Take a good hard look at your own prom picture. (Go ahead and dig it out, I'll wait.) Does it already look tragically out of date? Do you appear to be having more fun than you really were? Or is there really still a spark there, a portrait of the glory of youth?

The original Prom Night is all of these things. And still, filmmakers keep hauling Prom Night back to its feet year after year. After three sequels and now a full-fledged remake, we can't help but feel a little silly as we watch the original, but it's familiar enough that we can't look away. John Carpenter had already thrown a coming-out party for Jamie Lee Curtis two years earlier with Halloween, making her casting as Kim Hammond a tad redundant. Yet without her warm liquid eyes, beautifully grave facial expressions -- and, yes, super-freaky disco dancing -- there would be no reason to care about this slash-by-numbers affair.

Alright, that's not entirely fair. The film's ten-minute opening is as memorably wicked and iconic as anything the '80s produced (though the opening credits beginning with two of the least scary words in any language-- "Leslie Nielson"-- provide the first of many unintended laughs). This scene, in which a cadre of children stalking each other in an abandoned school building get a little too wrapped up in their game, perfectly taps into the ravenous, mindless dread of pre-adolescence, and the fatality that results is delivered with a satisfying crunch that would make even Shirley Jackson wince. Would anyone would have ever sat through the rest of this film if director Paul Lynch hadn't knocked it out of the park in the intro?

Six years later, the creepy phone calls begin just as the surviving children are picking out corsages and unburdening themselves of their virginity -- a sign that the film, like its characters, will be all hormones and no brain. And once the prom itself gets rolling, your own brain becomes marinated in the tepid bathwater of a relentless disco soundtrack, underscoring even the climactic final battle between our heroine and the Masked Villain, giving it the nail-biting tension of a Benny Hill chase scene. I have to admit though, the sight of Jamie Lee Curtis swinging an axe will always makes me feel more warm and tingly inside than my actual memories of Prom, which is probably why I'm likely to stay home and rent Halloween: H20 instead of attending my own 10-year reunion.

Prom Night buds anew this weekend, whispering the same sweet promises and deadly threats. Be warned, kids: You may laugh now at the original's loopy Blue Bazar tunes, but a Britney and Timbaland soundtrack will age no better, and today's bumper crop of starlets will be tomorrow's Real Housewives -- although I suspect recklessly losing one's virginity will never go out of style.