um and it feels very carry to me i feel like by the end i still don't know what they're plotting i i i think i get what they were going to do i i think well we'll get i guess we'll get there i want to see if our how our theories match up yeah in the tennis courts the instructor tells kim that rehearsals at the gym start at 3 15. uh leaving the courts vicki decides to show mr sykes her bare ass and is then reprimanded by the tennis coach in the girls locker room wendy finds her torn out yearbook photo taped in her locker and thinks it's a bizarre prank on her that i don't get what what about it that is a prank yeah it's just a photograph of you in your own locker so is this a joke it's not a joke it's not even a message it doesn't it's nothing it's like hey this is what you look like is this a joke thanks uh kelly tells wendy that she thinks that she will let drew have sex with her after the prom and suddenly we hear the sound of glass breaking and they find a shattered mirror in the bathroom they both step out of the girl's locker room to find who did it not completely dressed like kim's shirt is wide open when they lean out of the room but uh when they go back inside kim notices that a big shard of the mirror is missing now are we to assume that this is the killer it is the killer but why do this and why do this now have you bought a knife recently they're insanely expensive but surely this person could have shattered mirrors earlier or gone gone to the location where there are tons of broken mirrors including the broken mirror that the body felt the body fell off i think that's what the reference is too right but then use that mirror use that mirror yeah rather than assuming it's still there there's still like a bloody mirror in the yard six years later but a bunch of [ __ ] cops but rather than sneak into the girl's locker room while it's occupied by by people that you want to kill though yeah well one person that you want well that's true when she leaves later she sees sykes working on a light with a screwdriver and runs away terrified nick and kim head to the gym for a rehearsal because they are the prom king and queen apparently like the election took place and they already know in advance i thought that they announced it at the prom who won no you know they know ahead of time well they know ahead of time i don't know if everybody knows okay well either way they're invited to rehearse their prom king and queen presentation wendy and lou peer in from the side like the villains from carrie just waiting for a prank to go wrong there was almost nothing to rehearse here they just walk out and hold hands for for whatever reason kim's brother is asked to kiss her and then shake the hand of the uh again really confusing me about what the hell is going on between the brother and nick i don't know i think i think he was playing the part of like the principal is supposed to come out and greet the king and queen but the principal wasn't available for this rehearsal so he's standing in for it which i think is our next red herring for the whole film like what are we on five six seven eight i don't remember we're like oh the principal's not around right he's not around back in the locker room kim sees sykes sweeping up mirror shards i think if he were the killer he probably wouldn't be doing this after he'd already taken a piece of the mirror but anyway this is what she sees him doing jude and kelly both find their torn yearbook photos and their lockers as well i'm not sure how the killer went about planting these unless he had access to the master key to the school's lockers jude has a piece of the broken mirror attached to her photo but no one else seems to have a mirror included yeah so i don't know what the message is to that i'm suddenly hoping that there are two killers acting independently of each other like alex is killing kids and merch is just killing doctors and cops and neither one of them knows about the other one's plan lou speaks with wendy on the phone and assures again that he will take care of things tonight kim does her makeup and mom comes in sounding confused in search of her lipstick she's probably upset about the anniversary but they also hinted just general uh mental problems that she's had ever since her daughter was killed and they seemed to be going somewhere together and i was like oh wonder where they're going to it's like oh they're going to the problem when the hammond adults pull away from the house a figure in the shadows approaches we see alex help kim get her necklace on at home and she spritzes him with perfume and he complains stop it i smell like the ladies accidentally admitting that he was in there earlier taping wendy's photo in her locker but also i was sure this was gonna come into play later like she was going to smell the killer oh okay interesting but she does say how would you know what the ladies room smells like he's like i've been in there a bunch today i broke a mirror and i hung up some photos for no reason nick is ringing a doorbell and alex leaves to let him in he's practically sobbing next to a picture of robin like a framed picture on the fireplace mantle when kim surprises him wearing one of her mother's hideous old dresses as a joke he says she looks beautiful and i realize i was wrong this is her actual prom dress god you're beautiful wendy lights up a cigarette and waits impatiently for her prom date another of the film's three smokers rounding out with the sex offender who was probably smoking a lot after being badly burned in a car fire six years ago and who is this person at wendy's house is it her it's her mom yeah it's her mother okay she's just very strange their relationship is weird lou brought friends and he's not wearing a suit or anything he says it's in the trunk he chugs a bunch of whiskey in the driver's seat and hands her the bottle before smashing a trash can on his way out of the driveway i like that when he backs out and then goes and smashes the trash can he doesn't hit it on his backing out so like it's a hundred percent intentional like because he's driving towards it yeah in the history of pop culture i wonder if anything has gone out of fashion faster than disco because i feel like in 79 this is a completely believable problem yes and in 1980 it feels 10 years old somehow yes i agree with that we get our first sound alike disco track from composer zaza and but it's still called dancing in the moonlight clearly replacing the king harvest song of the same name kim and jude meet up and their dates slick and nick are introduced to each other kim dances with her father and he apologizes for missing her grand entrance i'm sorry too did we even see it i i don't i mean we saw a rehearsal for the king and queen announcement but we i didn't see her grand entrance she was just there at the dance already he says that mom is freaking out a little bit and so he had to take her for a walk to calm her down wendy enters with lou and the boys and now he's wearing a leather jacket over a wife beater with a bow tie which is a very interesting look and that's the that's the suit that was in the trunk yes it was just a jacket and a bow tie and would he be allowed to go to prom when he's suspended and definitely probably not uh kim rushes to nick so they can dance quickly and piss off the angry couple a second song starts and it's called prom night they do a long dance number to it and everyone seems to really enjoy it except for me mcbride is keeping watch at the school checking in with the cops every once in a while for updates in case they found this guy wendy and lou dance for a moment but she sneaks away when his back is turned kelly and drew are making out in the locker room and she asks him to stop when he gets his hands on her underwear she says that she isn't ready and he says he knows plenty who are and leaves her there suddenly someone else is in the bathroom with her as she sobbingly redresses and a masked man slits her throat jaggedly with a shard of mirror so i just want to point out that we are over an hour into this film this hour and a half long movie this hour and a half long movie we are like an hour i think i pause it we're like an hour and two minutes into this film and this is aside from the accidental death yes at the very beginning of this film this is the first person that has been murdered in this horror film well there's also the dead nurse but yes the first person we see who's murdered yes well no we saw her legs like yes i we don't see her being murdered while other people were presumably being murdered historically at the same time still an hour into this building and nobody's been slashed sorry i was just like about that scene and loaded weapon when he lifts up the sheet you see just a pair of legs but he lifts up the other side of the sheet and his pair of legs going the other way and he goes what am i looking at here oh good movie we cut to a puddle of blood on the floor coming out of this girl to the punch bowl at the prom we have the pov of someone watching from the sidelines in the hallway as mcbride is checking in again by phone and speaking very loudly about details of the case we move outside the school where jude and seymour crane aka slick are having sex in his van when we get another pov moving around the van seymour steps outside to pee in the bushes and she admits to him that she was a virgin up until just now she invites him to have sex again with her on the bluffs this time and they almost do it but seymour hears a twig snap and he gets worried what was that he says that he needs another joint and they get up and head back to the van i like to hear though she says oh i'll just roll this thing up about the blanket and she just picks it up in a big ball like she didn't roll it up at all i just thought it was funny it sounded like she meant like she's gonna like cleanly roll it up and she's just like lumps it all into a ball in the van seymour has a hollowed-out american history book full of joints i feel like there were more joints in this movie based just on this scene than there were in all of little dragons well no chi chi sean that's probably true i guess they had very large joints that's true which are called something else there you go thai sticks but and they had a bag of marijuana but they didn't really have a lot of joints they also had a bag of uh of space coke right and laundry detergent that's true jude here says i'll remember this night for the rest of my life just as the back of the van opens and she kind of falls backward out of it and the same masked killer plunges a shard of mirror into her neck twice very deep seymour screams and then punches the killer hard enough to like throw him out of the back of the van out of the ground and then pops the thing into reverse and tries to run him over yeah so there's a moment here where the the van is pulling away from them and there is something waving in the back window that looks like a hand and i backed it up like two times to watch this over and over i'm like what there shouldn't be anybody in the back of this van like waving out the back window frantically like was this a mistake and then i realized that it was curtain or something it was like some sort of like suction cup toy on the back of the window that is a hand waving oh interesting yeah um you see it on the back of the car when he picks her jude up at the beginning which i didn't notice yeah and then in this scene when it when the van is like speeding around this park nobody waving there shouldn't be anybody in the back of this van waving but the two of these guys are wrestling for control or maybe a man and a woman maybe who knows these two guys are wrestling for control of the van when uh seymour's basically just trying to drive away at this point he's given up on getting this killer smashed the killer is finally shaken loose from the van not before he's already pointed the van at the cliff and accidentally drives it over the cliff where it explodes in a giant ball of fire according to the imdb trivia the stunt coordinator literally stole the van that they blew up for this shot so i don't know if that means like like they stole it for the production or if he stole it like years earlier and he was like oh this is a stolen van it's okay if you blow it up cause i can't sell it back in the prom lou says we gotta show them who's boss and wendy says i thought i told you i didn't want anyone hurt i don't know what she means when she says this they haven't done anything yet also show them whose boss doesn't imply anybody necessarily getting hurt yeah wendy is putting on mascara in the bathroom when someone else enters and she asks if that person has mascara because she's running out of it or something yeah you don't do that you're gonna get pink eye yeah because i'm always farting in my mascara [Laughter] i'm not supposed to admit that i do that the killer switches i but don't steal my mascara whatever you do oh my god the killer switches off the light and starts swinging an axe at wendy but misses her and buries it in the bathroom counter she is being chased through the school by this masked assailant and she's crying for help in a lot of empty rooms where nobody is instead of running to the [ __ ] prom happening right now she hides in a classroom and the killer peeks in for a second before deciding the room is empty and wendy does this clever backward walk protecting her from seeing where she's going or if the killer is that way and she bumps into a model of a human anatomy knocking it to the floor where its brains fall out so i feel like the fact that we have a mass killer here again is reference to hammond the principal being another red herring oh it ha because he had the mountain because he took the mask from lou right it looks like lou's mask from earlier i think it is lou's mask yeah yeah it for sure is lou's mask but i think that's why it's it works as either well we saw the principal had it so maybe it's the principal and we saw that lou was wearing it earlier so maybe lou went and got it back or maybe it's the killer who has all these identifying scars and he needs to wear a mask to cover his face she keeps running away from this guy she runs to the auto shop room where she hides in a car and the killer finds her there and axes the window out she runs away again and ducks into a storage closet where she starts laughing maniacally to get the killer's attention apparently he got her at some point because blood is loudly pooling on the floor in here oops no it's another body probably kelly but she's upside down hanging from the ceiling so who can say for certain a cop sayer rushes in to excitedly tell mcbride that merch has been apprehended 50 miles away dang there's only one killer in this movie no there are two he killed the nurse he killed the nurse we don't know that we don't know what happened the nurses did we jumped to conclusions for this guy before maybe four children killed the nurse on the anniversary of the day where they accidentally what luck for that guy they have a bloodlust that can only be i would go crazy if twice four unrelated children had framed me for murder i also like to think about that the kids renew their vow not to talk about the murder they're taking a blood oath with someone else's blood every year on the anniversary they have to kill just so they can keep the secret yeah mr sykes the groundskeeper wanders into the prom very flustered babbling about a killer evidently he saw the killer pursuing wendy through the school in the imdb trivia it says that he's visible in one of the rooms that she ducks into to hide i didn't see him i didn't either but maybe he's there maybe he's not i don't know lou tells his boys that if wendy doesn't come back that they'll just have to act out his part of the plan and so the boys go and they grab nick backstage and knock him unconscious before they can be introduced as king and queen it seems to me that the plan was that lou and wendy would replace them okay i think i missed that line then because i didn't understand what she was planning to do here like i kind of got later that he that they were going that he replaced uh nick yeah but i didn't understand that she was also going to replace kim yeah i think that their plan the whole time was to be like we're just going to steal this honor from the two of them as a prank on them you didn't miss it because they never say it yeah you have to try to piece it together but because the killer comes in and then i guess the other guy who's supposed to subdue kim chickens out because he never subdues kim no because well no wendy never showed up he's never around so he said but still you would need either way part of the plan is subduing kim but here's the here's the thing right before he goes up on stage and he says if wendy doesn't come back i'm going to do it without her it's just going to be me and kim so he's he planned on just being her king and that's why he puts on nick's jacket so that he looks like nick because he was gonna he was hoping she wouldn't notice because he was standing at the edge of the stage with the crown on already so that she might have a jack she might not notice until they're outside lou this dark-haired guy is going to look like nick exactly curly blonde well they're in backstage and they're dark she won't know until they're into the lights she's with the wrong guy it doesn't matter because she won't see his face anymore that could have been effective with her brother because her brother and nick look identical but well it also does effectively confuse uh the killer because the killer thinks that this is nick's standing there and takes his axe and just completely chops lou's head off [Music] but it's funny because lou is standing by this this electric box um at the end of the curtain and when he chops his head clean off he buries the axe in the electrical box and zaps himself in the process and just collapses on the stage i i do like that the killer keeps getting injured throughout all these events like when seymour punches him out of the van yeah or and unless like he gets electrocuted because he's just not good at killing he's not a professional killer this guy is an amateur lou's head tumbles out onto the runway before the dance floor and everybody screams and leaves the killer recovers from being zapped just as kim finds nick knocked out and tries to get him out of the gym and then the killer finds them and everyone fights over the axe for a while eventually kim gets it and bashes the killer in the face and when she can see his eyes she realizes here that this is alex and she immediately feels terrible about what she did but what she didn't like hit him with the blade of the axe she like just she like bashed him in the head yeah but the killer is now bleeding through his mask and stumbling out of the school towards all the cops with kim approaching him from behind when mcbride draws his gun and points it at the the killer stumbling out of the school kim unmasks her brother in front of everyone and he tells her what he saw that the students that he killed were responsible for their sister's death but he never says specifically who yeah so as far as she knows nick wasn't one of the kids yeah and also that he was just he obviously has a head injury right and who knows what he's actually saying is his death rolls of his brain firing his last few thoughts yeah then he dies from i guess just the blunt force trauma um and we fade to the abandoned building for the credits to run so at the beginning when the three kids are approaching this building yeah does kim not see that there's other kids playing in here she for sure does and the only person she sees 100 for sure is nick right because her sister says look there's nick up there so i leave my sister with a bunch of kids and go get a book and i come back and she's dead and i have no suspicion that these kids didn't and i think that what the adults say that some you know sex maniac killed her is the same building just by coincidence that's so weird because she knew that there were other kids there yeah and i suspected alex right away just because kim was the only person who had a reason to leave but she told the other two go ahead and play with them and only stayed behind and they didn't give him any reason to leave right so they didn't show him like actually completely leave they just showed him like kind of walk off to the side and i was like so is he still there just make sure his sister's okay because he should stick around if he's like worried about them picking on her and then she falls out of the window and then a shadow goes over her body so i was sure the whole time it was him i didn't look very deeply into it but almost everyone in this movie has credits on a concurrent television series called the littlest hobo so i'm just going to start with that so that i don't have to mention everyone who was in the littlest hobo the director here was paul lynch he directed robocop 4 and a bunch of the tv series the writer william gray wrote the changeling earlier this year he also wrote the philadelphia experiment and the 1991 dark shadows film he will also write an eye for an eye next year with walker texas ranger saroman and shaft the music here was paul zaza uh he will do the score for kidnapping of a president later this year or kidnapping of the president he also did porky's christmas story prom nights three and four and a movie called flesh gordon meets the cosmic cheerleaders i know it well yeah the other composer i hope that's not on our list right now it will be uh carl zitrer was the composer of black christmas which is why he was chosen for this film and he also worked on porque's and christmas story with zaza leslie nielsen gets top billing here despite not appearing in a lot of the movie he's mr hammond he was obviously a forbidden planet he's frank drebin in the naked gun a lot of non-zucker stuff that's supposed to be funny but isn't mr magoo surf ninjas dracula and dead and loving it and he appears in several deleted scenes from this film that try to frame him or his wife as the killer there's also a scene where they reveal that alex and rob were twins when he's speaking with one of the doctors jamie lee curtis was kimberly hammond this is her third movie after halloween and the fog earlier this year halloween was not this year but the fog was she's we said before an uncredited computer voice and escape from new york but she's in trading places fish called wanda true lies and the new halloween trilogy a lot of stuff anne marie martin was wendy she played dory duro on sledgehammer she's darcy estmont in halloween 2 with jamie lee curtis and she plays jessica ford in the boogens she also wrote twister really the girl who played wendy wrote twister that's awesome yeah michael tuff or toe it's spelt exactly like the word tough uh plays alex hammond the brother and his credits are mostly location scout actually robert a silverman played mr sykes he's in a lot of cronenberg stuff which actually makes sense based on how he looks in this movie he's benjamin pierce and scanners he's hans in naked lunch he's darcy nader and existence and he's credited as hydroholic in water world and jan hartog in the brood he also plays dieter perez and jason x david moochie played lou farmer he plays a heckler in for love of the game and he plays horse cop and half baked which i think is the guy who's on buttercup before harlan williams feeds on a bunch of drugs and it dies she's a diabetic he's like i love horses i love horses i love butter stuff buttercup and that's why harlan goes to jail rob garrison was sayer that's the cop who says hey we caught the guy he's 50 miles away he actually wrote a lot of the littlest hobo we had him earlier this year as pretty boy in brubacher which i think is the guy who stole all the cars and then ended up in prison getting framed for a third strike of breaking a toilet in a drunk tank he played packer in iron eagle and tommy in the karate kid franchise including the new cobra kai show and he's also in the macgyver birthday episode famously our least favorite of the entire series or one of brock simpson played young nick he is back for every sequel as a new character he plays josh in prom night two he plays larry in prom night three and he plays father colin and prom night four he's the only actor to appear in all four prom night films and coincidentally his father peter r simpson produced all four prom nights it's pure coincidence yes well i wanted to to say that it's jimmy curtis has unfortunate sibling interactions yeah her brothers are not nice although is her brother the killer still in the halloween canon i think so i think it's still did you see the new halloween movie i haven't seen it the new one the newest newest one yeah i think that erases that oh really because it's not in the first movie that it's her brother i think it's in the second or third that they introduced that that's the situation and i think even in the trailer for the new halloween movie she says oh wasn't it like her brother was the killer and she's like no no that was just rumors people made up or something like that so they they erased that as being canon i don't think michael myers is supposed to be laurie strod's brother anymore also i want to i meant to bring this up earlier uh but i forgot uh when the title uh comes up on the screen yeah there's a lot of portions of the font being that have been cut out yeah including the curvy part of the p in prom so it just says from night that's very weird i was like why would that's the most important part of the letter p that you need to know that it's a p and not an f yeah if you're going to take out a tiny chunk of this letter it should just be not the part that makes it a different letter yeah that's the only thing you should worry about i think this is an enjoyable film i think it could have been gorier than it was well i think that we could have gotten some murders before an hour and two minutes into it that was the part that bothered me that i'm like well we have what was it four kids or five four kids four killers we had we had four people at the front of this movie that we could potentially kill throughout the course of the movie we didn't have to wait until couldn't convince the way through before we killed somebody couldn't we have covered what i wanted to do and have the sex offender guy come back and kill cops the whole time in the background or like faculty at the school that were in part to blame for his incarceration or something like well sure or make it at least suspenseful for these characters because i feel like leading up to this moment like there was nothing for them to really be afraid of because like they all dismissed the calls at the beginning and like nobody died before they got to prom and so it was like if at least one of them had died earlier we could have like hyped up the fact that this was like a freaky thing like should we go on with prom like should should we be afraid to go to prom like why did this person die you know so like there could have been some suspense in this movie and merch never works as a red herring because we know the whole time that he was not involved and he was not there when it happened well because he looks like he's just slightly older than these kids like he he seems like he's do we ever even see him no oh sorry i'm thinking of uh um no i'm thinking of the groundskeeper guy oh yeah yeah sykes looks like he's a 20 years older yeah he's the most red herring of the group because they literally don't give him any motivation all they do is say he's a wacko that guy gives me the creeps he's definitely murdering people tonight but the the guy who like we as an audience are led the most to believe is the killer he has no motive to kill these four kids i felt like the principal was the one that was the most you know murderous of the of the potential murders although i guess if the implication is that the sex offender is the one who found the body or whose shadow came over her body then that would mean that he saw the kids do it and then he was mad that he got blamed for it so he's killing him framed for it but he is a murderer because he murdered the nurse at least right yeah that's true well that's uh that's double jeopardy right though you can't charge him for no it's a different person different person you could charge him all day long but he can keep murdering that nurse though right when you kill someone you get unlimited free murders on that person yes okay if you're convicted okay note to self i thought uh it was fun like i said it could have been gorier the blood looked real fake in that closet it just looked like red paint apparently the director was kind of shooting for pg-13 because he wanted more people to go but then people pointed out that no one's gonna go see a slasher movie that's rated pg-13 and avco embassy specifically said we don't make this kind of movie you need to make this gorier and that was when they went back and added the decapitation scene that wasn't his original death really yeah well that was interesting to me because yeah it definitely needed a lot more i mean that was the for the for the course of the production that was always the plan was to decapitate him but when they were writing it they were like this this something crazier needs to happen here because this death isn't brutal enough we need something with blood and guts and crazy special effects but i think it works really well because they actually cut a hole in the floor for the guy to stick his head off so it's not one of those shitty looking waxes and that was good yeah but it was very tame the whole movie yeah it was very tame yeah i mean we get a couple throat slits but aside from that there's there's not enough blood for for what this should have been but i haven't seen the sequels i bet they're crazier yeah probably yeah what do you think uh richard up or down that's a down um i'm not into this kind of movie yeah it didn't do anything for me yeah uh i i'm gonna give it an up um i think that it is something that you should watch in terms of understanding you know evolution of horror movies yeah um they're left a lot to be desired in terms of it being a little bit you know more suspenseful or more gory but i've given it up yeah i i'm gonna give it an up also it was actually i felt artfully made and there wasn't any like glaring plot holes to it yeah it was it surprised people how well friday the 13th did this year compared to prom night because it's obviously a like on a purely technical basis a better made film friday the 13th for sure but it didn't have like the the audience base that that that movie ended up having well honestly they're not terribly different i think if this one was a little bit more over the top and we had a little a few more blood and guts moments it would have been on par with friday the 13th yeah i think that's true where's this going in your list well uh on that note i actually have it right above friday the 13th okay so i have it below humanoids and above friday 13. that's a fun set of movies right there it's two posters in a row with eyes and then two posters in a row with knives it's like a venn diagram yeah uh that puts prom night number 55 well what's interesting is i think it's somewhere around friday the 13th for me too but i have friday the 13th much higher yeah it's in that neighborhood um but i'm going to put it a little bit lower i'm going to put it above blues brothers and below brew baker which is 22nd on my list for the year right now um i'm actually putting it below blues brothers and above brubaker but even more specifically below folks and above used cars which puts it in 24th place i think this was a pretty decent slasher film we'll have better ones this year even now moving forward but i think that's everything for this one if you guys have any thoughts you'd like to share with us we are vintagevideopod on twitter facebook instagram and letterbox or as i've said before you can find each of our full movie rankings for the year we can also be found at vintagevideopodcast.com please consider rating us on itunes to help people find the show and if you take the time to leave us a review we will thank you personally in an upcoming episode if you're feeling especially generous you can also support the show through patreon.com vintage video podcast thank you so much for listening and i hope you'll join us next time when we'll be discussing lucio fulchi's zombie 2 aka zombie which imdb describes like so strangers searching for a young woman's missing father arrive at a tropical island where a doctor desperately seeks the cause and cure of a recent epidemic of the undead we leave you now with the trailer for zombie two looks abandoned [Music] this is something big that's just what we'd like to know one more step and i'm gonna blast you now freeze where you are yes it's my father's boat and uh how long since you last spoke to him well we have to go to matul we're trying to locate anne's father she hasn't heard from him for some time that's not a cool place to head natives claim it's cursed they avoid it like the plague [Music] i'm going to tell everyone that you're the one who's crazy demented cruel evil [Music] what exactly did my father die of dr minor and the boat's crew what happened to them what just about the dead coming back to life again and having to be killed a second time [Music] please islands fantastic legends voterism zombies in rifle centuries just superstitious horseshoe whatever it is it makes the dead stand up and walk i've seen it with my own [Music] so [Music] the father of my father always said when the earth spit out the dead they will come back to stop the blood from delivering [Music] i'm so scared we're not gonna make it off this island they're coming back to life they're everywhere [Music] whatever it is it makes the dead stand up and walk