TheFear Street trilogywas one of the many casualties of the cinema-shuttering Covid pandemic, originally scheduled for an ambitious one-film-a-month summer release by Fox before being offloaded to Netflix. But while it was a little disappointing to see horror films made with such unusual cinematic flair released straight-to-smartphone, it was also a wise business decision, the unorthodox original strategy unlikely to have paid off.
Based on the series of books by teen favourite RL Stine, the three films set up an exciting, expansive world, shifting between the 1660s to the 1970s to the 1990s, gliding from teen slasher to queer romance to supernatural fantasy and within a genre that typically fails to win critics over, they were surprise successes (each boasts a Rotten Tomatoes rating over 80%). It was a rousing win for writer-director Leigh Janiak, whose steady tonal balance of serious and silly showed so many others how it can and should be done, and it opened up a new universe of potentially interconnected horrors forNetflix, the first of which lands this week.
Smartly, Fear Street: Prom Queen does not have quite as much on its plate, a simple standalone slasher with a tight focus on just one timeline. But that’s where the smart decisions both start and end, a misfire not quite bad or powerful enough to undo Janiak’s great work but one that questions whether the world of Fear Street is one we need to spend much more time exploring. If the introductory trilogy started us off on a thrilling journey, here we’re brought to a sudden dead end.
There was always going to be an inevitable aesthetic downturn, as we slide from studio to streamer, but the distractingly tinny feel of Prom Queen is a particularly bitter pill to swallow after how sleek and transporting the previous films had been. We’re taken back to the 1980s for this instalment but it’s all thin, theme party pastiche, overly reliant on hairstyles and needle drops to do all of the heavy lifting. The plot is equally thin, as high schoolers compete to be named prom queen before getting picked off one-by-one in a rushed 90-minute runtime. It’s a face-off between good girl from the bad side of the street Lori (India Fowler) and bad girl from the good side of the street Tiffany (Fina Strazza). Comically both girls actually do live opposite each other on the same street, despite considerable architectural differences …
The red flags start flying early, as Scottish writer-director Matt Palmer and co-writer Donald McLeary race through an ungainly infodump opener, introducing far too many characters far too soon, a superficial and ineffective introduction to the specifics of Shadyside high school politics. They sprint toward prom without any dynamic filled in enough for us to understand or care and the catty standoffs are so toothlessly written, that the film immediately fails at the teen comedy side of the Venn diagram. Sadly, the teen slasher side is almost as bad, poorly choreographed kills with zero suspense and a killer in a rubbishy dime store costume with only one entertainingly gory moment to wake us up (a victim trying to use a door handle after his hands have been chopped off). There’s just no pace or atmosphere or, most importantly,fearto any of it.
One of the many exciting surprises of the trilogy was the introduction of an outstanding young cast of mostly unknown faces, filled with so many standouts that the real MVP was casting director Carmen Cuba, who’s previously worked with Larry Clark, Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott. She’s returned to oversee but any luck has run out with none of the high schoolers breaking through (Anora and Until Dawn’s Ella Rubin comes close but she’s frustratingly sidelined) or even given the opportunity, their dialogue never rising above rote. The adults – Chris Klein, Lili Taylor and Katherine Waterston – fare slightly better but, aside from Klein, one wonders why they’re even here.
Prom Queen isn’t just a disappointment because of what came before in the Fear Street universe but for what Palmer himself had previously done. His 2018 thrillerCalibrewas a remarkably gripping debut, an incredibly tense, watch-through-hands nightmare about a hunting trip gone horribly wrong (I highlighted it inthe best underseen films of that year), but any edge he might have had has been smoothed out by the bland Netflix algorithm, his follow-up as anonymously milquetoast as streaming content gets. The fear is gone.
Fear Street: Prom Queen is available on Netflix on 23 May