Fear Street returned to Netflix this week with the latest instalment, Fear Street: Prom Queen.
Based on the novels by R.L Stine, I might be alone amongst adult males in having quite enjoyed Netflix’s original Fear Street trilogy, released in 2021. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the pandemic-induced depression. But the centuries-spanning tale of a cursed town told over three time periods (1994, 1878 and 1666) kept me relatively entertained.
Sure, they weren’t a patch on the far better movies they ripped off paid homage to, most notably Scream and Friday the 13th, but they had a decent story and were competently made.
These movies are ‘young adult’ horror. Damn, I wish I was broken in this easily as a child. I had to piss my pants watching An American Werewolf in London and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The scariest part of Fear Street was having to suffer through the forced diversity and gender ideology, but I got through it.
The original Fear Street trilogy ended with the second Death Star being destroyed and a party on Endor. Ignore that last sentence. It ended with the curse being lifted on Shadyside, which is the name of the town. Nothing good had happened there for over 300 years because the residents of the neighbouring town, Sunnyside (no, I’m not making it up, but some idiot is), made a deal with the devil or something.
The 80s are back!
So now we come to the fourth movie in the trilogy: Fear Street: Prom Queen. The movie is set in 1988, which is before the conclusion of the original trilogy. It’s not a prequel or a sequel, it’s a midquel. I honestly thought I’d invented a new term, but I checked and it already exists. Late as usual. The earliest midquel I can think of is Highlander 3. Anyone got an earlier example?
Anyway, even though Shadyside’s curse is still in effect in Fear Street: Prom Queen, it doesn’t link to the other movies at all, and there’s no supernatural element to it, so I’m not sure why it matters. They could have set it at any time, but they chose the 1980s. Of course they did.
1980s nostalgia has been going on for over a quarter of a century now and we should probably talk about it. I’m an 80s kid myself and a total sucker for the period, but maybe we should start winding it down after Stranger Things ends. In Fear Street: Prom Queen, the 80s references approach parody levels, which brings us full circle seeing as it all started with The Wedding Singer taking the piss out of New Coke, Miami Vice and Boy George.
To give Fear Street: Prom Queen some credit, a few references were more niche than I was expecting. The movies playing at the local cinema are Miracle Mile and Phantasm 2. They even show one of the best scenes of Phantasm 2 (which is the Terminator 2 of horror sequels, but that’s a story for another day).
Not in this movie
However, it’s not a good sign when the best part of a movie is when a better movie pops on the screen for a few seconds.
They also let themselves down with some anachronistic dialogue, such as one character describing something as ‘sick,’ to describe something good. We didn’t talk like that in the 80s.
The plot (it’s a guy with an axe)
The plot follows six contenders for the Shadyside High School Prom Queen title as a masked killer in a red raincoat stalks them (a nice touch—at least the blood won’t show). The contenders are Lori, a shy, downtrodden girl whose family has a tragic past; Christy, a rebel chick who wears fishnets and will ruin your life; and four ‘mean girl’ cliches.
It stars a bunch of teenagers I’ve never heard of, plus Lili Taylor (who is given far too little to do) and Chris Klein from American Pie (his friends call him ‘Nova).
Most of the movie unfolds on Prom Night itself, serving up a stream of predictable ’80s songs from a DJ who looks like a young John Candy (probably on purpose), intercut with scenes of couples sneaking off alone and getting murdered. There’s a fair amount of gore and one or two inventive kills, but no real tension or scares.
I was rooting for the rebel chick, but they kill her off way too early, leaving Lori as the sole underdog against the mean girls.
Lori is trying to win the prom queen title for her mum, whose prom never happened because someone murdered her boyfriend—Lori’s dad—years earlier. It gives her a credible motivation for entering. Otherwise, you’d wonder why she is bothering, seeing as she seems so uncomfortable with the whole situation.
Paint-by-numbers
The biggest issue with Fear Street: Prom Queen is that it’s clichéd, derivative and predictable, including the whodunnit aspect. It’s obvious who the killer is, and why. The unmasking plays out like an episode of Scooby Doo, except with less tension.
The chief mean girl, Tiffany, is bitchy almost to the point of parody. Lori has eyes for Tiffany’s boyfriend, Tyler (of course she does). Lori and Tiffany have a dance-off at one point, which I didn’t expect, but it’s lacklustre.
On the plus side, the performances are mostly decent. The relationship between Lori and her genderbending goth best friend, Megan, is engaging. It doesn’t end in a lesbian love affair, as you might expect from Netflix, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that is a good thing.
It clocks in at under an hour-and-a-half, so there’s that to be thankful for as well.
The best thing I can say about this movie is that my standards were low, and my standards were met. I didn’t hate it, but that doesn’t mean it was any good.
Near the end, one character states that ‘nobody remembers the details. They only remember the winners.’ It’s true, which is why I’ve already forgotten this one. It’s not a movie, it’s ‘content.’
