Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990)
Directed by Ron Oliver
First off, I’ll say that I love Hello Mary Lou Prom Night II, its awesomely bad and awkward and took the franchise in an interesting direction. One day I was walking through Walmart in college and saw a double feature DVD of Prom Night III and Prom Night IV. I didn’t buy it. I already owned part IV on a VHS screener so I let it sit on the shelf. I changed my mind a week later and it was gone. Fast forward nearly 10 years later and I bought it off Amazon. Part III being the only one I’ve never seen, until now…
Part III continues the Mary Lou Maloney story from Part 2. Both 2 and 3 were shot in Canada, which becomes obvious, at least to me in Part III especially. PN3 centers around Alex, the “average” guy. I say average in quotes because he says it a butt load in this movie, he’s the average height, average shoe size, average grades. Basically, Mary Lou seeks him out, takes advantage of him and makes him do her bidding. So, he spends most of the movie burying the bodies that she kills. She repays him with making him popular, changing his grades, and fucking his brains out numerous times. I forget to mention Alex has a girlfriend already so he’s a real gentleman! Now he has to fight his way away from Mary Lou before she kills everyone he loves and takes him to hell with her.
The acting, is surprisingly not horrible. I was shocked for as dumb as the dialogue and story is, the acting is average. Alex is played by Tom Conlon, he really is just average looking and didn’t have much of a career outside of this movie it seems. Courtney Taylor plays Mary Lou, she’s kind of got a Tiffany Amber Theisen thing going, she’s hot but she’s not as good as Lisa Schrage was in part 2. She has some wise cracks that will make you roll your eyes but her delivery is kind of one dimensional. Cynthia Preston plays Sarah, Alex’s girlfriend. She’s really likable and has that girl next door feel. She has had a good career in movies and TV alike. The last character to even somewhat mention is Alex’s best friend Shane he’s played by David Stratton and looks to be at least 30 playing a high schooler. Not much to say about him.
Since this is a horror/comedy, the kills are all for laughs, but some are kind of gory. Mary Lou kills the science teacher and makes him into a banana split, which is hilarious. She kills the guidance counselour by throwing battery acid on her. A guy is killed with a mixer. Mary Lou throws a football that turns into a drill and buries into a guy’s chest, that one was so lame it made me cringe. She tells Shane that he has a beautiful heart and asks if he wants to see it, then rips it out haha. The nerdy guy who has everything on a schedule gets hung from audio tape? Mary Lou says “10 o’clock: DIE!” It is not quite clear and is done off camera. She punches through Sarah towards the end, and it was kind of anti-climactic if we are being honest. Along with the kills we get numerous sex scenes with no nudity. If it wasn’t for the gore and the occasional swearing, this would have been PG 13. Always makes me laugh when you have sex scenes without nudity, makes you think whats the point?
All the camera work is pretty decent. We get some cool shots throughout the film. One that stands out to me is the shot within Alex’s locker, it has been done before but it kind of caught me off guard in a movie this corny. There are scenes of Mary Lou chasing someone and you get this odd spinning camera shot, it is shown a few times. I don’t mean the technique is shown a few times; I mean the same damn shot is shown a few times. When Alex and Sarah get taken into the underworld it has a cool atmosphere where it is similar to the real world but with subtle uncomfortable changes. I was happy they didn’t go with the cliché fire and red lighting for all the “hell” scenes. Instead we get a bleakly lit kind of cold feeling to those.
There are a lot of odd things I noticed during the movie that are never really explained. The aforementioned locker shot shows Alex grabbing a phone from within his locker and talking to his parents. He tells them he’s at Shane’s house. Why? You’re at school dude! Maybe he said he was at Shane’s last night? Idk but don’t you think they would’ve looked for him before the next morning? Also, why would they call his phone in his locker? Better question: WHY IN THE HELL DOES HE HAVE A FUCKING PHONE IN HIS LOCKER?! Alex is shown playing football numerous times. The first time is in practice where no one on the team has the same uniform. I understand its practice and practice jerseys are really trivial, but they all have different pants and helmets lol. When they play a game, they all have matching uniforms so I guess they have practice helmets? Who knows? I mean this was shot in Canada; I’m surprised this isn’t hockey. The football field is just a plan grass field. No stands, the grass is tall and there are no lines on the field. Repeat NO LINES ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD! How can you play football, in an organized high school league, and not have lines on the field?! A later scene shows Mary Lou in the home EC room and she offers Alex some pie and he yells “I don’t want any friggin’ pie!” I’m not sure why but that made me laugh my ass off it was so bad. Sarah has a catchphrase in the movie that is really kinda dumb “I don’t get mad, I bake!” She drops that line numerous times and each time I’m like “what?” We get a lot of early CGI in this movie and its all laughably bad. Mary Lou gets blown up and its so fake that you have to laugh. I mentioned this movie was made in Canada and man you can tell in some spots. I feel like the only thing I’ve seen that is more Canadian is Degrassi (Junior) High. If you’re not satisfied with the quality of this movie, then I’m “sorrey”.
Was this movie good? No, no it wasn’t. Was it a “shit load of fuck?” No, no it wasn’t. Will I ever watch this movie again? Probably not. It is so odd, it isn’t creepy enough to be a true horror movie and it isn’t funny enough to be a comedy, it lies somewhere in between in the awkwardness that it truly is. Part II and Part IV both are better than this movie, and Part IV is flawed at best. By the time Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil came out, it was already outdated by like 5 years. It is so incredibly 80s but came out in 1992. Part III isn’t bad enough to be enjoyable and not good enough to be memorable. If anything, it suffers from this and is forgettable within the series. Maybe someday I’ll get around to reviewing Part IV and hell maybe the first one (which I find a little overrated) and finish the series. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss gets a solid D from me. If it was worse, I’d probably like it more, but it doesn’t get that so bad its good vibe that Part 2 does. Oh and lets briefly talk about the subtitle: The Last Kiss. You would think the song “Last Kiss” by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers aka the saddest song ever would play in this movie….it does not.
