When is a remake not a remake?

It would be unfair to compare blonde-du-jour Brittany Snow's wooden performance as the target of a psychostalker in the painfully predictable and clunky Prom Night with Jamie Lee Curtis's iconic screaming in the 1980 Canadian slasher classic of the same name.

For starters, all these films share is a title and a lot of teenagers getting down with their bad selves on the dance floor on the most important night of their lives, while a killer picks them off like ungulates in the video game Deer Hunter.

The plot is entirely different, and -- in one of about a dozen major doofus flaws that could have been fixed in the script stage -- our heroine doesn't even know she's emperiled through most of the movie. In fact, nobody does, except the most inept police force on the planet, led by Det. Winn (Idris Elba, who went from American Gangster to this). When practically nobody on the screen is scared, it tends to understate the terror of the experience (the movie doesn't even have a sense of humour to offset its lack of tension).

So, acting assignment-wise, Snow (Hairspray) is not exactly playing on a level playing field with '70s scream-queen Curtis. Not that she gives much indication she could scream her way out of a paper bag.

The plot, dictated to us in clumsy expositional dialogue by Det. Winn, involves the escape from a mental home of Richard Fenton (Jonathon Schaech), a former high school teacher who, three years earlier, literally went nuts over one of his students, Donna (Snow), killing her family to win her over.

It takes three days for the local cops to find out Fenton is free. He has killed a guy and stolen his car and Visa. Still, even though the victim has been reported missing, his card isn't flagged when our psycho-killer checks into the same hotel where Donna and her friends Claire (Jessica Stroup) and Lisa (Dana Davis) and their dates are enjoying the most important night of their lives.

Naturally they've booked a suite where they can break away from the dance and drink/fool-around. And naturally, the apparently now-unrecognizable Fenton is checking in just as the girls' third floor keys are handed out. And naturally, the clerk asks Fenton a question I've never been asked in about a thousand hotel check-ins: "Do you have a preference which floor your room is on?"

But then Fenton is not your ordinary killer. He's able to stab someone to death on a bed, and within minutes (seconds in one case) hide the body and leave not a trace of blood on the bed or anywhere else.

Much of Prom Night thus consists of Fenton waiting in the suite for the next misbehaving teenager to come along, the better to bide his time for the big move on Donna. Now if you've had three years to plan, it might occur to you that every time you kill someone inconsequential, you put yourself at risk of getting caught before you've accomplished your mission.

But then, he does have the advantage of matching wits with the DUH-PD, who eventually spirit our heroine -- not to a safe house -- but the one place she'd be most likely have to face her wannabe killer in a ridiculous climax.

Even for the low expectations of this genre, Prom Night is gob-smackingly stupid.
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