Prom Queen
(Shout! Factory DVD Set/Webisode Serial)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: C
The
Internet… The Web… The media source of the future trying to find an identity as
if it should be like all previous media, yet surfing it makes having a
narrative output even more difficult than that of channel surfing a
television. Here and there, people have
tried to produce shorts and serialized stories, but none have worked very well
including Prom Queen. Made of 80+ of bytes of a story that never
adds up to much, it wants to show us inside the private lives of high school
teens. Too bad it is too self-impressed
and choppy to begin to achieve that.
It could
have been like a soap opera ala 90210,
but the ideas are so tired they never begin to be about anything. The cast makes sense in their casting, but we
never really get any character development, though the four directors (it took
four people to direct this?!?) are interested in some sexploitation and where
that happens in this bankrupt world, violence and potential torture porn
follows. Yawn!
A sequel
dubbed Summer Heat is sadly as
pedestrian and shows the group learned nothing from their mistakes in the first
place. The wind-up is another trip down
tired roads that will only look more dated as HD kicks in. Of course, you can have fun with smaller
spaces of narrative as TV commercials have proven since the 1950s, but that
would never occur to this age group whose sheer inexperience shows in every chapter. When all this was done, the Anthony
Head/Sharon Maughan Nescafe/Taster’s Choice series of TV coffee ads years ago
suddenly looked like an epic masterpiece!
The
letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image is soft in both cases, though the sequel series is
slightly less faint and aspect ratios can change (like 1.33 inside the middle
of the 1.78 frame) so don’t expect much in the way of composition. The Dolby Digital 2.0 sound is barely stereo
and yet, is the highlight of the set.
The sound is not certain if it should sound like location sound or
recorded sound and it shows. Extras
include select commentary on some of the shows, gag reel, new cast interviews
and video blogs.
- Nicholas Sheffo
