Not a very good film, even by the "standards" of the genre. There was surprisingly little gore, until one particular scene. (This is not a complaint) Very little gratuitous nudity. (Maybe a little bit of a complaint) The acting, sets, direction, etc. place it firmly in the B category, which is fine. Leslie Nielsen seemed to be mailing it in. Jamie Lee Curtis was so young that her craft may not have been well-developed, seeing that she became a fine actress. The director seems to have made his career in television, and it showed. This is kind of a waste of time.

This is probably the worst horror film I've ever seen. I love Jamie Lee Curtis but this was a mistake in her career.... it's not that she's bad in the film but she's not the star, and everything else in the movie is bad. The acting is extremely over the top cheesy and cliché, the story is pretty weak... they had a chance to make a longer more substantive horror movie, but they resorted to boring cliché material that leaves you feeling like this was a huge missed opportunity. The story centers around 4 kids who were involved in the accidental death of a little girl (Jamie's sister in the film), and now six years later a killer who knows their secret is coming after them... sound kinda familiar? (I know what you did last summer). Watch that one instead of this one if that kind of plot summary sounds interesting to you because it's far better than this disaster. The killing scenes aren't suspenseful or scary, hell none of the scenes in this movie are scary.... just boring and more boring. This is a flop! I recommend you keep looking if you run across this one. 1/10.

It's tough to rate "Prom Night" this late in the game. Horror flicks were already becoming de rigueur by 1980 - check out the ineffectual parody "Student Bodies" - so you can imagine how trite this material seems almost forty years later!Even if you've never seen a slasher movie, this stuff is familiar: a group of generally oversexed teens are bumped off one by one by a masked assailant, whose identity is revealed at the end of the film. This one also features a traumatic event in the prologue, with the assailant being someone who witnessed it and is out for vengeance, a la "I Know What You Did Last Summer".Don't let the familiarity of the material put you off, though. "Prom Night" is a very well made movie: the death scenes, particularly, make unnerving use of slow motion and camera angles that would have been truly disturbing back in 1980. Most slashers don't even bother with stuff like that: they just go for the gore.The ending also boasts not one, but two surprises: the last death is truly shocking, and the identity of the killer? I must confess I didn't pick it, even after having seen hundreds of these movies."Prom Night" covers VERY familiar ground, yes, but it does it with more style than 99% of its familiars.

Years after a terrible tragedy, a group of teens partying away at their high-school prom find themselves stalked by a murderous killer in retribution for their actions earlier and must stop his blood-soaked rampage.Overall this was a very disjointed and problematic slasher. One of the many problems facing this one is that the central motivation for the rampage is quite shoddy and rather lame, centering on the initial game in the beginning which runs for far too long and comes off as far too clichéd to have the impact it should have. When this part of the film is problematic, it certainly undoes this one a lot by coming up with a lame game that sets off a clichéd reaction which doesn't have all that much impact here because of that clichéd nature. As well, this here really undercuts the film itself as there's barely anything which can count itself as enjoyable slasher fare as a lot of these scenes are lame, drawn-out and pack almost zero suspense into them. There's very little of the really creepy type of scenes all throughout this, as the chase through the school hallways is just awfully overlong, clumsy and doesn't really feature anything to show her life's at stake so it just comes off as a bland, tedious scene from a film full of them, including the opening game and the sequences with the police attempts to catch the red herring which are supposed to be creepy or chilling but doesn't have anything worthwhile to add to the film. That would be enough to lower this one enough even without the utterly excruciating fact of this one being shot so dark that it makes for an extremely difficult to near- impossible time just making out what's actually happening at the time. It's blurry, dark and just doesn't kook all that appealing which really highlights the flaws even more as there's hardly anything that sticks out when it can't be seen all that well. There's a few good ideas here, though, that does work including the fact that the film sets up four different people as the killer and gives them each a fair amount of time to make people think is the real killer, which is really ingenious. Two people involved in subplots as being potential killers are given perhaps the most realistic killer motives that it's surprising none of them were the killer. The other thing about this one that works is the final twenty minutes in the film, as that is when all the murders take place as the rest is the prom set up. All of the deaths are all packed in at the ending, which leaves the ending to pack a giant wallop. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot of enjoyable stuff here.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Adult Language, Nudity, and a scene of Rape.