Prom Night (2008)

A remake of a 1980 slasher picture that nobody had been clamoring to see again, Prom Night arrives with the grim efficiency of a studio fulfilling a contractual obligation. Brittany Snow plays Donna, a high school senior whose family was slaughtered three years earlier by an obsessed biology teacher. Now he has escaped the mental hospital, checked into the same five-star hotel hosting her prom, and begun working through her friends with a knife. The film is competently assembled and utterly hollow, a machine that produces corpses at regular intervals and nothing else. Critics at the time were unkind. They were correct.

The setting is a luxury hotel, which invites some passing attention to wealth and corporate hospitality, though the film has no interest in the arrangement of capital. The staff exist to be stabbed. A maid dies for a key card. The prom itself, organized by a classmate scheming for a crown, gestures at status anxiety among teenagers and then abandons the thought entirely. The cast is more diverse than the 1980 original, and the film does nothing with that fact. Idris Elba plays a detective. He investigates. That is the full extent of his role.

Donna survives her ordeal, which is the minimum required of a final girl and no more than that. She does not grow, testify, or organize. She screams and hides and is rescued by a man with a gun. The killer's pathology is a plot device, not a diagnosis, and nobody in the film has a thought about anything beyond staying alive until dawn. What remains is ninety minutes of competent, joyless assembly, a film that topped the box office once and has been forgotten steadily ever since. The sommelier swirls the glass, frowns, and sets it down.