Fear Street: 1666 (2021)

(Netflix Streaming, May 2022) So here we are, travelling to the seventeenth century for the conclusion of the Fear Street Trilogy. It’s an understandable misnomer to call this Fear Street: 1666 considering that only the first half of the film takes place at that time –the film itself has a “Fear Street: 1994 Part 2” title card to introduce its second half. The result is understandably uneven. While writer-director Leigh Janiak spends a considerable amount of time making colonial-era America accessible to teenage audience, the re-use of the same actors in both periods, unwillingness to be too faithful to the reality of the time, and genre requirements often combine to make 1666 feel like The VVitch cosplay with of-the-moment representativeness. That feeling I had in the first film that the heroine, being lesbian, was both virtuous and invulnerable? Confirmed to the Nth degree here, especially as the film assembles its pieces to reveal that (wait for it…) the witch was a victim framed as a threat and the white guy was the true evil all along. Not only that, but the Shadyside/Sunnyvale divide was a multi-generational effort of systematic oppression. The fact that our heroine isn’t white? Not an accident either! Whew! Although, I admit, this is far better material for a slasher trilogy than I could have hoped for… even if it seems to be hitting the white-guy piñata as gleefully as many other 2021 films. The return to 1994, on the other hand, often feels like an exercise in narrative housework – making sure all the loose ends are tied up, making sure to get more value out of that mall-refurbishing effort, making sure our witches ride off into the sunset having triumphed over patriarchy. It generally works, but I can’t help but feel that it would have been possible to cram the entire story in a single two-hour film, considering how much of it feels like filler. But I have to admire the audacity of the concept. I also liked series lead Kiana Madeira quite a bit better here than in the first film – she gets more to do in both the 1666 segment and in orchestrating the climax of the series back in 1994. It doesn’t amount to much, but it’s reasonably entertaining for something like five hours and a half, right about the length of a Netflix series. Watching the trilogy back-to-back-to-back was the right choice:  It may feel like a lot of repetition, but at least I’m done with it.