The original Prom Night is not that great. There were roughly a billion slasher movies that came out in the wake of Halloween, and Prom Night... sure was one of them. Jamie Lee Curtis disco dances and that is the most memorable part of it. Not a fan.
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II has nothing to do with Prom Night 1. The producers made this a Prom Night sequel at the last minute, a timeless marketing trick of horror films. I don't think it worked in Hello Mary Lou's case, however. This movie did not make a ton of money at the box office. And it remains obscure. That's totally unacceptable. Hello Mary Lou is fantastic. It is one of my favorite slasher movies of the Eighties. It is a blast and a half.
The concept is Carrie meets A Nightmare on Elm Street. In 1957, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is the most popular girl at Hamilton High School. She's the biggest - and proudest - slut in Canada. However, after an accident involving her boyfriend Billy and a stink bomb, she's set on fire at her prom and dies in horrible medieval ordeal. Thirty years later, the ghost of Mary Lou is back. She will be Prom Queen, no matter what.
Our heroine is Vicki (Wendy Lyon), a surprisingly popular girl despite dressing in very frumpy clothes. Her mom is a religious fanatic but Vicki has a social life. Her boyfriend Craig (Louis Ferreira) is the son of the principal, Billy, who is now all grown up and played by the great Michael Ironside. Vicki slowly loses contact with her circle of friends as she goes more and more crazy. She's having visions of Mary Lou, and then starts to become Mary Lou.
One of the downsides of Hello Mary Lou being so underrated is that this should have been the start of a great horror icon. Mary Lou Maloney should be up there with Freddie Kruger as a slasher superstar. She got one other movie in Prom Night III, then disappeared forever. We just do not have many female slasher figures, and that's a shame.
Mary Lou is just out for a good time and does not give a shit how she gets it. She'll bang another dude right in front of her boyfriend. Mary Lou opens the movie giving a confession to a priest that she's a dirty whore just to see the look on his face. Plus, she has seemingly unlimited supernatural powers and is pretty creative with her kills. Lisa Schrage is great in her few scenes and so is Wendy Lyon as possessed Vicki.
(Also, Wendy Lyon chose to walk around naked for like five minutes. There are very horror movies with that much nudism that I do not like.)
Hello Mary Lou is full of great supernatural horror moments. Vicki has this big white rocking horse in her room. It later comes alive with dark red eyes and sticks out its slimy foot-long tongue. There is simpler stuff like when a volleyball net turns into a spiderweb or when hands under a sheet grope a girl. One of the best special effects is when Vicki gets sucked into a blackboard while in a classroom. It is a really clever trick where they replace the blackboard with a swimming pool of dark water and film it from above. So Vicki is swimming around with the chalk letters floating as Mary Lou drags her under. I especially love the big Carrie climax where Mary Lou rips herself out of corpse to come back alive.
While I'm gushing about this movie, I need to tell you that Hello Mary Lou is fearless. This movie states definitively that there is no heaven, there's no God, but there is Mary Lou. The priest character is no help, Christianity loses very definitively to the power of this teenage ghost. Mary Lou murders a pregnant girl. There's an incest kiss! Hello Mary Lou goes for it, man. This is a really dark movie but it is constantly having fun with pushing its boundaries. Yeah, maybe it is bleak since nothing can stop Mary Lou. But Mary Lou is enjoying herself, you can't help but join her a bit.
The cast is great too. Even the ones who are just there to get murdered are pretty well-rounded. Terri (Kelly Hennelotter), Vicki's best friend, should be a nothing character but comes off strong and caring for her friend. She has a sweet romance plotline with a boy who is just slasher-bait himself. Too bad Terri gets crushed in a locker by naked Vicki, oh well.
There is nothing Hello Mary Lou does poorly. It is scary, it is fun, it is creative, I love it. Its only mistake was being a sequel to a better-known but far less impressive horror movie.
Next Time: The Mortuary Collection (2020), a brand new horror anthology on Shudder.
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