Crew
Directors – Ron Oliver & Peter Simpson, Screenplay – Ron Oliver, Producers – Peter Simpson & Ray Sager, Photography – Rhett Morita, Music – Paul Zaza, Special Effects – The Light and Motion Co, Special Effects Makeup – Nancy Howe, Production Design – Rueben Freed. Production Company – Norstar Entertainment/Comweb Productions Inc/Famous Players Inc.
Cast
Tim Conlon (Alex Gray), Courtney Taylor (Mary Lou Maloney), Cyndy Preston (Sarah Munro), David Stratton (Shane Taylor), Dylan Neal (Andrew Douglas), Jeremy Ratchford (Leonard Welsh), Lesley Kelly (Miss Richards), Roger Dunn (Principal Weatherall)
Plot
Depressed at the averageness of his grades, Hamilton High student Alex Gray wanders the school grounds. The spirit of Mary Lou Maloney suddenly appears and makes love to him. Mary Lou then takes it upon herself to forcibly change Alex’s grades to A’s, make him the star of the football team and kill off anybody who crosses him.
The Prom Night films are symptomatic of the 1980s horror genre’s conceptual poverty of imagination. They are yet another manufactured Roman numeral franchise – a series that was fabricated from a wholly unrelated first film. The first entry, Prom Night (1980), was a routine slasher effort that tried badly to imitate Halloween (1978); the second film, the quite likable Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), jumped on the parody horror trend; this at least follows on in continuity from the second film; while the fourth was an even further unrelated effort Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1992) concerning a psycho priest. The original was later remade as Prom Night (2008), which none too surprisingly had no connection to any of the other films.
Unlike the A Nightmare on Elm Street films, which started out serious and became progressively sillier, the Prom Night sequels started out tongue-in-cheek from the outset. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss pretends to no more than a series of campy dispatches by a tongue-in-cheek villain spouting bad puns. There is nothing more to the film than that.
There are some occasionally amusing moments – Mary Lou spouts Freddy Krueger-like claws and then a closeup shows they are six-inch red fingernails – and the odd one-liner: “You want average – get Sandra Dee,” snarls Mary Lou. The film, for some reason, lays into school guidance counselors with a vengeance – “That wasn’t human, that was a guidance counsellor,” says someone looking at the counsellor’s remains.
At its worst, which is far more often, Prom Night III‘s level of humour is appallingly sophomoric – especially the announcements that come through the school loudspeaker – “Today’s chess tournament has been cancelled – members are asked to report to the library to play with themselves” or “Attention girls’ weightlifting team – a class on facial hair removal is being held in the gym and attendance is mandatory.”
The effects, particularly the animation surrounding Mary Lou’s appearances and disappearances, are not particularly convincing. Courtney Taylor lacks any conviction as Mary Lou – the bitchiness comes with a dreadful vapidity. On the whole, Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is too cheerfully tongue-in-cheek a film to be considered bad but lacks anything to be much more than that.
Full film available online here:-