Released: 23rd May
Seen: 24th May
In 2021, a horror film event happened that really showed the potential for what could be done with a streaming platform that wanted people to notice what it was releasing. Over the course of three weeks Netflix released the Fear Street Trilogy, a set of horror films inspired by the R.L. Stine books that all took place in different time periods, played around in different eras of the horror/slasher genre, and all connected to create a grand overarching story. It was dark, twisted, queer and just a ton of fun. I even named the entire trilogy as one of the best films of 2021, which is a choice I stand by because every single entry did something truly great within the slasher genre. They were films that understood what makes the genre fun and their success as an event pretty much guaranteed that there was going to be more. When they announced that we were going to get a new entry with the subtitle Prom Queen, this reviewer was excited at the prospect… never be excited about things, it leads to disappointment.
Fear Street: Prom Queen takes place in 1988 at Shadyside High School where everyone is preparing for prom. Among the cavalcade of teen girls trying out for the position of Prom Queen is loner and alleged local weirdo Lori Granger (India Fowler), who is running against a group of popular girls known as the Wolfpack, for some reason. This wolfpack is seemingly led by the queen bee, Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), and the wolfpack is working together to try and win prom queen. Winning prom queen is something one of the wolfpack is sure to be able to do because Lori is hated by the entire school thanks to a rumour that her mother murdered her father. However, because this is a slasher film set during prom in an 80s high school, the women running for the title of Prom Queen inevitably start being murdered one by one until finally the movie ends and you wonder what the hell happened.
Fear Street: Prom Queen really shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence as the previous Fear Street trilogy because they share nothing in common other than the loose connection to the R.L. Stine books however the only reason this film exists is that the trilogy mentioned earlier was a huge success so what Prom Queen seemingly did was it got rid of the cast and crew of the original trilogy, grabbed the first draft of one of the shittier Prom Night sequels, did a little adjusting because there’s allegedly a budget so they can afford to play Never Gonna Give You Up during the prom sequence and that’s about it. Forget things like the interesting characters, fun spin on genre, creative killer design, elaborate murder sequences, important representation and an understanding of how a good modern horror film is supposed to look, let’s just make Prom Night 6: Kill Me Now.
Look, I’m an absolute sucker for a good bit of throwback horror. Hell, that’s what made the original trilogy so great was that they were clearly loving tributes to classic horror films. This isn’t a loving tribute, it’s a basic ripoff that offers nothing. Fear Street: Prom Queen has characters so bland that it’s genuinely hard to remember the names of any of them, exactly one half-interesting kill sequence that is let down by being poorly filmed and a final act that would be camp if anyone at all seemed to be trying. Fear Street: Prom Queen feels like it’s just not trying that hard, which admittedly does make it fit in with a lot of cheap slasher fare but even the cheapest shittiest slasher film from the 80s at least had something to offer, be it an outrageous kill scene or a memorably bad performance. Nothing here is memorable, nothing here can pull the audience’s attention for long enough in order for it to become memorable.
When you have an entire cast of uninteresting and unlikable characters, that makes it hard to care when they meet a grisly end in a slasher movie but that can sometimes be mitigated by having the grisly end be so over the top that you can’t help but enjoy it. Just as an example, I don’t think anyone who watched the first Terrifier movie could tell you the names of the female character who hung upside down in the film off the top of their head but they will never forget the image of her being sawn in half from groin to head because that was absolutely fucking insane. Fear Street: Prom Queen doesn’t have anything like that, it doesn’t have any interesting characters or fun deaths. A few beheadings, an impaling, one disembowelment that just looked so shitty it was kind of comical but these are standard for the genre, none of them are interesting or even that well done.
Hell if the entire film was just kind of running on autopilot but looked good that might work but it’s also just not that well shot, most of Fear Street: Prom Queen feels like you’re watching a bad 90s made for TV movie where they haven’t bothered properly colour correcting anything or lighting it properly because they have 2 weeks to finish it for air. So many scenes in this film just look bad, one particular sequence has everything bathed in piss-yellow lighting that has never looked good in the history of cinema and yet this film insists on shooting its one semi-cool scene with this lighting. It feels like we’re watching one of the worst episodes of Tales from the Crypt without the clever script that made even the worst episodes of that series enjoyable. It’s not even that anything here is so horrifically bad that it warrants a ton of anger, it’s just a level of bad that suggests that this was made without anyone caring.
Fear Street: Prom Queen is just a goddamn bad film with nothing to really salvage it. It’s not silly enough to just be a dumb slasher, it’s not visually interesting enough to be weird and it’s not camp enough to hit the “so bad it’s good” sweet spot. It’s just a film that fails at just about everything that it sets out to do. Even if you just judge it as its own thing without the rest of the franchise to compare it to, it’s a bad Prom Night ripoff that doesn’t even have the kindness to have a well choreographed dance number in the middle of it but if you judge it compared to the trilogy that it’s forcibly tied itself to it’s an utter disaster.
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