October 8 - Double Feature

FRIGHT NIGHT (Tom Holland 1985) vs. PROM NIGHT  (Peter Lynch 1980)

Click to enlarge Murray's Review!

I love VHS covers. Especially well made VHS covers.  Remember the interactive feature on the front of Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter 1990), that when prompted by the relief-textured button, the hooker would say ''Wanna Date!?''  I squealed like a little girl and pressed repeatedly, when I noticed it on the shelf at "Payless Video" in Denton, Texas circa 1990.  

*Note:  Frankenhooker, by the way ladies, is a fantastic and cheap, last-minute, timeless Halloween costume, merely requiring a purple Bettie Page-cut wig, bra, and tube-mini-skirt.

In the same vein, as an avid horror movie VHS renter at Payless Video in Denton, Texas, I loved the cover art for Tom Holland's Fright Night, starring Chris Sarandon and now-outed lezbo Amanda Bearse, playing the character appropriately named "Amy."

Although Fright Night can be categorized as a humorous vampire horror, do not discount its elements of horror and makeup mastery provided by expert Richard Edlund and lead actor Sarandon's sultry and witty at times vampiric performance.  The film tells the comical story of a teen boy's questionable new neighbors, two, male vampires of course, and his obsession with making his skeptical closest friends believe his tall tale.  Only Roddy McDowell's character as "Peter Vincent," who plays within the picture on a small network B-movie program, can save the clan from the ambiguously gay duo! 

When I was ten, I realized about sixty minutes in why there was a Ghostbusters-stylized ghost on the VHS cover...and it haunted my dreams for years. Having a mouth full of saliva-covered teeth, stretching from ear-to-ear is an extremely efficient visual for inducing nightmares, regardless of the comical overall plot to this 80's classic:

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Everyone loves the "Scream Queen.''  We can thank John Carpenter for many things, but safe to say that he is directly responsible for the success of Jamie Lee Curtis's staggering horror movie career.  This is not to say however that any part of Prom Night should be listed amongst those successes, for this movie is one of the sloppiest plot-driven masked-murderer films of the decade.  Aside from an incredible awesome-bad disco-off between Jamie Lee Curtis's character "Kim" and her date, a sexy Kim Catrall look-alike named Eddie Benton a.k.a. Anne-Marie Martin (former wife of deceased Michael Crichton), and a pretty gnarly decapitation sequence, Prom Night yields nothing but embarrassing cheese, loosely written side characters, laughable voice over and massive yawns.  Still...there lies a soft spot in my heart for all things JLC.  Leslie Neilsen, RIP, also ''stars'' in this classic VHS rental, also with a wonderful cover featuring the queen herself. *Spoiler Alert:* This cover is entirely misleading.

Twenty-eight years later saw its remake with the same title, directed by TV drama man Nelson McCormick.  I am willing to bet that regardless of its cast of no-name twenty-somethings, the newer version  most likely provides at least a small percentage of elements of surprise, comedy, and/or suspense...or maybe not? Haven't seen it just yet but ultimately, I plea no contest in the comparison to Fright Night...they just simply share half of the same title.  Prom Night fascinated me because the importance of this annual High School event carried little to zero importance to myself and my peers when we were going through those teenage motions.  Still, the genre is wide-open and any subject matter goes.  "One-star" fun.