HORROR; 1hr 28min
STARRING: Brittany Snow, Jonathan Schaech
Oh, what a night: Snow
Gaspers and shriekers will be in their squirmy element with this paint-by-number creepy-crawly, “inspired by” Jamie Lee Curtis’s 1980 template. Snow has her duck-and-cover work cut out for her as high-school grad Donna Keppel. The victim of an out-of-control crush that saw her family murdered by a psycho teacher (Schaech as Richard Fenton) three years ago, Donna is attempting to get on with her life. Needless to say, however, Fenton has escaped from his nut house and is back with a vengeance — armed, of course, with a kick-ass knife. And with a cinema maniac’s impeccable timing, he is checked into the very same hotel where Donna and Co are staging their senior prom.
Form being destined to follow function, certain bosomy young things and their studly dates are doomed to bite the dust. Schaech is no slouch as a killing machine, notching up the bodies with gelid calm. It’s a long way from avant-garde art, but the cat-and-mousing zips along and the end is enough of a showdown to justify the B-grade means.