Fear Street: Prom Queen Review

When critiquing a movie – not a film, a movie – like Fear Street: Prom Queen, it helps to approach it with a generous spirit. Shallow characters, predictable storylines, wooden performances, “high schoolers” in their mid-30s: All of these can be forgivable, even charming, in the context of an ’80s-set teen slasher. But certain rules have to be followed in order to receive this grace, the most important of which is that the kill scenes have to deliver the brutal and bloody goods. Unfortunately, the latest entry in Netflix’s Fear Street series fails to satisfy even this requirement.

Prom Queen comes laden with lore, both from R.L. Stine’s original Fear Street books and the 2021 movie trilogy inspired by them. Returning to the fictional location of the titular road – Shadyside, Ohio – director Matt Palmer winds the clock back to 1988, adding a new point on the timeline of a small town that’s cursed to recreate scenarios from popular horror films every 10 years or so. Stine’s Prom Queen book then provides the structure, setting up five candidates for the top prize at Shadyside High’s spring formal and then knocking them off one by one because, ya know, curse. There are gestures towards a larger arc about the adults in the town, and how they perpetuate these periodic massacres; the movie is lazy about it, however, as it is about everything.

This is all laid out in the mind-numbing script, in which characters repeat their full names and places in the Shadyside social hierarchy multiple times after they’ve already been laid out in a lengthy opening voiceover. That’s expected for Netflix, whose notes for screenwriters allegedly include a mandate that characters announce their actions and intentions so that viewers who are paying attention to something else – their phone, their laundry, a misbehaving pet – can follow along. With its long, airless stretches and sleepy performances, however, Prom Queen struggles to maintain even a halfhearted level of interest: Late in the story, one of the teenage leads reacts to the “shocking” reveal of the killer by pulling the same face one might make after biting into a lukewarm hamburger.

To be fair to the young performers, the adult cast – including Katherine Waterston, who’s given lively performances elsewhere – is as awful as the teen one, wooden and sleepy and seemingly uninterested in what’s happening around them. There are two exceptions, both of them attributable to natural charisma: Lili Taylor exudes warmth as an ex-nun turned vice principal, while Red Rocket’s Suzanna Son actually brings personality to her role as the BFF of final girl Lori Granger (India Fowler).

Prom Queen plays to its audience by shifting Son’s Megan – a “stoner, horror nerd, and my best friend,” as Lori describes her – into a heroic role as the body count rises. Megan’s devotion to Lori is fierce and full of tension, and when she arrives at prom in a suit with slicked-back hair, for a moment it seems as if Prom Queen is about to get interesting. But, disappointingly, any suggestion that the girls are going to get together remains just that, and Lori is paired off with a generic jock who we know is a nice guy because he said “thank you” when she brought him a plate of fries in an earlier scene.

One noticeable difference between actual ’80s teen slasher movies and the 21st-century pastiches they inspire is that the bullying is much less vicious in the modern films. That’s another negative here, as Prom Queen attempts a satirical take by making popular girl Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza) a miserable prisoner of her own perfectionism. But she’s just not mean enough – to Lori, to her friends, or to herself – for this angle to work. Playing against the similarly listless Lori, their prom-based rivalry culminates with a halfhearted dance-off that leaves nothing on the floor but the viewer’s time.

Again, if these mild sequences contrasted with effective – or even just disgusting – horror, they’d be forgivable. But Prom Queen doesn’t try that hard to scare its audience, either. There are some good ideas here: One kill involves the extremely dangerous (and now largely obsolete) guillotine paper cutters that once threatened fingertips in offices and classrooms around the world. But the tension in these scenes is practically nonexistent, a problem that’s made worse by anemic sound effects and Halloween-store quality gore.

One small, but telling sign of Prom Queen’s all-around indifference is the construction of the teens’ dance outfits, which lack the outrageous kitsch of actual ‘80s prom dresses. They’re just knee-length A-line skirts sewed to simple bodices with unfinished seams and maybe a ruffle on the shoulder, and they look like a costumer missed a deadline and knocked out a dozen of them on set that morning. That’s just speculation, of course; maybe the wardrobe department was prepared, and it’s Palmer who didn’t care enough to pay attention to this particular detail.

But if care wasn’t put into the costumes, or the performances, or the script, or the gore, then where did it go? And, more importantly, if the people making it didn’t try that hard, why should we bother to press play? Netflix has an answer to this, too: Prom Queen, like any movie produced by the streaming service, is just a ploy to keep us logged in, designed to autoplay when we stand up to use the bathroom or get a snack after finishing something more engaging. And it shows.