Prom Dates

Best friends, Hannah (Julia Lester) and Jess (Antonia Gentry), made a pact at 13 to have a great prom with their dates. They are now high school seniors. Jess finds her boyfriend cheating. Hannah's boyfriend is too clingy and she comes out of the closet. The two best friends suddenly find themselves dateless just 24 hours before prom.

The girls are well into their twenties. That's my first impression and the lasting one. I can't ignore it every time they're on the screen. Most of these 'kids' are well into their twenties. Otherwise, this is a fine raunchy teen comedy. It has a lot of the familiar humor. A lot of it works well except these actors are too old. Maybe there are child labor laws involved. Still, they need actors who look like teenagers.

This is another recent raunchy teen comedy that deals with issues faced by the Lgbtq community from a sensitive progressive perspective without losing the edginess expected from the subgenre. And yet again it really nails it.

I'll get what little negative there is to say out of the way quickly. At one point in this it felt like they were running out of material though later stuff reveals they hadn't. Another time it feels like the season finale of a soap opera. And there are a few jokes that punch down.

I understand that some people really hate that this does not completely feel like it takes place in reality. The excellent Youtuber Stutterbox recently did a video on the movie Bottoms where he points out that it's not exactly how it happened that we're seeing, rather it's how it was retold to others.

This is hilarious from start to finish. I'm not sure if it had a bigger budget than Plan B and I can't check right now because my wrists are in too much pain or if it's just that this was able to spend it in a way that is more showy but definitely it has strong production value.

Some characters are broader than others but the acting is all solid. Nobody feels like they're in a different movie. It manages to cover a lot of issues faced by the target demographic especially considering that it's laser focused specifically on prom.

It doesn't shy away from potentially controversial subjects though I can imagine that at least some of them are handled with a tiny bit less care than would be ideal. Most of them I can't speak to but I would definitely say that I did not love the bits about learning disability. 8/10.

Prom Dates hit Hulu on May 3rd and is a nice buddy comedy to kick off the summer. The movie stars Julia Lester and Antonia Gentry as two best friends who have been dreaming of the perfect prom since they were 13 years old. As fate would have it, they find themselves 24 hours away from the big day dateless and willing to do anything and everything they need to have the prom of their dreams.

I would classify this as a very fun and hilarious buddy comedy. It is filled with over the top and sometimes gross jokes that mostly hit, and I overall enjoyed it. If you are looking for a classy movie that is a contender for any awards, I recommend looking elsewhere because that is not what this film delivers. However, if you are looking for a fun watch with lots of laughs, then Prom Dates may just be what you are looking for.

Jess (Antonia Gentry) and Hannah (Julia Lester) are two friend who many years ago made a blood pact to have the perfect prom and now, hours before the big night, they struggle in finding dates after breaking up with the ones they had.

Director Kim O. Nguyen has very little to offer in her first feature film other than a creativity-free zone. Prom Dates is a movie where its few redeemable aspects in no way make up for its many lacks. As a comedy it goes without saying it aims at humor, but alas, the "comedy" in the movie is nowhere to be found, on the contrary, it often had the opposite effect rendering the whole endeavor a humor-free zone. The characters are all unidimensional and unlikeable in every sense of the word, they go in their lives making uncalled sexual advances bordering abuse and when things do not go the way they want gratuitous violence is they preferred response. Like many teen comedies, its humor many times borders bad taste and manages to elicit anything but laughs. Hannah's proclivity towards vomiting is distasteful, to say the least. To aggravate things further, it has some musical numbers that will make you melancholic about the times when you had to at least try to sing well in order to sing a song. The song where Greg (Kenny Ridwan) proposes Hannah to be his prom date is terrible.

Sexuality is an explored concept in Prom Dates, but the many jokes at the expense of Hannah where a correlation is draw between clothe preferences and sexual orientation, as if being LGBTQIA+ equated certain dress code, is equally simplistic in its stereotyped belief as it is untasteful. As previously said, it has very few redeemable aspects. It is unfunny, badly written, with bad performances, lacking any profundity and plausibility, full of stereotypical characters, and promotes gender violence. It is terrible and definitely one of the worst movies of 2024.

I'm probably not the intended audience for a teen comedy, being a full-grown adult, but I watch them sometimes, because the teen comedies we had when I was a kid were not exactly inclusive. I found this movie funny, I think the lead characters were wonderful, the leads were convincing as best friends, beautifully supportive, and just silly enough to keep the film overall on the funny side, despite some heavier topics.

When I was the right age for this film, the only film with even some teenaged lgbtq+ characters was the film Heavenly Creatures. It was not a comedy, and it didn't have a happy ending. I wish this film, and some other lgbtq+ focused teen films had existed back then. You don't have to be queer to see the humour of this film, because most characters are straight, but it does add an element of "yeah, relatable" to this story. Also, yes, there's alcohol, drugs and all kinds of inappropriate things going on, but who cares, this is fiction, a comedy, and for once, it's from the girls' point of view.