In the grand tradition of a long line of many sequeled horror films comes the third film in the Prom Night franchise which started with the original back in 1980 and starred Jamie Lee Curtis. While the first movie was a decent enough cheap slasher film, this third entry attempts to fuse horror and comedy, something that far more often goes wrong than right, and comes out as neither and doesn't even manage to be entertaining.

We start the film with Mary Lou Maloney (the lovely looking Courtney Taylor) escaping from Hell and returning to the High School were she was killed years ago. She manages to cast her evil spell over an average student named Alex, who she connives into doing all the clean up work when she starts killing off the staff and students of Hamilton High School. Alex ends up framed for the many murders that occur and eventually will have to decide between Mary Lou, his real girlfriend, and his life.

I can't say for sure, but it looks like this movie is cut. One instance of swearing is noticeably cut and a few of the gory murders are suspiciously shorter than they look like they should be.

This fourth entry is a marginal improvement over the abysmal third chapter. This time, the film starts off back in 1957, the year that Mary Lou was killed at Hamilton High School. We witness the fanatical Father Jonas murder a pair of young lovers, doing what young lovers tend to do sometimes in the backseats of cars.

The Catholic Church finds out about Jonas' spree and locks him in the basement of a church where he spends the better part of the next thirty years of his life, full of drugs, held there to hopefully die in peace. But sadly for the church, Jonas escapes, oddly enough, on Prom Night, and of course, as they indulge in partying and sex after the prom, it's up to Jonas to commit his fanatical murders and cleanse things in the name of God.

Like I said, it's slightly better than the third entry, but it's still so clichéd that it's at times almost painful. The nudity and gore is at least a bit more plentiful in this chapter, and that keeps the sleaze-o-meter factor a little bit more active as you watch it, but it's still not enough to make it worth much of anything. At least this one seems to be uncut.

Video:

Both movies were shot fullframe and that's how they are presented here. Both films look like they were taken from VHS tapes. Colors aren't too bad, though they are a tad soft in a few spots, and the blacks don't look awful, but it doesn't appear that much effort was done to clean these films up and Artisan has done much better work in the past than they did here on this release. Far from to notch, it is watchable, just not overly exciting.