{"id":47952,"date":"2025-05-29T15:29:06","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T19:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=47952"},"modified":"2025-05-29T15:29:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T19:29:06","slug":"fear-street-prom-queen-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/29\/fear-street-prom-queen-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN [2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The race for Prom Queen is killer\u2026 literally, as a slasher takes down the crown in Netflix\u2019s Fear Street: Prom Queen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Fear Street: Prom Queen, directed by Matt Palmer and written by Palmer & Donald McLeary and adapted from the 1992 The Prom Queen book, is unconnected to the 2021 trilogy, save for a few mentions of the camp slaughter and overall feel. You won\u2019t find witch Sara Fier or her street here. I\u2019m putting it out there before anyone is confused. Prom Queen doesn\u2019t add to the mythos. Think of it as another book entry in R. L. Stine\u2019s long-running series. Some connect to a larger milieu, some don\u2019t; X-Files mythology vs monster-of-the-week.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I love the separation. For better or worse, Fear Street: Prom Queen plays like an episode of a non-existent Fear Street show. For better, the tone and history of the town are established by the previous entries (although you need not have seen them). Shadyside is a dangerous town, with a cursed history of murder, magic, and mystery; the flip side to the beautiful, rich, trouble-free Sunnyvale. Bad things happen, blood is spilled, and people are ruined. For worse, much of the characterization and story beats feel like an episode expanded from 45 to 90 minutes, without beefing up, leaving a lost feeling as it tries to gain footing. Fear Street: Prom Queen is entertaining, no question. But it also doesn\u2019t commit to what it wants to be, pulling back from reveling in the 1980s slasher cliches and the humor to try to give a depth that isn\u2019t there. Uneven, but worth a view.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lori Granger is a long shot for the crown at Shadyside High\u2019s 1988 prom, but she\u2019s trying anyway. She\u2019s unpopular, with one friend: the horror loving, cynical Megan; apparently this stems from her mother being blamed for her father\u2019s stabbing on prom night eighteen years previously (a weirdly thin way to give her high school hate, but it connects to the prom night of the plot, so shrug?) Between her and the title are this school\u2019s Heathers and the wild drug-dealing Christie. And an axe-wielding killer taking down the teens and others in the way. \"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

How is the slashing? Solid. The bloodiest prom since Mary Lou Mahony returned from the dead in my favorite Nightmare on Elm Street ripoff, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. Okay, Carrie in her various iterations killed far more students, and there is a decent body count, but I wanted to talk about Hello Mary Lou. I adore that wild flick. Palmer sets up each sequence well, with a certain level of shock, sense of tension, and surprise. There are some great kills, often feeling right out of the 1980s. They feature wonderful, practical effects, but a bunch revert to iffy CG. It\u2019s strange, as similar effects are practical in the same movie. However, all are done in the glee that comes from a knowing, self-aware modern kill flick.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Between the kills, the characters and plotting are lacking. The characters aren\u2019t given much: I often was confused on who was who, some of the driving points for them don\u2019t amount to much (Lori\u2019s parentage past, a family rivalry with lead Plastic Tiffany), characters come in like we met them before but hadn\u2019t, and others vanish for too long. They mostly exist as victims and\/or red herrings. There is a looseness to the proceedings, a frustrating scattershot.<\/span><\/p>\n

At ninety minutes exactly, it seems like more of the meat of the matter was cut in favor of blood, or more often, filler, strangely enough.\u00a0 Yes, I say this despite noting it also feels like 45 minutes stretched to 90.\u00a0 Both are true. Many empty bits do nothing with those moments to build the world or characters, or give more for the audience to latch onto. Give more character, or at least dig into the cliches or subvert them. As it stands, the genre riff is airy, not solidifying.\"\"<\/a><\/span>The performances are fine. India Fowler as Lori gives an easy charm as the wannabe Prom Queen. The mean girls, Fina Strazza, Ella Rubin, and Rebecca Ablack, bring the right amount of over-the-top menace of movie high school terrors. Among the younger cast, Suzanna Son as Megan brings a spark, stealing the show wherever she\u2019s on screen. But it\u2019s the older cast\u2019s Katherine Waterson, of Alien: Covenant, as Tiffany\u2019s mom, with a delicately unhinged performance, who most understood the assignment, channeling Carla Gugino. Sadly, American Pie\u2019s Chris Klein and especially The Conjuring\u2019s Lili Taylor are wasted as little more than \u201chey, I know them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a great film, but it isn\u2019t truly bad. It\u2019s an enjoyable slasher that does what you\u2019d expect it to do, even if it drops the ball too often. Fear Street: Prom Queen reminds me of one of the titles you\u2019d get at a video store as part of a Five Movies, Five Bucks promotion. You didn\u2019t come in to get it specifically, but \u201csure, why not?\u201d and pop in after Gremlins and everyone winds down. It has a silly under-cooked reveal after obvious red herrings, oddly holding back on some aspects, and the point-by-point doesn\u2019t make logical sense outside of the viewer. But those same films it pulls from did the same. Put yourself in that mindset, sit back, and enjoy Fear Street: Prom Queen as the light but entertaining slasher it is.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The race for Prom Queen is killer\u2026 literally, as a slasher takes down the crown in Netflix\u2019s Fear Street: Prom Queen.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[477],"class_list":["post-47952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47957,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47952\/revisions\/47957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}