Fear Street: Prom Queen Isn’t A Very Serious Film
Depending on how cheesy you like your movies, Fear Street: Prom Queen is only good in one aspect. If you, however, enjoy momentous cheese, then please, by all means, ignore this article, and perhaps bring a stack of crackers with you.
If you’d like to hear more, though, then there’s plenty to talk about. Plenty to examine. The third biggest question one might ask about a slasher—and Fear Street: Prom Queen is a slasher to its core—beyond if the movie is good or scary is whether or not it’s fun? For those of us who are fans of special-effects gore and outlandish movies, does this movie deserve the popcorn treatment?
Fear Street: Prom Queen Is Great For Burning Time
Yep. Oh yes, indeed. Not only is this movie full of cartoonishly violent deaths, it’s also funny. None of these characters are meant to be taken seriously, and their reactions match that. A man’s arm is cut off, and he says a catchphrase, for Christ’s sake. The first few scenes of Fear Street: Prom Queen consist of exposition dumping the scenario and explaining all the cliché people involved.
Unfortunately, this actually doesn’t do enough to make things clear. I actually got confused after the first kill because the movie had established two different goth-style characters, and I’d mixed them up. Even once the cast is smaller, the character’s personalities are barely represented, and the main thing to remember them by is how they died.
Some Of These Characters Are Barely Their Tropes
But what graphic, splattering deaths they are. Though most of the kills are limited to hand-held weapons, it’s pretty visceral. One involving a buzz saw could’ve gone longer and even more hardcore, but if you’re in the camp of people who’s not seen a ton of slasher movies—which, cards on the table, is a group that includes me—it’s going to make you squirm, or cheer, as the case may be. Fear Street: Prom Queen understands that its runtime is going to be a series of death scenes and tries its best to accommodate.
There’s an ever-present danger of tedium with such a setup, though, and Fear Street: Prom Queen barely escapes it. For a good chunk of the movie, there’s the prom going on in one room, and then people wander away for various reasons, and then die. The pattern is so obvious and so unbroken for so long that it felt like ticking off boxes, even if the kills were good for their five seconds.
Fear Street: Prom Queen Has A Repetition Problem
But the mystery holds the movie in place. That’s the one good thing I hinted at earlier. It stays interesting off effective red herrings and fun twists. I was not successful in guessing the killer at almost any moment. The movie simply understands what you would assume, and what tropes you would expect, and fills the cast with possibilities. Perhaps a more seasoned fan of the subgenre would find it annoying because of how many there are, but I had a lot of fun constantly going “oh, it could be them” and then having some moment prove me fully or partially wrong.
Sure, like everything else in this film, the motivations are cheesy, and the suddenly evil act is campy, but I do need to clarify that I am not against that. I like me some silliness. Fear Street: Prom Queen isn’t hiding its influences, and it’s not trying to be a serious film. This is not earnestness brought low by incompetence. This is earnestness that never was on the beaten path. They very clearly made the movie they wanted to make, with only a few things I would call actual errors, and if you watch the first five minutes and find it annoying, then bail out—but otherwise, stay for some gory fun.
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