Prom Night (1980) had hardly been the best of that first crop of slasher films, despite the always welcome presence of Halloween (1978)’s Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role, but its name had enough cachet still in 1987 for distributors Norstar Releasing to take an entirely unrelated Canadian film, Bruce Pittman’s The Haunting of Hamilton High (the fact that the eponymous school shared its name with the high school in Prom Night was entirely coincidental) and try to pass it off as a sequel. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II would be the first in a series of spin-offs: Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1989) is a more-or-less direct sequel (though it’s more a spoof of what had gone before than a serious follow-up), though Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1991) only pays lip service to the earlier films.

Ron Oliver’s script is a variation on the already well-work “sins of the past” story that was a staple for 80s slashers. We start in 1957 (three years before Johnny Duncan recorded the first version of Gene Pitney’s song Hello Mary Lou) when 17-year-old Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) confesses to various sins to a priest before heading for her senior prom, where she cheats on her hapless boyfriend, Billy Nordham (Steve Atkinson). When Mary Lou is crowned prom queen, Billy tries to get his revenge by dropping a stink bomb onto the stage, but the fuse ignites Mary Lou’s dress, and she’s burned alive. Thirty years later, Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon) is preparing for her own prom and, searching for a dress after her religious mother (Judy Mahbey) refuses to buy her one, finds Mary Lou’s in an old trunk – and when she takes it, she unwittingly frees Mary Lou’s vengeful spirit. Various students are murdered in odd and gory ways while Vicki begins to suffer strange and unsettling hallucinations. She confides in Father Buddy Cooper (Richard Monette), who was the boy that Mary Lou cheated with in 1957, and he believes that she’s back from the dead looking for pay back. To complicate matters, Billy (Michael Ironside) is now the principal of Hamilton High and the father of Vicki’s boyfriend Craig (Justin Louis). As Vicki becomes increasingly rebellious and starts wearing 50s clothes, the bodies continue piling up until Mary Lou emerges from Vicki’s body on the prom night and chaos reigns…

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II shamelessly steals from/pays homage to, depending on how generous you’re feeling, any number of earlier films – The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), Alien (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (the final shot here is lifted almost verbatim from Craven’s film), Demoni/Demons (1985)… almost everything in fact, except Prom Night. And ignoring the 1980s film was a canny move as this is that rarest of beasts, a “sequel” (albeit one in name only) that far surpasses its predecessor. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek throughout, playfully mixing and matching assorted genre commonplaces while poking gentle fun at them. Oliver can’t quite resist the temptation to namecheck cult directors via character names (there’s a Carpenter family, and solo Henenlotters, Cravens, Dantes, Woods, Waters, Brownings and O’Bannons) but for the most part, the spoofing is well done and Oliver’s dialogue captures some of the snarkiness of 80s teen comedies better than most (“she looks like she’s in a fashion coma”).

Pittman handles the humour well but knows a thing or two about suspense and horror set-pieces. He stirs in some creepy and effective hallucination scenes (there’s an odd bit of business with a possessed rocking horse) and the moment when Vicki is dragged into a classroom blackboard is a minor classic of its kind. Sadly, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II would be Pittman’s only horror film, though he did a more than creditable adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron for Showtime in 1995. The only time he really sets a foot wrong here is hardly his fault – in the climactic scenes at the prom, the appearance of the Mary Lou monster (played by Loretta Bailey) is somewhat spoiled by a very obvious and ill-fitting mask in some scenes. Mary Lou herself would become a very minor franchise monster, turning up again in The Last Kiss though she wasn’t required for the final film in the series. Which is a shame as female horror monsters were a rarity in the 80s and Mary Lou is a spectacularly nasty piece of work who should have had a few more outings.

Where films that just lift all their best stuff from other, better movies are often irritating, the fact that Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II makes no bones about its shameless recycling makes it rather endearing. It’s all done in a spirit of fun and affection, in some respects doing what Wes Craven would do in Scream (1996) but doing it several years earlier. It’s by far and away the best in the franchise and a fun slasher in it its own right. It’s a shame that they didn’t just go with the original title – yoking it to the Prom Night title might have given it some small amount of “brand recognition” (though did people really care that much about Prom Night in 1980 let alone 1987?), but The Haunting of Hamilton High was a good enough film to stand on its own two legs without being forced into a somewhat odd and mismatched franchise. Wild, not a little silly and surprisingly inventive, it’s a fun ride that deserves a better reputation that it seems to have.