Prom night (15) * Dir: Nelson McCormick With: Brittany Snow, James Ransone, Johnathon Schaech The bottom of the barrel has now been scraped with this anaemic remake of the long-forgotten 1980 stalk 'n' slash horror movie that starred a young Jamie Lee Curtis and was itself a pale imitator of the film that made her a scream queen, Halloween. Replacing gutsy Curtis with insipid Brittany Snow from Hairspray and retaining only the basic premise of the unoriginal original - a knife-wielding psycho-killer stalks flaky kids around their high-school party - the new film is updated and reworked to no good effect. Unnecessarily extended and tedious party scenes (now taking place in a large swanky hotel rather than a claustrophobic school) are intercut with Johnathon's Schaech's ex-schoolteacher-turned-stalker dispatching Snow's friends. With the gore toned right down and attempts at building suspense hopelessly cack-handed, this Prom Night fails to fulfil even the most rudimentary requirements of a horror film.
