Prom Break

No genre has quite the inverse ratio of passionate filmmakers to budget challenges than horror. Nowhere is that clearer than in today's Amazon Prime slasher, a movie that has as much can-do spirit as it does echoes in its audio quality.

Quick Plot: It's prom night, and a sextet of seniors are ready to party. Nice guy Nelson offers up his uncle's isolated cabin, a perfect locale filled with a batch of '80s slasher on tape and a working VHS player. The only downside is that there's been a rash of missing young women in the area. But surely that has nothing to do with THIS evening, right?

Before the ladies can trade their heels for flats, a masked killer begins his hunting, tearing into the young bodies with all the practical effects a Generation Xer can ask for. The highly squirtable gooey blood almost makes up for the lack of an imposing killer...unless someone in the audience has always had a fear of men in windbreaker tracksuits. 

Party Night was written and directed by newcomer Troy Escamilla, a man with an obvious devotion to the kinds of movies most of us rented from our local Blockbuster (or if we were lucky, our independent video store, RIP Long Island's 112 Video). The screenplay blatantly references The Mutilator and some other old school gems, right down to a closet confrontation that feels positively Lori Strode in execution.

Nostalgia aside, Party Night is not exactly a good movie. Made on a minuscule budget crowdfunded via Kickstarter, it's riddled with poor sound quality that I have to imagine came from a lack of good equipment. There's a shot of a text message that's essentially just a zoom in on a cell phone, and the closeness of the camera to the actors' faces is genuinely unpleasant. It's almost like you're getting a found footage horror movie without the setup of it being, you know, a found footage horror movie.

The affection, however, is clearly there, and while the young cast lacks much experience on camera, they're all clearly trying. This isn't a movie you come to for deep analysis or filmmaking innovation, but as a 70 minute waste-no-time slasher, it achieves what it sets out to do.

High Points

While none of the violence breaks any barriers, it's generally well-executed and all clearly practical, a nice switch from the typically terrible CGI we see in low budget horror

Low Points

...with, unfortunately, the exception of the final grand kill, a decapitation that asks its audience to forget everything they know about how the human head is connected to the rest of its body 

Lessons Learned

Pink cell phones belong to girls

The music doesn't matter at prom. It's the EXPERIENCE

Being a good girlfriend in high school means more than just allowing your boyfriend to have sex with you 

Rent/Bury/Buy

Party Night is for a very specific audience: those who can handle low budget limitations for the reward of slasher gore. If that's you, then don your formalwear, hop in your Prom Ride, and find on Amazon Prime.