SOMEONE in the new teen slasher flick Prom Night insists that senior prom is 'a memory you'll always want to remember'.

Not so for Brittany Snow's victim/protagonist Donna.

She is stalked by a psychotic killer who just escaped from prison and is hell-bent on hacking up her buddies one by one to get closer to her on the supposed best night of her life.

Like the bloodless, gutless and sexless movie, my own prom was also a disappointing mess.

It'll be a night for them to forget... and get hacked up on the best night of their life in Prom Night.

There wasn't any mass murderer on the loose, although I was faced with a different kind of horror.

But, like Donna, I survived, although it's one night I'd rather forget.

The year was 1995, and the occasion was the Hwa Chong Junior College prom at the Shangri-La Hotel ballroom.

Considered the most important social event for every 18-year-old student, proms are supposed to be bittersweet rites of passage.

Like the gang in Prom Night, my close-knit clique of female classmates checked into the hotel suite we booked for an overnighter with great anticipation (but we weren't so stupid as to go in and out of the room by ourselves and become knife fodder for a skulking maniac of course).

With so much riding on those few special hours, I look back and wonder why I was so ill-prepared.

The rest of the girls had their hair and make-up done by professionals earlier (an SOP referenced in the movie), while I thought a wash-and-blow dry was good enough.

Big mistake, because my shoulder-length layers literally flipped out on me.

I was a pretty decent-looking girl back then, but God knows what made me opt for the wayang look (white and blue eye shadow, red lips and a Joker-worthy amount of face powder) - an embarrassing folly of youth forever immortalised in other people's photographs.

DEATH BY DRESS

Then there was the disaster of a dress. Alas, back in those days, we didn't have access to all the cute, sexy and trendy champagne, electric blue and salmon pink creations on display in Prom Night.

Mine was a (too) tight-fitting tulle designer gown which my mother bought for $50. And because it had a plunging back and I didn't know nipple tape existed, I resorted to wearing a - gasp! - visible black cotton sports bra underneath.

In retrospect, I am shocked I wasn't arrested that night by the fashion police for my crimes against good taste.

Guess who's back? An older but hotter Mulder-and-Scully duo in The X-Files: I Want To Believe.

And far from having a gentleman in a tux pick me up from my house in a stretch limo and tie a corsage around my wrist, as Donna's cute boyfriend does, I was dateless.

And you know how most couples lose their virginity on prom night, Beverly Hills 90210-style?

Well, never happened.

Speaking of nostalgia gone bad and best left in its bygone era, I'm suffering from major amnesia over The X-Files: I Want To Believe, the second movie spin-off of the iconic paranormal '90s TV series which ended rather confusingly six years ago.

Yes, the truth is still out there, but does today's audience really care?

I gave up trying to figure out what was going on eons ago, and can't remember much about The X-Files other than it introduced alien invasions and government conspiracy and FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) took forever to get it on.

And now that everything about the film is as tightly-wrapped as Area 51 - there's no plot synopsis available of advance screenings for reviewers - I just wish creator-director Chris Carter left the franchise alone instead of tormenting us all over again.

But maybe there is some value in thawing out a dormant film franchise after years of being cryogenically frozen, like how its stars seem untouched by age.

Present-day Mulder and Scully certainly look way hotter than the past.

And I certainly hope I do too.

This article was first published in The New Paper on July 22, 2008.