Prom Night Parent Guide

The setup for Prom Night is simple enough. Dress up a lot of 20-year-old actors (pretending to be high school seniors) in fancy clothes, put them in a swanky downtown hotel and then let a mentally unstable teacher loose in the place with a hunting knife. Sounds like the perfect way to end the school year?

For Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow) and her date Bobby (Scott Porter), it’s hardly what they anticipated. Instead this was supposed to be the highlight of the year and a distraction from Donna’s painful memories of the past. Arriving on the carpeted steps of the upper scale establishment, they, along with their high school friends, Claire (Jessica Stroup), Michael (Kelly Blats), Lisa (Dana Davis) and Ronnie (Collins Pennie), have booked a huge suite on a floor above the ballroom where their prom is being held and have plans for some post-party activities. But those are postponed when the partygoers begin disappearing one by one.

Meanwhile, at the police station, Detective Winn (Idris Elba) receives a fax about a jailbreak. Richard Fenton (Johnathon Schaech), a former high school teacher who murdered a family nearly three years ago, is a fugitive from the maximum-security prison where he was being held in the psychiatric ward. Though officials don’t know his whereabouts, Winn is pretty sure he’s headed back to Bridgeport to get the one remaining family member that escaped him—-Donna Keppel.

From this point on the film is pretty standard fare with more gore than suspense. The only guessing game is who will be the next one to get his or her neck slashed. Fortunately (and entirely unrealistically), despite the killer’s preference to hack his victims to death, there’s a minimum of blood. Most of the action takes place off screen with no spreading pools of the red stuff to give away the dead’s location.

However as the body count grows, so does the list of sexual innuendos, profanities and underage drinkers. Although one guest has his liquor confiscated at the door, others manage to conceal their flasks until they’re inside the party. Another issue is the implied sexual activity planned by the teens following the crowning of the prom king and queen. Neither parents, guardians nor teachers appear concerned about the intended sleeping arrangements.

With plenty of darkened rooms and the mandatory jump scenes, this re-make of a 1980s film with the same name, ought to provide more suspense than it does. Instead, plot inconsistencies and catty exchanges between the prom royalty candidates make Prom Night one date parents will want their teens to turn down.

About author

Kerry Bennett

Kerry Bennett is interested in media from both a journalist and parent perspective. Along with authoring articles for several family-oriented publications, she has written for Parent Previews for over 15 years. As a parent herself, she believes parents play a powerful role in teaching media literacy in their homes.