‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ Review – An Excruciating Return to Shadyside

Ruthless yet inspired kills, expansive lore, and spirited personality made Leigh Janek’s Fear Street trilogy, based on the novels by R.L. Stine, the summer horror event of 2021. New standalone entry Fear Street: Prom Queen, nestled chronologically between Fear Street: 1978 and Fear Street: 1994, features none of that. Instead, the 1988-set slasher opts for shallow pastiche, bland kills, and a grating cast of characters. It makes for an excruciating return to the cursed town of Shadyside.

A quick recap reminding viewers of Shadyside’s penchant for cranking out masked serial killers kicks off Prom Queen before settling into introductions to the roster of prom queen candidates that’ll be targeted by the latest villain. Meek outcast Lori Granger (India Fowler) hopes to escape her family’s tarnished reputation by winning the coveted prom queen crown, but she has stiff competition with The Wolf Pack, the clique of mean girls led by vicious bully Tiffany (Fina Strazza), who will stop at nothing to win. Class rebel and wild child Christy (Ariana Greenblatt) is also in contention, but barely. Greenblatt’s credits designate her character as the first to fall, and the uninspired death sets the stage for the latest bloodbath.

Director Matt Palmer, who co-wrote the script with Donald McLeary, struggles with tone straightaway. Attempts at humor fall flat or get overshadowed by one of the most unlikeable casts in recent memory. Characterization gets jettisoned to get straight to the slasher goods, leaving the actors with little to grab hold of save for a handful of archetypical traits. Strazza lays the mean girl schtick on way too thick; Tiffany is a caricature of a bully made even more annoying when jealousy rears its ugly head. Prom Queen insists that boyfriend Tyler (David Iacono) has eyes for her rival Lori, but the severe lack of chemistry between Fowler and the unemotive Iacono makes this prominent plot point tough to swallow.

Fowler’s doe-eyed sweetness marks Lori as Final Girl from the start, one that lacks much in the way of smarts or agency. Her arc from meek underdog to Final Girl isn’t mapped out well, nor believable. Personalities change on a whim, based on plot necessity.

That’s not Fowler’s fault; Prom Queen seems insistent that Shadyside High’s students either be especially cruel or unbelievably stupid. Not even Lori’s horror-loving best friend Megan (Suzanna Son), meant to be the clear fan favorite, fares well in a film that feels more like a poor simulation of an ’80s slasher than an actual slasher. Palmer dispatches his teens without mercy and at random, but it’s tough to care when you’re actively rooting for every single one to fall to the point where their demises can’t arrive quickly enough.

The period setting is pastiche and meaningless, a slew of loud ’80s tropes and cliches. It’s a generic slasher that could’ve been set anywhere, at any time, just dressed up in embarrassing ’80s drag. Those hoping for anything coming close to matching the creative bread slicer death of 1994 will be disappointed to find your run-of-the-mill maiming and slicing here, played up to gory effect through CGI and some practical. There’s zero tension to the kills, either, a surprise coming from the director behind the intense thriller Calibre.

But this speaks to the film’s massive tone issue. Prom Queen can’t quite decide if it wants to be a mean-spirited slasher or prom horror camp and instead just dials up the superficiality and cruelty of youth to an unengaging degree. The climax desperately wants to embrace camp but is too dour to make it work. Not even tenured players like Chris Klein or Katherine Waterston can make their outlandish characters work in this incohesive misfire. 

A mid-credit scene connects Prom Queen to the Fier curse introduced in the Fear Street trilogy, but other than that, nothing about this standalone entry resembles the same Shadyside viewers were introduced to in 2021. It’s a poor imitation and a frustratingly tedious patchwork of much better slashers that came before. This prom is worth skipping.

Fear Street: Prom Queen is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ Review – An Excruciating Return to Shadyside appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.