Fear Street: Prom Queen is a throwback slasher that leans too much on its throw-back and not enough on originality. Great needle drops to all the standard issue 80s pop/rock songs are great… but so too is a random shuffle on your 80s Mix. And cool gory kills don’t make up for a lot of tiresome prom drama.
Taking place years after vaguely defined murders, a host of girls are running for prom queen. Insert all that teen drama llama and then a prom where a masked killer hunts down the nominees.
I’m not sure, but I think I was supposed to remember the events of Fear Street: 1978? The movie has an ill-defined backstory that it would have been nice to know… but, then again, maybe that’d have made the identity of the killer even more obvious? I’m unsure. If it is a sequel, I doubt the timeline… but also big fail for not calling it Fear Street: 1988.
The cast is fine… though a lot of the girls kind of looked alike to me. The lead herself looked like what would happen if Rory Gilmore and Joey King had a baby. Really, there’s only two or maybe three girls worth following and their mid-film drama got super tedious. Really? Where did this dance off come from and can it end, please?
The kills were at least quite good. Definitely gory though not as inventive as some of the ones in the previous Fear Street films. Still, nice they don’t cut away for the PG-13 and the final slaughter during the prom showed a lot of promise. It didn’t quite go as far as I’ve had liked… but the far more campy finale was fun. .
The actual masked killer? Someone in a generic red slicker and a cryptic black mask. Very boring and replaceable (I hear the Gorton Fisherman from I Know What You Did Last Summer might want a crack at the slicker killer gimmick again).
There’s nothing particularly scary about this flick and I was often left a little bored by the tedious drama. But the kills were fun and the overall third act pulled it out of the fire, at least a little bit. It’s not particularly great but it did leave me hoping for Fear Street: 2005 or whatever.
Score: 74