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Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is a 1987 Canadian slasher film directed by Bruce Pittman, and starring Michael Ironside. If that isn’t enough enticement to make you wanna watch, we don’t know what is. Frankly, Michael Ironside is a genre icon. C’mon, look at this resume, people: Scanners, Visiting Hours, Total Recall, Starship Troopers…
He plays Billy, a 60s teen with an impossibly receding hairline, who’s gettin’ down to Little Richard at the prom. After being rebuffed by the queen, one Mary Lou (from whose name the movie title derives) he angrily lobs a stink bomb toward her as she’s accepting her crown in front of adoring masses. Unfortunately, things go haywire, the incendiary devices ignites a spark, the drapes catch fire, and so does Mary Lou.
Flash forward to the 80s, and Billy is now high school principal at ill-fated Hamilton High. And the spirit of Mary Lou, is haunting the halls, like bad Axe deodorant spray. Mary Lou’s trapped in a treasure chest, and emerges, to haunt those who did her wrong.
Prom Night II doesn’t have Jamie Lee Curtis or Leslie Nielsen (and hell, Robert A. Silverman too, he of Scanners, eXistenZ, The Brood), but what it does have is the same low-budget cheap-and-cheerful Canadiana (it’s filmed in Edmonton, Alberta, with some re-shoots in Toronto). There’s also some supernatural weirdness and sinister dreamscapes going on.
This is a much better film than we remember.
Jason Voorhees. The butcher of Camp Crystal Lake needs no introduction. Or does he? Perhaps to a new generation of audiences, who were unaware of the source material that is the original Friday the 13th movies.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (in mellifluous Italian: Non si sevizia un paperino) is a 1972 Italian giallo film directed by Lucio Fulci, starring Tomas Milian, Florinda Bolkan, and Barbara Bouchet. It is notable within Fulci’s filmography as it is one of the first in which he began using violent icky gore effects, something Fulci would continue to do in his later films, most notably Zombi 2, The Beyond and City of the Living Dead. The soundtrack was composed by Riz Ortolani and features vocals by Italian pop stylist Ornella Vanoni.