½
Fear Street Part One: 1994 (R), on Netflix
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Caution: spoilers.
This is the first in a trilogy of films based on books by R.L. Stine (which I haven't read). The films were released weekly in July 2021, but I didn't see them until 2025. The first film is set in 1994.
It begins with a mall closing for the night in the town of Shadyside. A young woman named Heather (Maya Hawke) is chased through the mall by someone wearing a skull mask, and is eventually stabbed to death. The killer turns out to be a fellow mall employee named Ryan Torres, who has killed several other people in the mall that night. He is then shot dead by Sheriff Nick Goode. According to the news, serial killers are not uncommon in the history of Shadyside.
We then meet a teenage girl named Deena Johnson, who has recently broken up with her girlfriend, Sam, after Sam moved to the neighboring town of Sunnyvale, which is crime-free and affluent and I guess most of the people there look down on Shadyside. Deena's younger brother, Josh, spends his time chatting online, as well as researching the town's history of murder sprees. It all began in 1666, when a witch named Sarah Fier was hanged and vowed revenge on the town. Josh believes that over the years, many people have been possessed by Sarah, who used them to kill people. Deena's friends, Simon and Kate, take the whole witch story as a myth and treat it as a joke. There is a vigil in Sunnyvale for the victims of Ryan Torres, after which Sam's new boyfriend, Peter, tailgates the bus that the Shadyside kids are riding home on. Deena attempts to get back at them by throwing the contents of a cooler at their car, but looses her grip on the cooler, which flies out of the bus and causes Peter to crash his car. Sam, who was in the car, is injured, and crawls out of the car. She then has a vision of Sarah Fier.
The following night, Deena and her friends are stalked by someone in a skull mask, who they assume to be Peter. They go to the hospital to tell Sam to get Peter to knock it off, but she insists Peter has been with her all night. Peter is then killed by the skull mask killer, who eventually turns out to be Ryan Torres, back from the dead somehow. They try to tell Sheriff Goode about this, but he doesn't believe them. So they try to deal with it themselves. Over the course of the night, a couple of other killers from Shadyside's past return from the dead to stalk them as well. Deena, Sam, Simon, and Kate begin taking Josh seriously about the witch's curse.
And I won't spoil much more of what happens, except to say not everyone survives. The killers are eventually stopped, but it turns out the curse is still in effect, in a way I won't reveal. Anyway, I thought it was a fairly good movie. Not great, but good. Reasonably scary, for something aimed at teenagers, anyway. It pays homage to earlier slasher films, most notably Scream (but with a supernatural twist). I found the characters reasonably likable, and I thought the relationship between Deena and Sam was handled pretty well. And I guess that's all I have to say, for now.
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 (R), on Netflix
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This is the second film in the trilogy, set mostly in 1978, but bookmarked by scenes in 1994. Review coming soon.