My grandmother was always quick to remind me, "If you ain’t got nothin’ nice to say, don’t fucking say it, and, for the last time, turn off that goddamn hose!" She also blamed the Jews for her chronic arthritis, and once mailed President Reagan what she thought to be severed head of the Yeti, but was later identified by the FBI as a stale Hostess Snowball.
Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, I’d like to think that my virulently anti-Semitic grandmother wasn’t entirely bereft of wisdom, so I’m going to refrain from lambasting producer Neal H. Moritz for having built up a massive, fifty-four title filmography that contains fewer than five watchable movies. Let’s instead pretend Moritz cares about making decent films and is determined to imbue his remake of Paul "Humongous" Lynch’s Prom Night with a soul, even though he’s brought on J.S. Cardone to script it. Indeed, let’s consider the fact that Moritz has hired television hack Nelson McCormick to put an ethnically diverse group of television actors like Brittany Snow, Dana Davis, Scott Porter and Collins Pennie through the paces, and know that he will come up with something far better than a Halloween-inspired knockoff best known for a grisly, strobe light illuminated decapitation.
Oh, who gives a shit? Prom Night was never any good to begin with, and is ripe for the remaking – though it’s hard to believe Moritz’s version will surpass the Canadian-produced original that launched the career of Jeff Wincott. But if Idris "Stringer Bell" Elba is going to take on the Leslie Nielsen investigator role from the original, I might just give it a spin on DVD at four in the morning while I’m trying to sleep through the ruckus of my Navy SEAL neighbors shooting at each other out of sheer boredom (some things you can’t make up).