Now that it's October, I figure it's time to finally catch up on the other two Fear Street movies, especially given how much I enjoyed the first.
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (2021)
Rated R for bloody horror violence, sexual content, nudity, drug use, and language throughout
Score: 4 out of 5
Fear Street Part Two: 1978, the second installment in Netflix's trilogy, is an altogether better film than the first and my favorite in the trilogy so far. While I liked the first film's characters a lot more than I thought it would, the cast here took less time to grow on me, with the stock summer camp slasher archetypes given some extra depth to them and the two sister heroines having a very interesting dynamic, especially with the knowledge that one of them -- and only one -- is going to survive the events of the film. The needle drops were also on point and did a lot to set the film's retro mood, which captured not just the look of the '70s but also the atmosphere of the Malaise Era. Its attempts to replicate the look and feel of '70s and '80s slashers specifically weren't so successful, the film's slick and glossy production values, Marco Beltrami's operatic score, and a twist that's pretty easy to figure out often betraying it in that regard, but this is a series that's already established itself as a separate beast from those, rooted less in the late '70s/early '80s golden age of slashers than in the '90s golden age of YA horror novels and teen horror movies. Even if you strip out all the 1994-set content bookending the film, this is still a very well-made standalone slasher that does a lot right, even if the first movie undoubtedly enhances the experience.
The film starts where its predecessor ended, with Sam possessed by the ghost of the 17th century witch Sarah Fier and tied up by the other two surviving protagonists, her girlfriend Deena and Deena's little brother Josh. They take Sam to the home of one C. Berman, the sole survivor of the Camp Nightwing massacre in 1978 who helped Deena and Sam (seemingly, temporarily) stave off Sarah Fier's curse the first time. There, through the framing device of Berman telling the story of the massacre to the kids, we go back in time to 1978, where the Berman sisters are both in attendance at Camp Nightwing, the older, more responsible Cindy as a counselor and the younger, rebellious Ziggy as a camper. Ziggy is in trouble again for stealing money (allegedly, though can we really trust the rich Sunnyvale assholes who accuse her of stealing it?), much to the consternation of Cindy, who desperately wants to escape Shadyside and knows that, if Ziggy is kicked out of Camp Nightwing, she's losing her job and income as a counselor too. They're both entering relationships at camp, Cindy with the handsome and wholesome Tommy Slater and Ziggy with the rich kid with a heart of gold (and future sheriff) Nick Goode, and getting into often heated interactions with the other people at camp. Unfortunately, while Cindy, Ziggy, Tommy, and the stoner counselors Alice and Arnie are exploring the woods in search of the legend of Sarah Fier after hearing the camp nurse ramble on about it before attacking Tommy, they get to encounter the legend up close and personal when Tommy is possessed and becomes the latest Shadyside resident to go on a murderous rampage. Guess what, folks, you're now in a summer camp slasher movie!
One thing I appreciated about the first movie is that it got me invested in its characters in a way that teen slashers normally don't spend a lot of time on. While it took some time for me to care about Deena specifically given how she was largely to blame for the problems in her and Sam's relationship, the fact that she eventually grew as a character helped make for a very solid protagonist. Here, the main characters are more likable from the outset, but all of them still turn out to have a lot more layers to them than they seemed to at first glance. The protagonists this time, Cindy and Ziggy, are sisters, Cindy being somebody with dreams of getting out of Shadyside and paying a lot of attention to her clothes and appearance while the more tomboyish and rebellious Ziggy seems like she's on the fast track to growing up into someone like Alice, the punkish counselor who's introduced smoking pot and having sex with her boyfriend. Cindy and Ziggy felt like two girls who had grown up together their entire lives and clearly loved each other, but also had a lot of deep-seated issues and simmering resentment that had never been worked out, Cindy towards Ziggy for being white trash and Ziggy towards Cindy for thinking she can rise above her station. Emily Rudd and Sadie Sink each had a lot to work with, and together, they crafted a very compelling sister duo. Another standout in the cast was Ryan Simpkins as Alice, who's initially portrayed as immediate cannon fodder and who you know is not going to make it to the end. The film could've just stopped there, but beneath Alice's party-hard exterior turns out to be somebody who seems as though she's just given up, unable to deal with life in a dump like Shadyside and retreating into drug use, casual sex, and self-harm to cope. Unlike Ziggy, she actually admires Cindy for at least having the heart and the guts to try and improve herself. What could've been a throwaway "slutty punk chick" was instead one of the most tragic figures in the film thanks to both smart writing and Simpkins' performance.
This film follows in its predecessor's footsteps when it comes to slasher violence, too. While there's no kill as immediately memorable as the bread slicer, we do get plenty of axe murder (from a head split open to decapitations) as well as the killer taking out several kids, even if, for obvious reasons, the child deaths happen just offscreen. The aesthetics may betray the fact that this was filmed in the modern day, but the bloodshed demonstrates that they knew what their inspirations were famous for. The film also did a good job capturing the atmosphere of the '70s, using it to further establish Shadyside's reputation as a dump and create a feeling where it seems like the world is baking in a long marijuana haze and slowly going to shit. Even though it's set in 1978, there's no disco on the soundtrack here, which instead focuses on the sort of late '60s and '70s rock music and retro pop that kids in the small-town heartland (who, in real life, drove the anti-disco backlash) were actually listening to. The feeling is that the rich Sunnyvale kids are going to coast through life on their parents' wealth, while the Shadyside kids are already turning into burnouts holding each other back. Thinking about it, it feels like nothing less a cleaned-up version of a Rob Zombie movie, one that's less fixated on replicating '70s grindhouse edginess than it is on the general climate of the decade. The needle drops of classic songs helped, but the movie itself also did a lot of solid work in setting the mood.
The Bottom Line
The highlight of Netflix's Fear Street trilogy so far, Part Two: 1978 successfully homages its inspirations while emphasizing interesting characters and a solid atmosphere. I'm excited to see how the trilogy ends.
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And now, to wrap it up...
Fear Street Part Three: 1666 (2021)
Rated R for strong violence and gore, language, some sexuality and brief drug use
Score: 3 out of 5
Fear Street Part Three: 1666 takes the series back to the seventeenth century with what I'm pretty sure isn't the most historically accurate depiction of colonial America, but one that closes off the trilogy's overarching story well and puts its strengths in plotting and characterization front and center. For every time the anachronisms took me out of it, the film managed to pull me back in thanks to interesting characters, all culminating in a big twist that changed everything I thought I knew about the series just in time for a final confrontation. It ended the series on a reasonably high note, with a sequel hook that got me interested in a future Part Four, even if some of its recurring quirks keep coming back (seriously, getting stabbed in the gut is not an easy injury to get up and walk away from). Overall, Netflix's Fear Street trilogy has turned out to be a very fun slice of cheesy supernatural slasher goodness that doesn't exceed its inspirations, but certainly honors them well.
Picking up where Part Two: 1978 left off as Deena returns the witch Sarah Fier's hand to the rest of her corpse, Deena suddenly finds herself sucked back in time to the year 1666 when Shadyside and Sunnyvale were one town called Union, with her inhabiting Sarah's body in the final days of her life and witnessing how she died. I wasn't all that convinced by the setting, and not just because of the noticeable anachronisms that have always been present in this series but peaked here. Seventeenth-century Union felt like a Renaissance faire or a colonial-themed amusement park, between a lot of frankly terrible "old-timey" accents all around and the fact that, for lack of a better way to describe it, the characters all seem to carry themselves in a "modern" fashion. Save for the plot-relevant homophobia directed at Sarah and her lesbian lover Hannah, I felt like I was watching a modern recreation of the past. The VVitch this was not, is what I'm saying here.
That said, in many ways these scenes are in fact a modern recreation of the past in-universe as well, filtered through Deena's modern perspective as she puts herself in Sarah's shoes. (This also explains how a Black girl could've existed back then without getting any mention of her race; it's made clear that the real Sarah was white.) All of the people in the past are played by the same actors who play their counterparts in 1978 and 1994, most notably Hannah, who shares her actor with Deena's girlfriend Sam. This layer of artifice, combined with the layer of camp that the series as a whole has bathed in, made the anachronic touches a lot easier to swallow and made it easier to focus on the plot and characters, which were as solid as they've been throughout the series as the film weaved a plot filled with twists and turns. Even underneath the bad accents, the cast were all otherwise convincing as the town was swept up in hysteria over a suspected witch, and there were some damn gnarly moments throughout as Sarah, who it turns out was not the monster she was built up as, fights for her life against both her distrusting neighbors and the figure who turns out to be the real villain.
And then the second half of the movie kicked in, bringing the story back to 1994 for the final confrontation against the evil that has haunted Shadyside for over three hundred years. Without spoiling anything, it's here where the film's emphasis on classism, long lurking as subtext throughout the series, became outright text, and I must admit, watching the protagonists take on the rich Sunnyvalers who have profited from the curse of Sarah Fier was damn satisfying. This was a movie where it feels like the filmmakers really wanted to get political, specifically the kind of political that most people get after a few drinks, and held it in mainly for courtesy's sake, knowing that what it's already saying or implying lets viewers know exactly where it stands -- that, and dwelling too long on the mix of "eat the rich" and "ACAB" sentiments lurking just under the surface would've taken attention away from a viscerally rousing finale full of gore, bloodshed, and asshole villains getting what they deserve.
The Bottom Line
All told, Fear Street Part Three: 1666 was a fitting end for a trilogy that's cheesy as hell but still very enjoyable thanks to its better qualities and how it deploys its campiness. I can safely say that I recommend the whole series at this point to anyone who's a fan of larger-than-life, self-referential horror.
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