Prom Night

It looks promising: a sincere Halloween rip-off which takes time out to milk Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, and all those B feature 'lust and rivalry' high school sagas. The masked axeman terror here coincides with the anniversary of the death of a small girl, caused accidentally by four older kids who swear to keep their guilty secret. Corny, but not enough for Lynch, who also throws in the escape of a homicidal maniac wrongly imprisoned for the child's murder, and a confusion of red herring conflicts which mark the plot as a poor imitation of John Carpenter's patient terrorism of good by evil. But if you forget motivation, the visual trick-or-treat of slow revenge is entertaining enough: a weirdo janitor dribbling at the window; the victim's year book photos pinned with shards of shattered mirror. Jamie Lee Curtis is superb as Miss Naturally Popular and Prom Queen-to-be, isolated in empty high school corridors: if you like your psychologising loose and edited to that unstoppable disco beat, it's a night out, just.