Late Night Classics – Prom Night III: The Last Kiss

Prom Night sucks! The 1980 slasher film has a cult following in the horror community and I am not sure why. I realize that having Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie at the height of her ‘Scream Queen’ status gets boner points from spank-happy fanboys everywhere, but other than that and the casting of Frank Drebin himself, Leslie Nielsen, this is a weak-in-the-knees flick that is so heavy on disco I thought Barry Gibb was going pop up in a white jumpsuit and say, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”

Three sequels and a remake later, I have to say that my favorites of the series are Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and Prom Night III: The Last Kiss. Neither of them have anything to do with the anemic original, and both of them took the supernatural highway and went for a more Carrie-esque approach to the hell known as high school.

Frankenhooker, Brain Damage, and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday all display the visual magic and eye candy from a master of his craft, Al Magliochetti. Al is a straight shooter and doesn’t sugar coat a thing; as you will see in our candid conversation that covers his beginnings, his partnership with Frank Henenlotter, and his involvement on Prom Night III: The Last Kiss.

Jason Bene: How did you become a visual effect supervisor?

Al Magliochetti: I went to school with a cinema major. It was my goal to become a filmmaker. I always had an affinity towards different kinds of effects, both make-up and physical. It occured to me that if I were to put some of these elements in my own class films, mine would look a little cooler than anybody else’s. That just gradually got me more interested in actually doing it.

Jason Bene: What was the first feature film that you did visual effects on?

Al Magliochetti: The first feature film was Spookies. God help me.

Jason Bene: We will leave it at that.

Al Magliochetti: We can talk about it if you like.

Jason Bene: [Laughs] We’ll do Spookies another time.

Jason Bene: How did that lead you to working with Frank Henenlotter on Brain Damage and Frankenhooker?

Al Magliochetti: There was an article in Fangoria about the censorship of Basket Case and I felt bad for the guy, so I looked him up in the phone book and I called him out of the blue. Basically, I was leaving a message and Frank picked up the phone and we wound up talking for an hour and a half. Somehow or another I wound up getting a 16mm copy of my short film Dance Macabre, which was a visual effects opus that I did as a film student. I got him a copy and I didn’t hear anything for quite some time. One day months later, Frank’s producer [Edgar Levins] called me and set up a meeting with me to come to New York and talk about doing a film with them. It was a film that was never actually completed called Weird Shit, also known as Insect City. It was about weird cockroach infestations. At the time, Frank didn’t know Gabe [Bartalos], so I was involved in some of the concept stuff. I built a three-foot cockroach. I sculpted it and sent them photographs, but I never casted or molded it. That project wound up going to the sidelines. Frank wrote a script called Elmer the Parasite and I was called in for a meeting while I was working on Spookies. I was working in New York on Spookies and then I jumped on a train and took it in to Manhattan and came back with the script. By the time I got back I had read most of it and I literally threw it at Gabe Bartalos and said, “You have to read this, I have to introduce you to this guy.” That’s how Gabe got involved.

Jason Bene: Your optical effects have a distinct look to them. Is that something you created on your own or was that something you worked with someone else on?

Al Magliochetti: I created them on my own, but I can’t entirely take credit for it. I studied the work of others, primarily, Pete Kuran at VCE, who did a lot of low budget films and put a lot of extra sparkle and energy in them with very simple animated effects. Pete helpmed me out with Brain Damage quite a bit.

Jason Bene: Just from the Prom Night III: The Last Kiss trailer, you can see your work vividly because it has a signature look to it. How did you get hired to do the effects for the film?

Al Magliochetti: I had done some work at a visual effects place in Canada called ‘Light and Motion’. I was originally brought up there to work on a kids television showed My Secret Identity with Jerry O’Connell. At the time they were doing a movie called Millennium with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd and that was kind of a big effects deal. I had motion controlled tracks and models and all kinds of stuff going on. They didn’t want to deal with this crummy little television show, so I wound up doing a fair amount on it. I wound up leapfrogging over to the War of the Worlds television series at the same time for the same reason.

Those series ended and I came back to the States and I got Frankenhooker. By that time ‘Light and Motion’ was in financial trouble, so I had a forty thousand dollar budget to do twenty-two visual effects shots. That wasn’t a whole lot of money at the time. Back then these things went for a minimum of five thousand dollars apiece. I wound up striking a deal with the guys at ‘Light and Motion’ that they just give me support personnel. It was a union shot film, so I needed someone to run the camera and the optical printer because I was physically not allowed to do it. I didn’t know how to run an optical printer anyway. They had to give me paper and drawing supplies and stuff like that. They didn’t really know that I could be a one-man band. They thought they were going to sucker me in and then they were going to hit me with all of these extra charges. They were kind of amazed to see that I was flying through all of this stuff without help from anybody. They came up to me and said, “Why didn’t you tell us you could do this on Millennium?” I said, “I tried to, you didn’t let me.” They thought I was some dumb little guy doing a television show up there and I offered to help and they said, “Get lost kid.”

They were in talks to do Prom Night III at the time with Norstar Entertainment. One of the producers was Ray Sager, who was also The Wizard of Gore in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ movie of the same name. I was kind of intrigued about meeting him since I knew that movie pretty well. The supervising producer was a big fat slob named Peter Simpson, who has got to be one of the nastiest producers I’ve ever met in my life. He was totally uncouthe and totally uncivilized. He was just this thug. I didn’t really want have anything to do with the job. They were trying to get me to advise them on what could be done and how to keep things cost effective. I turned to the guy and said, “My responsibility is to Frankenhooker. They are paying me to be here. I don’t want to get side-tracked.” I was in the middle of shooting time-lapse clouds for the storm sequence in Frankenhooker where we had a camera up on the roof. They called me down to a meeting and said, “We gotta go across town to this Prom Night III thing and we want you to join us.” I refused because I was working late. They said, “It will only take twenty minutes.” It took more than a half hour just to even get there. My shoot for that day was scuddled. I went to this meeting and I advised them the best I could. They had a lot of stuff. None of it was particularly complicated if it was thought out properly, but that seemed to be the problem with that film. The director had a pretty good vision of what he wanted to do, but everybody else was just running around crazy and not getting it.

Jason Bene: Producer Peter Simpson is credited as a co-director. Was there friction between him and the director?

Al Magliochetti: Well, he was throwing his mighty weight around. Ron [Oliver] did do the bulk of the directing. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes with that, but on-set Ron was primarily the director.

Jason Bene: How much time do you spend on the set and where was it shot at?

Al Magliochetti: I was on the set everyday for the most part. The bulk of it was shot in the facility where they shot the Police Academy movies. I believe it was originally some kind of asylum or something like that. They used it as the police academy itself and here we are years later using it for Prom Night III.

Jason Bene: Since you spent a lot of time on the set you probably ran into Courtney Taylor [Mary Lou] a few times.

Al Magliochetti: Courtney was wonderful. She was very professional. She was a very nice person. She seemed like she was a little embarassed by the low cut dress they tricked her out in. She was a very sweet kind of person. In fact, one of my uglier memories of Peter Simpson was one day they had her covered with blood that was all over her face dripping down into her cleavage. Peter Simpson looked down then looked up and said, “Gives a whole new meaning to her tits are hanging out.” He laughed and then walked away. The poor girl got tears in her eyes. I felt so bad for her. I don’t know what happened to her. After the movie I moved back to the States. I really didn’t keep in touch with anybody on that thing.

Jason Bene: Did you make a point to be on-set when she did the more naughtier scenes?

Al Magliochetti: I was there whenever there was a visual effects stuff to do. What the actors are garbed in doesn’t really matter to me. I’m not there for a peepshow. I had a bigger crush on the other girl, Cyndy Preston.

Jason Bene: Do you have any stories that you can tell?

Al Magliochetti: She had a boyfriend at the time and it was extremely unrequited on my part. She didn’t return any affection at all. It was just one of those things where she was being worked to death and she literally collapsed on me one night and I fell for her like a ton of bricks. She was in another horror movie called Pin. You should check it out. Cyndy’s problem was she had gotten totally busted up in a car accident. Almost every bone in her body was broken. She was still very, very frail. It happened between Pin and Prom Night III. She had been out of the body cast for six months. She was still very skittish. That girl was drop dead gorgeous.

Jason Bene: You were the young, naive Magliochetti back then.

Al Magliochetti: Back before I knew how actress’ could be quirky.

Jason Bene: A lot of the visual effects you did were pink. Why was that color chosen?

Al Magliochetti: It was supposed to be purple. Purple was Mary Lou’s color. When you put a purple gel into the animation it doesn’t read very well, so I pumped a little more light into it and it basically came out a little more pink. Ron Oliver was very clear that purple was her signature color.

Jason Bene: Did you work on the flamethrower at the end of the movie?

Al Magliochetti: We got some pyro guys in there who were fireman by day and pyro guys for movies by night. They rigged up some kind of fire extinguisher to shoot a stream of gasoline. We shot that against black and composited it in. It looks a little funky to me. My supervisor at ‘Light and Motion’ was a cinematographer and he actually took charge of shooting that effect and he did it kind of incorrectly. It was extremely underexposed and the shutter was run at the wrong angle, so basically it cut down the amount of light and made the flame look very choppy looking. That was not the way to go in my opinion. I’m not sure why that decision was made or if he was even aware of it. The camera may have been set incorrectly and he didn’t know, I’m not sure.

Jason Bene: Mary Lou gets a propane cylinder put down her top and she explodes. The explosion looks exactly the same as the pyrotechnic title reveal in the trailer for Frankenhooker.

Al Magliochetti: They had this weird idea that if they had a hose coming off the propane cylinder and it was lit it would burn like a fuse and that would cause the bottle to explode. It makes no sense in any universe whatsoever, but that’s what we had to go with. That was how it was written. The guys at the model shop built me a hollow propane bottle that we stuffed full of batteries. We put a high intensity light at the very tip of it which would allow me to track it and put a lens flare on it so I could put a flicker for sparks. The explosion wasn’t up to me.

Jason Bene: Is there one effects shot that you look back on that you are proud of because you were working on a low budget film.

Al Magliochetti: I remember the door blowing off the hinge was kind of a big deal at the time.

Jason Bene: That is where it blows off and the pink colors shine through the door.

Al Magliochetti: Part of it was the biproduct of it being transferred to video. It had a lot more of a purple look on film, but when you go to video you lose a little of the color balance.

Jason Bene: Have you ever watched the whole film?

Al Magliochetti: I’ve seen it a few times. I even have it on DVD. God knows why.

Jason Bene: Do you have it on the double feature with Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil?

Al Magliochetti: I think I have it on Laderdisc. Maybe I was just trying to buy up all of the copies so nobody else could get them.

Jason Bene: It is still better than the original Prom Night. It’s a bad disco slasher film with no blood.

Al Magliochetti: At the time, Canada was kind of new to the film business when the first Prom Night was made. They basically had an attitude of just copying whatever the Americans did and thought they could do it just as well. Maybe that’s changed a little bit now. It was definitely not true at the time. Some things just came off way too lame. My Bloody Valentine was another good example of that.

Jason Bene: Canadian horror was big in the early 80′s. I enjoyed the two Prom Night sequels where things became supernatural. It’s almost like Prom Night doesn’t exist when it comes to these sequels.

Al Magliochetti: As you know, Prom Night II wasn’t even a Prom Night movie, it was called The Haunting of Hamilton High. The distributors just slapped the Prom Night label on it in hopes of making money off of it making it look like a sequel. They were completely unrelated movies, whereas II and II were obviously tied together because of the character of Mary Lou. Prom Night was more of a serious horror movie, whereas The Haunting of Hamilton High and The Last Kiss were a little more goofy. They had a little more fun in them.

Jason Bene: I like those kind of flicks. I realize that they might be categorized as moron movies. They had fun where now horror films are too serious.

Al Magliochetti: In Prom Night II, Ron Oliver named most of the characters after horror directors, which pissed of Frank Henenlotter to no end because the character [Kelly Henenlotter] he was named after wound up giving a blowjob to be the prom queen. Frank was raving, “Oh, great, I get to be the cocksucker!”

Jason Bene: In the closing credits of Prom Night III your name is not credited in the special effects department, but it says they were done by ‘Light and Motion’. Do you want to talk about why you are uncredited?

Al Magliochetti: I volunteered that. I did have a few people helping me with that movie and we all decided collectively that because we were being pushed around a little bit by the production, that we didn’t want our names on it because it did not represent our best work. It was a very weird attitude. Again, primarily because of the main producer [Peter Simpson] was in a big rush for everything. They had to have it immediately, but then they saw no problem with picking it apart just to do it again no matter how perfectly it was or how closely it matched what they asked for in the first place. There is a bit where Mary Lou is walking down the stairs and she has these long nails that come slicing out of her gloves. There was a thread one of the fingers. It was not that big of a deal, it was just a thread. That producer had a fit and had us jumping through all kinds of hoops to try and take care of this thing and erase it optically. Digitally it would have not been a big deal. Optically it was almost impossible because it was just a tiny thread. It was impossible to even see it through an optical printer, let alone, get rid of it.

The weird part was one day over the fax machine when a notice came through that basically threatened ‘Light and Motion’ as being responsible for the entire budget of the movie if we did not deliver the effects on time. How are we supposed to deliver it on time if you are not accepting any of it? It seemed like they were trying to railroad the company into a very bad position, so I wound up taking a little of the initiative and I called everybody in for a meeting. I put all of the storyboards on the wall and on every single one of them I put a price tag. I went through them and I said, “Here’s what you asked for and here’s what we gave you. As far as we’re concerned, these things aren’t acceptible. If these are not acceptable from this point on, this one is going to have a five hundred dollar revision change. This one is going to have a one thousand dollar revision change. You’re changing things in midstream, then we have to charge for it, it’s that simple.” After that, guess what? A lot of the shots were just fine. It was things like when Mary Lou was on the football field and she stomps her foot and she vanishes. The script said something like, “Mary Lou glows and vanishes.” I did the animation and we put the shot together and I showed it to them and Ron Oliver said, “She is supposed to be pissed off. Can you have her a pissed off glow?” I wound up running it through a ripple glass and just putting a little shimmer in it. We had an editor who thought he was running the movie. We visual effects people run into this from time to time.

For some reason, editors think they are the only ones who know how to make a movie and in their minds become the director, writer, and producer. We had a guy like that on this named Nick Rotundo. Nick would call me up asking for all of these things that were never part of any contract. They were never discussed. He would assure me that this is what the director wanted. I would implement the changes and turn these things in and the director would have a fit asking why I wasn’t following his instructions. This got to be old after a while. At one point he was asking for a really bizarre change. It was kind of complicated and I asked him to make up a workprint for me to show me exactly what he meant. Before everything was done with hands-on film, what you could do is take part of your workprint and send it to the lab and have a black and white or color copy of it. What he was asking for was so outlandish I said, “Why don’t you make the workprint and write exactly what you want on it and I’ll follow it righ to the frame? Ron Oliver came in when the shot was ready and hit the ceiling and started yelling at me for being an incompetent idiot. I pulled the roll of black and white film off of the shelf. I rolled it down to the section where I was given very specific instructions and I pointed to what was written in the editor’s handwriting on that film. I said, “What does that say?” Ron looks at it and his tone completely changed and he said, “He lied to me, that fucking asshole lied to me! When I get through with him he’s not going to be allowed to cut meat.” The editor was kind of a lunatic. There was one shot in the film that was ruined because the director put the wrong indicator marks on the workprint. There is a sex scene with Alex and Mary Lou on a table and the camera is looking straight down on them and the camera is spinning. This was supposed to be a long, slow dissolve between him having sex with Mary Lou then dissolving to him in a very similar angle shoveling dirt into the grave, which was placed exactly the same place as the table in the previous shot. The editor wound up putting the wrong indicator marks on the workprint, so rather than a dissolve, the negative was cut in the middle of the shot and there was no way it could be repaired after that.

Jason Bene: Did you realize the Artisan DVD is a ‘television version’. It has missing gore and nudity. I made a point to track down an the uncut version.

Al Magliochetti: Is the Laserdisc edited?

Jason Bene: I am not sure. Do you have anything else to say about Prom Night III?

Al Magliochetti: I wasn’t able to work on the Back to the Future ride because of it. I was invited to work at Douglas Trumbull’s effects place in Massachusetts to do the Back to the Future ride, which Gabe Bartalos and a few other friends of mine were working on. Because I was stuck doing Prom Night III I was not able to get on that. I wound up getting home and they still owed me several thousand dollars to do the work and I never got the check. I called ‘Light and Motion’ to find out when I would receive this money, which I desperately needed. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Canada that long. They said, “Sorry, we filed for bankruptcy the other day.”

Jason Bene: Are you saying that you haven’t received a single penny from that movie?

Al Magliochetti: I was paid while I was I was working on it, but the big chunk of money was supposed to hit me on the back end. No, I never got it. The owner of the company had the balls to call me up a year or so later to work on another movie after his company had folded. I said, “You still owe me thousands of dollars.” He said, “I don’t owe you that money, the company owes you that money.”

Al Magliochetti has been a good friend and supporter of Killer Film for some time and he has been gracious enough to let us show you his collection of never-before-seen photos from the set of Prom Night III: The Last Kiss!