The opening does a good job of hooking you, after that it takes about half the movie for things to get going, but when they do, man, you get some of the best horror-camp the 80s spat in your face. First off, the set pieces are amazing - some of them looking like they'd be right at home in a Freddy movie. Also, the main actress sells her characters transformation once possessed, going from a wholesome, high school student into a vicious, murdering bitch. The cherry on the haunted cake is Micheal Ironside, who is always welcome in any movie (yes, even Highlander 2). Then, I suppose, the whip-cream is the girls locker room sequence (boner inducing). Lastly, the ending is spooktacular, with some more incredible effects. I highly recommend this superior sequel, and (spoilers) there's another one.

Let us start by counting the movies Prom Night 2 ripped off.1. The Exorcist 2. Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Carrie 4. Friday the 13th Just to name a few.Now if this was meant to be a satire like Airplane! Then bravo. Unfortunately, I don't think that was the goal here.This film had absolutely NO original material and dragged on for the longest 1 2/2 hours of my life. Satires are supposed to make you laugh. This simply made me cringe in my popcorn.Why two stars? Because Wendy Lyon did an admirable job trying to save the flick. Too bad she completely destroyed her career in the process.

As is noted in every review of this film, outside of taking place at Hamilton High, the only thing "Prom Night II" has in common with the Jamie Lee Curtis "Prom Night" is the number of plot holes into which the unwary viewer might fall.Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is an avaricious little tramp who wants BADLY to be prom queen in 1957. Unfortunately she steps on a few heads while reaching for the crown, and one of those heads belongs to her rich but clueless boyfriend Billy (Michael Ironside), who catches her making out with bad-kid Budd (Richard Monette) at the prom. As she struts to the stage in triumph, Billy climbs into the rafters like a tuxedoed King Kong, lights a stink bomb, and throws it down onto the stage to ruin the moment. Unfortunately, the fuse catches Mary Lou's pre-OSHA dress on fire and she burns gruesomely to death in front a room full of screaming teenagers who apparently missed "Stop, Drop, and Roll" because they never think about throwing a coat over her or anything like that and just stand there watching her burn. Flash forward 30 years. It is now 1987, with all the fashion tragedy that implies. Billy is now Principal Nordham of Hamilton High, and Budd is Father Cooper, the priest of the local Catholic church (?). Billy's son Craig (Justin Louis) is dating pretty little Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), who is up for prom queen. Unfortunately, Vicki's aggressively Catholic mother won't permit her to buy a new dress, so Vicki rummages in the Hamilton High drama prop room for something suitable and comes up with the crown, sash, and cape worn by the doomed Mary Lou. She puts it on and BAM -- Mary Lou is back and out for blood. Father Cooper figures out quickly that the ensuing weirdness is tied to Mary Lou's restless spirit and tells Principal Nordham that her soul is bound to wander in purgatory because she died violently while trying to accomplish a mission (presumably becoming prom queen, since she caught fire before she was crowned). Principal Nordham refuses to believe it. It is of course the truth and in the end, Mary Lou reemerges in all her slutty, living-dead glory to wreak havoc at the prom.Unfortunately, in between the explanation and the dénouemont, the movie is a pastiche of bizarre, occasionally frustratingly unrelated vignettes of Mary Lou possessing Vicki and wreaking havoc. The first casualty is Vicki's "quirky" friend Jess (Beth Gondek), who is dispatched after a weepy emotional scene in the bathroom where she confesses to Vicki that she has just found out she is pregnant (the pregnancy never comes up again). Why does Jess try to pry a jewel out of the prom queen tiara that Vicki has found in the prop room? Why is Jess dragged toward the menacingly open paper cutter, giving everyone the impression that heads will roll, only to end up hanging from the light fixture by the ties of the prom queen cape? Only Mary Lou knows.Preening through the narrative is Kelly (Terri Hawkes), the nastiest mean girl who ever used a crimping iron, menacing all and sundry in her quest to be voted prom queen ahead of the blandly blonde Vicki. She even performs oral sex on the Val-Kilmer-esque nerd, Josh (Brock Simpson) in an effort to have him rig the computer voting; unfortunately, Mary Lou gets to him before he can complete the task. Mary Lou also finishes off Vicki's best friend Monica (Beverly Hendry), who sports the most obvious boob job in the history of 80's teen cinema frontal nudity during a shower scene gone horribly wrong. In the end, of course, everyone dies and no questions are answered. I am pretty sure they were setting up for a sequel but this movie borrows so much from so many other movies that it's entirely possible that the writers simply lost their train of thought. What, for example, was up with that carousel horse in Vicki's bedroom? I mean, yeah, the tongue was a nicely creepy touch, but this is a girl whose mother won't shake loose the cash for a new dress for the prom and yet her bedroom is a full-on Laura Ashley fantasy complete with a carousel horse? And nobody ever explains why Mary Lou was such a bitch in the first place, or what Father Cooper was reading from when he explained why she had come back. The Bible? The Necronomicon? And after positing Kelly as the nastiest little thing to strut across a disco floor, her death is disappointingly routine. I mean, this movie puts serious effort into getting you to dislike this broad, and then...nothing. By the time Mary Lou bursts out of Vicki's chest and rampages gorily through the high school in search of Billy, the story has lost its thread entirely. The end -- wherein Billy gives Mary Lou's spirit her moment in the spotlight at their prom, and in return she possesses him instead of Vicki (who is reborn a la "Poltergeist", although by then you'll have completely lost count of the number of horror films being simultaneously ripped off) made no damn sense at all, although it seems to have wanted to, very badly.

"Hello Mary Lou"... concerns a girl who finds herself possessed by the vengeful spirit of a deceased prom Queen.This was a surprisingly spooky and nifty little horror flick by my standards. It's not exactly the best movie ever made, but I'll get to that in a minute. The ultimate strong points of this film are most definitely the special effects and it's decent writing . The special effects are top notch, and the stunningly original ideas behind them make them even more impressive. We get a creepy as all get out rocking horse which springs to life, a chalk board which becomes a pool, a locker which squishes some poor girl, some really good burn makeup, and much more. While some of the effects seem similar to another popular slasher series of that time (Nightmare on Elm Street), they are still very good in their own right. The plot and storyline, while a little too "Carrie"-esque, do move along quite well. It was quite interesting to see Vicki's slow transformation from average school girl to insane demon, and the kills which get thrown in are less than routine (see the locker death I mentioned above). Earlier I said this wasn't exactly the best movie ever made. I have my reasons. Mostly it's due to the acting. While it was interesting to see Vicki become Mary Lou, Wendy Lyon's performance just becomes more and more over the top as we go along, and builds up to an absolutely ridiculous, "Places to go, people to kill" answering machine message. No one else's performance was much to write home about either. Another beef- Mary Lou's spirit just isn't that scary. She's still a rebellious and "loose" teenage girl, and while that actually makes sense for this film, it was still more campy than scary to me. Overall, it's a very effective and chilling mini masterpiece of a horror film. It's underrated, probably due to it's lame title and it's odd association with a less than stellar slasher film from seven years earlier(which makes me wonder why they chose to call it a sequel at all. It has practically nothing to do with the original, and by 1987, "Prom Night" must've already been old news; it's not like there could've been legions of fans clamoring for even an in name only sequel or anything, but what do I know?) Lord knows that's why I had avoided it for so long. But give it a shot, if you're into an unusual slasher with great, surrealistic effects and a little originality to boot.