From the Vault: Dance 'til Dawn
If you don't think prom is the greatest night of your life then you can screw right off!!
Graduation season is upon us, that time when young people must give up childish things and cross the threshold into adulthood. Cherish these days while you still can, teenagers, because it’s the best time of your life. It’s all mortgages and unsatisfying orgasms and boring jobs and crying toddlers after that.
I’m lying, of course. In no way should high school be the best years of your life. Enjoyable, sure. Tolerable, at the very least. But the very best? No. That’s sad. It’s what bitter middle-aged people say because they don’t think anyone under 30 has the right to complain about anything. Let me tell you something, young people reading this: if years from now, you can honestly look back and say that high school was the best time of your life, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere. If you’re 40 and regaling your bored kids for the tenth time with a story about planting a stink bomb in the vice-principal’s office, or if you still have your junior year wrestling trophy on display, it’s time to figure out at what point your life went off the rails. The proper time to give up reminiscing about high school is by the end of summer after you graduate.
Nevertheless, if you really believe that horseshit, then I have a treat for you: 1988′s Dance ‘til Dawn, one of the last in a run of teen-friendly TV movies with all-star casts (see also: High School U.S.A., Poison Ivy, Crash Course). Watered down John Hughes without the cynicism and sly humor (and with its own bald-ass ripoff of Yello’s “Oh Yeah”), it hits all the teen movie tropes with the speed and efficiency of a grandmother at Saturday night bingo championship.
Dance ‘til Dawn takes place during a senior prom in an unnamed, blandly middle-class American town, the kind of place where the preferred teen hangout is still the local diner. Prom is the most important night of a high schooler’s life, as various characters mention numerous times, and such a magical, monumental event that it impacts what sorority you’ll get into, and even where you’ll end up attending college.
There’s drama even before we make it to the big event: high school power couple Shelley and Kevin, the leading nominees for prom king and queen, are on the outs. Kevin (Brian Bloom), a mullet-sporting, gold chain-wearing, chest hair-exposing creep, keeps pushing Shelley (Alyssa Milano) to have sex with him when she’s not ready, and both of them lie about having other plans for prom night.
Dateless but undaunted, Kevin immediately sets about finding a replacement for Shelley. He doesn’t care who he takes to the prom, just as long as he gets some ack-shon by the end of the night. Going solely on the word of one of his idiot friends, who claims without evidence that she’s easy, he decides at the last minute to ask shy, nerdy art student Angela (Tracey Gold) to be his date.
Angela wears glasses, meaning she is, of course, a hideous gorgon.
Thankfully, for the sake of the audience’s emotional well-being, her foxy, glasses-free makeover takes place barely twenty minutes into the movie. Given that this was at least the second time that Tracey Gold, a lovely young actress, played a character who the audience is supposed to believe is unattractive, it’s no wonder she developed an eating disorder in real life.
ANYWAY, Angela, who plans to go to Bible college in the fall, initially turns down Kevin’s invitation in favor of hanging out with Margaret, her best friend. However, Margaret (Tempestt Bledsoe) is bafflingly eager to be ditched in favor of going out with a charming slimeball who has roofies falling out of his pockets, and talks her into it. Angela borrows her mother’s old prom dress, a stunning, sequined floor-length number that fits her like a second skin, and announces to her overprotective, born-again Christian parents that she’s going out for the evening.
While Angela’s mother, played by the reliably lovable Edie McClurg, is pleased that she’s finally going on a date, her father, Ed (Kelsey Grammer), isn’t having it. Seething with rage (and no small amount of lust, to be sure), he orders Angela to stay home, but she refuses. Rather than wait until she returns home to have a talk with her, like normal fathers who aren’t struggling with forbidden sexual desires, Ed takes off after Angela with her mother in tow, determined to catch her and Kevin getting up to no good. Way too much screen time is devoted to this most tiresome and unpleasant of movie cliches, the creepy father going to grotesque means to protect his daughter’s virginity, inevitably played for laughs instead of horror, as it should be.
Meanwhile, because her family and friends just wouldn’t understand if they knew she had broken up with her boyfriend because he’s a manipulative asshole, a now dateless Shelley still wears her prom dress and even pays for a limousine to pick her up at her house. She kills time at a movie theater and runs into classmate Dan (Chris Young), who’s also gone to extreme lengths to hide that he’s not at the prom because, evidently, at Hoover High not going to the prom is more humiliating than trying to pay for lunch with Marlboro coupons.
Like Angela, Dan’s one moral failing is nearsightedness, which he too corrects by wearing comically large glasses. Other than that, he’s cute, kind, smart, and funny. Even with the owl glasses, if this were today all you’d have to do is put this kid in some skinny jeans and an ironic band t-shirt and he’d have to hold off girls with a stick. Shelley, on the other hand, is a neurotic snob who seems to be confusing high school popularity with being a minor celebrity, convinced that no matter where she goes, she will be recognized and gossiped about. She demands that Dan help her stay out of sight, even risking his life at one point, all while initially treating him with the kind of disdain reserved for someone who’s just farted in a crowded elevator.
In the minimally explored C-plot, we meet the queen bee of the senior class, Patrice (Christina Applegate), and her befuddled, near-mute boyfriend, Roger (Matthew Perry). Patrice, demonstrating a level of ambition and attention to detail that suggests she’ll grow up to be Annette Bening in American Beauty, has planned the entire prom herself, including choosing the theme, wearing a dress that matches the tablecloths, and forcing her obnoxious, bickering parents to chaperone it. Much of her hard work ends up being mocked and sneered at, however, because Patrice is one of those “only in the movies” popular girls whose friends and fellow classmates treat her with barely concealed hostility.
Unaware that her nice mother and sicko father are following them (and also unaware that Kevin is just biding his time before he can help her out of her dress), Angela has a wonderful time. Her arrival at the prom is greeted by gasps of disbelief by her classmates. Who is that beautiful b-b-b-b-babe? Why, is that…could it be…? Angela? No, don’t be silly, Angela wears glasses, she looks nothing like her. “That must be a college girl, I’ve never seen her before,” one girl remarks, even though she made a disparaging crack about Angela mere hours earlier. Maybe that’s why the prom is so special, Hoover High is a school for the blind.
She’s even voted prom queen, with nary a drop of pig’s blood in sight. The same girl who earlier didn’t recognize Angela is teary-eyed with joy, emotionally overcome with this courageous tale of triumph over astigmatism and frumpy sack dresses.
Angela’s parents, disguised as catering staff, watch as she and Kevin dance. “Isn’t she beautiful out there, Ed?” her mother says, to which her father replies, “She certainly is. I have a mind to go out there and drag her home.” I bet you do, Dad. I bet you do.
Back at the absolutely riveting B-plot, Shelley and Dan warm up to each other while stargazing, followed by a painful scene of Shelley trying to teach him how to dance. Then, she says the magic words: “Do you always need to wear those glasses?” Dan explains that he really only needs them for reading but likes how they look. Shelley takes them off his face and says “I think you look better without them. I can see your eyes.” Dan is wearing glasses the size of Sizzler plates, you can see his eyes from outer space. Nevertheless, his vision problems are instantly cured, and you know he’ll be up to his eyeballs in thirsty popular chicks in no time.
With the prom a smashing success, Kevin moves on to the next step in his plan, bringing Angela to the after-party at Patrice’s house and convincing her to go upstairs with him, where they can be capital-A Alone. Because, really, the best, most romantic setting for a couple’s first time making love is a few steps away from a hundred idiot teenagers getting drunk on Seagram’s Golden Wine Coolers and dancing to Tone-Loc.
But, uh oh!, there’s a spanner in the works: Margaret (who conveniently disappeared until the plot needed her again) has caught wind of what Kevin is up to, and tries to warn Angela about it. However, despite Margaret being her only friend until that very night, Angela, drunk with tiny foil crown power, refuses to believe her. “This is the best night of my life, and I’m not going to let you ruin it!” she cries, before stomping away.
Alas, Margaret is right, Kevin went to a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money for the sole purpose of impressing his friends, who cheer on his weaselly efforts to get Angela into bed with a disturbing level of enthusiasm not seen since The Accused. He tries to explain that he’s accepted Angela as a human being (rather than just a warm body he can hump with all the care and concern of an old gym sock hidden under his bed) so that makes it okay. Angela’s not buying it, though, and ditches him. While all this is happening, her father is still stalking her, even resorting to stealing a ladder and peeping at her and Kevin through a window. He’s still there long after she’s gone, until someone thankfully calls the police and has this pervert arrested.
As for Patrice, all of her careful planning falls apart within just a few hours. Her classmates are unimpressed with the work she’s done for the prom, she loses to Angela for prom queen, her house is trashed during the after party, which she misses because she and Roger get stranded miles away from home, they’re arrested for a noise complaint, and after all that, the henpecked Roger dumps her. Patrice is the closest the movie gets to a villain, but she’s pretty harmless. If anything, she’s such a nothing of character that it’s hard to feel any sort of satisfaction when she gets her “comeuppance” at the end. She’s not even mean so much as dismissive to the less popular students, so what exactly is she getting a comeuppance for, being a type-A personality?
Despite things not working out with Kevin, Angela finds going to the prom such a life-changing experience that she decides to attend art school in Italy, even though just a day earlier she couldn’t tell the difference between nail polish and lip gloss. She also finds out through a last-minute reveal that her parents were the wild kids in high school and her mother got pregnant with her on their prom night. Being a teenage father is a flimy excuse for a man in his mid-thirties to dress like a 1940s soda jerk, refer to his wife as “Mother,” and probably want to have sex with his daughter. Nevertheless, that explanation is enough to compel Angela to forgive him for stalking her and peeping into a window to see if she might be naked. You know how dads are!
The film ends with Shelley and Dan walking into the local diner, where conveniently every character in the movie, even the thoroughly humiliated Patrice, is present. “Oh my God, Shelley, what are you doing with that dweeb?” one girl asks, though Dan is easily better looking than every other guy in the place, to which Shelley replies “Going steady!” Everyone in the diner reacts to this with slack-jawed disbelief and dropped soda cups.
I shouldn’t be so hard on Dance ‘til Dawn. It’s harmless fantasy for teenage girls who know that one of these days the captain of the soccer team is going to look right at them in study hall. I was there once, I understand. Like every teen movie then, now, and probably forever, however, it talks a good game about being true to yourself, yet also sends the clear, conflicting message that you’ll be considerably more noticed and liked by your peers if you look as much like everyone else as possible.
Angela’s makeover (and let me reiterate, she still looks like herself, just without glasses and wearing better-fitting clothing) is so effective that the minute she arrives at the prom, the popular girls immediately start trailing behind her in adoration, like handmaidens in Marie Antoinette’s court. One assumes it’s supposed to be Angela's newfound confidence that draws them to her, but it feels more like the movie is suggesting that Angela wasn’t worth anyone paying attention to until she lost the specs and started wearing makeup and fashionable clothes, like girls are supposed to.
To be fair, though, it’s not just the girls who get a hard lesson in happiness by way of conformity: Dan doesn’t register as a human being to Shelley until she takes his glasses off (and for all we know tosses them into a river or something). The shock and awe everyone expresses that there are real people under Dan and Angela’s nerdy attire is a heck of a message to show to Dance ‘til Dawn’s teenage audience, most of whom probably had nothing better to do than sit at home and watch this movie.
Not only do I remember this, I recall that one of the reasons why Kelsey Grammer's character goes after Kevin and Angela is because Kevin bought condoms from his pharmacy earlier in the day. It was emblematic of the 80's to put in a message about safe sex but still manage to be prudish about it.