Movies
Kill of the Week: Human Ice Cream Sundae in ‘Prom Night 3’
Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
Just three years after the release of Prom Night 2, Mary Lou Maloney was brought back from the grave for 1990’s Prom Night 3: The Last Kiss. Actress Courtney Taylor took over the role for the franchise’s third installment, centered on the spirit of Mary Lou’s quest to win over the heart of a hunky high school student.
Anyone who gets in the way of that, well, they don’t live much longer.
Like the previous film, Prom Night 3 took more than a few things from the Nightmare on Elm Street playbook, doubling down on the surreal kills in a way that was completely nonsensical and totally absurd. The camp factor is high in this one, and the death scenes are nothing if not interesting conversation pieces.
In one scene, a football tossed by Mary Lou turns into a deadly drill in midair, pinning an unlucky student to the goal post. But perhaps the most ridiculous death in Prom Night 3 is the murder of the high school’s science teacher, who is first impaled through the hands by a pair of ice cream cones. Like, almost literally crucified… by ice cream.
Later, we see that Mary Lou has literally turned his corpse into a banana split.
Hey, you have to applaud the bonkers creativity, right?!
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
You must be logged in to post a comment.