Fear Street series

  • Fear Street: 1666 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Fear Street: 1978 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) Slasher nostalgia gets a mildly amusing twist in Fear Street: 1978, the second instalment of a series that began in 1994 and promises to keep going in 1666. In the middle of a 1994-set framing device, we travel back one generation in time to find ourselves (where else?) at camp, on the shores of a lake not named Crystal. A new cast of character sets the stage for another camp slasher, with the links to the 1994 being more mythological than anything. This camp, after all, is the destination for both the scarred survivors of the small-town murder capital of the United States Shadyside, and their privileged neighbours of Sunnyvale. Characters are introduced (one or two of them younger versions of people we’ve met in 1994, although the film allows itself some identity-blurring shenanigans for good measure), then spooky events happen, one unfortunate murder is swept under the rug and everything climaxes on a blood-soaked night when the witch and her acolytes come back once more to murder everyone in sight. While 1978 revels in the fashions of the late 1970s like its slasher predecessors, writer-director Leigh Janiak once again isn’t interested in being too faithful to the period in terms of themes or technique: despite the beige, it feels like a 2021 film and there are clear hints that the mythology is moving toward an explanation about its witch antagonist rather than outright destruction. Sadie Sink makes for a good lead, and the result does have enough to keep interest even if this all feels like a drawn-out tangent from the story begun in 1994. This being said, Fear Street: 1978 will be far more effective for viewers who actually like the first wave of late-1970s camp slashers – I found them intolerable in the first place, and the only thing keeping me interested here is in seeing how we’re going to go to 1666 for the series’ conclusion.

  • Fear Street: 1994 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2022) If there’s a genre I’m not feeling nostalgic at all about, it’s the 1990s revival of the 1980s slasher genre: a terrible rip-off of an even worse movie subgenre that should be stomped back into its grave then covered with a load of concrete. But here we are, two decades later, about to re-engage with it as part of the Great Nostalgic Regurgitation of everything that’s come before. Fear Street, adapted from R. L. Stine’s YA horror series, at least has the intriguing distinction of being a more ambitious project than most, going for a story presented in a pre-written trilogy of films, each of them going back to a different era as part of a single story. (I was about to be appreciative of Netflix for allowing such storytelling experiments, but reading about the film’s production history clarifies that everything was supposed to be theatrically released before Netflix bought it all due to the COVID-19 theatrical closures.)  Alas, it takes only a few moments for the film to temper viewers’ expectations, with a bit of blunt high-concept (a tale of two small towns: Shadyside, the murder capital of the United States located right next to Sunnyvale, which has no discernible crime rate) that reveals a lot about where the series is headed and can only work for undemanding teenage audiences. Much of this 1994 instalment of Fear Street works on inertia, reusing 1990s neon nostalgia, the usual slasher plot template and teenage archetypes to reassure audiences on how they should be feeling. Writer-director Leigh Janiak is not interested in a stylistic pastiche: the filmmaking approach is transparently 2020s and so is the representativeness of its characters. I had to laugh when the main character was established as a lesbian, because in the modern pantheon of teen movies that essentially guarantees her virtue and her survival to the end of the series – we are (thankfully, but also schematically) a long, long way away from The Celluloid Closet here. Fear Street: 1994 is mediocre material all the way through: it’s only slightly better than most slashers in introducing a strong supernatural element and clearly having more in mind for the later instalments. I did like one of the characters (who sadly gets killed, and not nicely) and some of the production design gets a lot out of a modest budget. While the story could have ended thirty seconds prior to this first film’s end credits, there’s a lot of background material that could have been used for depth in other films but is here more likely to gain further significance in the follow-up films. I’m wondering how the conceit will be kept, though: Are we going to spend all of Fear Street 1978 in 1978, and all of Fear Street: 1666 in 1666? What’s the framing device? That, more than the issue of stopping the killing, is what interests me in this series.