On DVD: Prom Night -- Is This a Commentary Track or a Drinking Game?

Not every actor hits. I don't need to tell you that. It's pretty much a fact of life. But more importantly, not every very talented actor handed a break on a silver platter hits. Some actors hear opportunity knocking, jump at the chance, give it their all and deliver an outstanding performance only to never make it like you know they should. Some give up. Some fall into a spiral of substance abuse. And a few keep plugging away. Now most of those that stick around end up on TV or sleepwalking their way through craptastic movie after craptastic movie, doing just well enough to make a paycheck -- because hey, it's better than a day job.

And then there are guys like Johnathon Schaech. The guys who never give up. Oh sure, they still show up in crap, but they never just appear. They put their all into it as if this were the role they're going to be remembered for. I don't know why Schaech never hit. You most likely know him as the brooding artist kid from That Thing You Do. Most people do.

When I met him several years back, more than a dozen people approached him while we talked, all of them saying the same thing. "I loved you in That Thing You Do!" He always smiled and thanked them and shook their hands, but if you looked closely, you could see lurking just behind his eyes the contempt for the fact that no one knew an ounce of his other work. It wasn't mean-spirited, just more of a hidden disappointment that the dozen or so films he'd done since just never seemed to make their way into the conversation. And it is clear that those feelings have driven him to continue along in his career, always putting in a hell of a lot more effort than the projects sometimes deserve.

Projects like Prom Night. Now, I'm not going to break down Prom Night for you in my usual manner. There's really no need to. This is crap. They stripped what little was cool away from the original and just kept the name and the concept of having a killer at the prom. It is what it is: a PG-13 horror movie meant to scare 14-year-old girls who haven't seen these films 1,000 times already while presenting a strong anti-sex allegory. Nothing more. Anyone over the age of 17 is bound to be bored to tears watching this drek. Unless you watch it for Schaech.

Schaech plays the killer and they expend absolutely no energy trying to hide that fact. The movie actually feels more like a sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer than it does a Prom Night remake. They show you he's the killer in the opening of the film and then give you this lame escaped mental patient angle to his story.

So there's zero mystery. It's all about a killer killing in very unimaginative ways. But every moment he is on screen he is creepy as hell, a beast of pure menace who doesn't just stab people with knives, he thrusts with an unpleasant desire not to be mentioned in mixed company. He is exactly the type of guy your daughters should be scared to death of. And every moment he is on the screen the movie has something going for it. Sadly, the movie is about Brittany Snow.

Prom Night, the "Unrated" version, is available now from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. As a DVD package this thing is laughable. Not "bare bones." Laughable. For starters, there's an "alternate ending." I know this because the sticker on the front of the box says so in big letters. So what's the big twist? How did they change the movie? Well, rather than having the camera track off of Brittany and out the window into a beautiful final tracking shot ... it freeze-frames and has a quick, creepy flashback voice-over. The ending doesn't change; the story doesn't change. The big alternate ending is a freeze-frame. Nice.

There's a gag reel with nothing too terribly amusing, a mess of deleted scenes which expand two story lines that still don't make much sense except to fill time and make this feature length, along with a few common, garden-variety making-of videos.

But it's not all for naught. Because there is a commentary track. Now, while the commentary track isn't all that worthwhile, you can make a potentially interesting drinking game out of it with friends -- just make sure to take a drink every time Brittany Snow says "like" or "Oh my gosh!" It's actually not so much a commentary track; it's more like watching the movie with someone's little sister. I won't tell you how many times she utters these words, but I will recommend that no one drives home after.

But then again, this movie wasn't made for us. It was made to make teen girls squeal. And it might do just that.

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