Prom Night (2008) + The Ruins
PROM NIGHT (2008) + THE RUINS
I know, I know… Why did I even try, right? Between the two movies, that was about $37, factoring in popcorn and soda. Oh, then there’s gas, too, so maybe $40-ish. But look, it’s horror, it’s new, and I hate to judge a book by its cover. One or the other could have been a pleasant surprise, right?
Take Prom Night. Sure, “PG-13 slasher flick” sounds like an imbecilic oxymoron, especially when your movie is a remake of a 1980 horror film best known for a gnarly beheading scene, but hey - The Sixth Sense was PG-13, and it was a pretty effective thriller, right? Sure, Prom Night is rating 14% on the Tomatometer, but hey - House of 1000 Corpses got 16%, and it’s a personal favorite. Besides - I’d hate to become one of those people who dismisses a film before I’ve even seen it.
So now I’ve seen Prom Night. Allow me to dismiss it.
Holy shit is this film bad. Besides the fact that it’s a “remake” (pretty much in name and setting alone), there isn’t a moment in this waste of time that shows even a glimpse of originality or ingenuity. Essentially a teenage Sleeping With the Enemy set at a prom, it’s as cookie-cutter a post-Scream, for-the-teens horror film as you can get - and what’s most disturbing is, to that end, it apparently succeeds. Watching it with a near sold-out crowd in Long Beach, the audience around me was cheering and hollering and even calling out to the characters on the screen by name - at one point a girl behind me actually screamed out in horror, “He killed her!?” And I sighed with the sad recognition that the producers behind this film knew what they were doing, and yes, we’re going to see more and more of these. Idiocracy, here we come…
Recent torture-heavy flicks such as Hostel and Turistas have been attacked by one advocacy group after another for being too disturbing, and while I’m not necessarily a fan of that modernized American-in-a-strange-land genre (for “torture porn,” to borrow a phrase that’s more than a touch simplistic, I’ll take classics like Night Train Murders and Audition any day), I find the notion of paying $12 for a slasher film and sitting through one bloodless murder after another, broken up by countless sequences of privileged kids dancing poorly to one Power 106 hit after another, far more disturbing. Watching Prom Night, I actually found myself struggling to remember the name of this Lifetime-esque movie where a girl is similarly stalked by an obesesed older man - about 10 minutes later I remembered (it was 1989’s Lisa, and was excited and relieved for a moment, only to suddenly realize that, holy shit!, I’m still in this theatre watching Prom Night. I’d totally blanked out! And I didn’t feel the slightest bit compelled to turn to my friend as ask him what I’d missed.
I’ll give props to Johnathon Schaech for his creepy portrayal as the killer (no spoiler there - unlike the original, there’s no suspense or mystery here as to who the killer is). Picking off kids and hotel staff with his hunting knife, his face rarely registers anything beyond a quiet, darkly determined gaze - there is simmering rage behind the eyes, but otherwise he may as well be wearing an emotionless mask (think Michael Ironside in Visiting Hours). I’ll also credit the film for being a scant 88 minutes long, and for not subjecting its audience to a ridiculous amount of back story and getting us to the prom within minutes of the opening credits (the film starts with opening song Time of the Season, sung by Ben Taylor, who could have taught the filmmakers a thing or two about taking a classic and remaking it while adding something fresh and distinctive to the mix).
On the other side of the gore spectrum is The Ruins, the film adaptation of the recent Scott Smith novel about yet another group of privileged teens who decide to check out an ancient temple while jaunting in Mexico, only to find themselves tormented by carnivorous plants and rifle-wielding locals determined not to let the kids escape. Featuring intense and gory moments reminiscent of Cabin Fever in their frank depiction of torn flesh and putrefying ligaments, it was a breath of fresh air to know that we can still get movies like these - that there are producers and filmmakers who aren’t satisfied at making films specifically for the audience that has been carved out for films like Prom Night. Go figure, then, that as the events of The Ruins escalated into increasingly bloody events, the audience slowly began walking out in pairs - couples who, no doubt, weren’t expecting to have their stomachs churned. Perhaps they saw “horror” on the synopsis and thought, Oh good!, there’ll be oversexed cute people listening to bad hip hop and telling horrifically bad sex jokes, maybe a creepy jumpy scene or two, certainly not gore, certainly not substance. Why expect that after Darkness Falls, The Fog, Prom Night…
That being said, that’s essentially where my praise for The Ruins stops - it’s gory, and as strong as its gore quotient is, it’s appropriate to the story. I will give it that, and praise director Carter Smith for his nerve (one scene in particular, where a man’s legs are amputated, easily ranks among the finest moments of howl-inducing cinema carnage). But GOD man, would it be too much to ask for a script doctor now and again? Especially in a movie where the impact of the events lies in its audience’s a) acceptance of the events and characters as realistic, and b) appreciation and sympathy for the characters, must we once again have a screenplay heavy with cliches and unnecessary exposition?
Jena Malone’s character, Amy, gets flirty when she gets drunk. At one point, she almost kisses fellow German globe-trotter Mathias (played by Brit Joe Anderson, speaking in a painfully bad German accent that left me wondering why in Hell the filmmakers just didn’t go out and find a German). Much attention is given to the fact that she’s a dirty drunk - it comes into conversation several times. Her boyfriend seems resigned to it. The other couple has intimacy issues too.
Why is this all important? It’s not. It could have been, and considering the circumstances I kept thinking these issues would come to a head somehow - maybe the vicious foliage would amplify their rage and it will all come to a bloody row - but nope. Waste of time. All of this, combined with all the footage of these kids getting silly drunk and partying it up and wearing painfully I’m a total tourist sombreros left me completely desensitized to their predicament - sometimes you want your characters to die, but in a movie like this, I really wanted to want my characters to survive. Without that, you lose a great portion of the terror you’re supposed to feel.
I think of a movie like The Descent. Just as much set up - even more so - but every detail of character, every notion and dynamic and conversation and relationship, plays itself out later when they’re in the shit. The fact that these two are sisters, that this one was sleeping with that one’s husband, that this one is a cocky spelunker - it all makes their fates resonate, their pain more profound, and their terror more palpable. My issue isn’t with back-story or exposition itself - it’s with bad exposition and back-story. Or, worse, utterly unnecessary exposition (I know I go back to it frequently, but the recent 113-minute House of Wax remake is just about the most perfect example of this). There’s simply too much cavorting and gallivanting at the beginning of The Ruins, and it all presents characters who, for the most part, are annoying and uninteresting. I found myself rooting for the hydrangeas, and I don’t think I was supposed to.
I also don’t think it was either director’s intent to make the highlight of either of their films be a trailer that played before it - an intriguing and creepy little clip for a movie called The Strangers. I try really hard not to let myself get too seduced by a good trailer (witness Dead Silence…), but I’m eager to check this movie out.
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