2. Detective Winn - Prom Night
This is a remake/riff on the theme of the 1980 Jamie Lee Curtis movie. There's no storyline other than a psychotic killer on the loose murdering well-to-do teens at a high-school prom. Remember when horror movies were a chance to moralise? The punishment of the promiscuous, the smokers and the alcohol imbibers? In Prom Night it's the Limo hirers and the exclusive hotel suite reservers in designer threads who get slaughtered. It's enough to make you want to join the Occupy movement. Every cliché in the Fisher Price Book Of Horror Movies is trotted out. Brittany Snow's character goes to the bathroom, reaches into the medicine cabinet, closes its mirrored door and BOOM! Who's reflected? That funny little murderer fella. Lazily directed by Nelson McCormick, who helmed TV's Prison Break, there's neither invention nor tension. You could reverse the order of the murder victims and it would make absolutely no difference at all to the story. Amidst all this nonsense is Idris Elba as Detective Winn who's reduced to employing a very narrow lexicon of stock film cop phrases. "I've got a man down. I need back up over here NOW!" and "Goddammit! He walked right by me!" being the pick of a pretty bad bunch. It's terrible stuff. His role is such a stereotype even he can't bring anything to it. There's a scene in which the hotel concierge is pointing out on a sheet of paper where the hotel fire exits are. Detective Winn is anxious. Distracted. He's not even looking at the building schematic. He's too busy scanning the hotel lobby for signs of the homicidal maniac unleashing terror upon our privileged teenagers. I'm assuming he used a similar review process when he was offered the script for this. He must have had his mind on something else entirely when he accepted the job. The photograph above was taken at the precise moment he realised he wouldn't be able to activate the release clause on his contract.