Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 continues Netflix’s nostalgia-soaked throwbacky teen-slashy trilogy inspired by R.L. Stine’s other, non-Goosebumps book series. Last week, we swallowed some Garbage (and Portishead and White Zombie) with Part One: 1994, which established the convoluted saga of Shadyside, a town haunted by many murders because of an old witch’s centuries-old curse. Part Two has its cake by picking up right where the previous chapter left off, and eats it too by jumping back in time to tell a story about kids listening to Kansas, the Runaways and Captain and Tennille while getting hacked to bits by a maniac. Will this middle chapter in the series transcend the opening salvo — which was well-received but left me underwhelmed — and be more than the sum of its pop-culture references? Let’s find out.
FEAR STREET PART TWO: 1978: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: For the moment, it’s still 1994. C. Berman (Gillian Jacobs) is a character we met briefly in the first movie, the woman who survived the curse and lived to be someone with dozens of alarm clocks set for every little thing in her life, including a highly depressing meal of TV-dinner mac-and-cheese and a tall frosty glass of Jim Beam. She listens to David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” as she feeds her dog, Major Tom, and obsessively-compulsively clicks and twists and bolts the many locks on her doors and windows. That doesn’t stop someone from shining flashlights through her mailslot and windows and gaining entry, and those someones are Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.). They desperately need C. Berman’s help for reasons that would spoil the first movie, and we wouldn’t want to do that, since some of you are going to binge all three when Fear Street Part Three: 1666 hits next week. So I tread carefully.
C. Berman’s help requires her to sit down Deena and Josh for a really long flashback to 1978, when she went to summer camp, and her sister was murdered by one of the many infamous Shadyside slashers. “In Shadyside, the past is never really past,” C. Berman says, which is a way of saying this movie is a sequel that quite cleverly goes backwards on the timeline. The place is Camp Nightwing, which is apparently close enough to Shadyside for shit to suck ass. Cindy Berman (Emily Rudd) is a goody-goody preppy counselor, and her younger sister Ziggy — as in “Stardust,” one presumes — is a troublemaking camper played by Sadie Sink of Stranger Things fame. Ziggy is targeted by Sunnyvale bullies who claim she’s possessed by the witch, so cue “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult on your 8-track. Like most Shadysiders, she has a chip on her shoulder and a scowl on her face, and she knows her sister is a phony in her barrettes and trendy polo shirt and moccasins, listening to “Love Will Keep Us Together” and kissing Tommy Slater (McCabe Slye) but removing his hand from her posterior lest things progress too far.
No, REAL Shadysiders rawdog it hard, like teen counselor burnouts Alice (Ryan Simpkins) and Arnie (Sam Brooks) do while jamming “Cherry Bomb” on the cassette deck, before settling down to smoke some grass and figure out a way to score some downers; maybe they should try to sneak some pills out of the infirmary while creepy Nurse Lane (Jordana Spiro) and clean-cut Sunnyvaler and future sheriff Nick Goode (Ted Sutherland) aren’t looking. The campers gear up for the big color war, which involves hiding in the woods in the dark and trying not to get “captured” by the other team, a situation that some lunatic might enjoy, especially if that lunatic is cursed by the ancient witch and armed with a dangerously sharp implement and looking for some people to kill with that sharp implement. Sounds like fun for the one carrying the sharp implement!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Say, what day of the week does all this summer-camp slaughter happen? Friday, maybe? And what date on the calendar exactly?
Performance Worth Watching: I really enjoyed Emily Rudd’s wide-eyed characterization of Cindy, the one person who’s trying to be good for goodness’ sake. The film might have worked better if she was the cluelessly sincere rube surrounded by self-aware supporting players winking at all the recognizable cliches, but I should be reviewing the movie that is, not what I want it to be.
Memorable Dialogue: This exchange:
Nick: Carrie? Cool.
Ziggy: You’ve read Carrie?
Nick: Yeah — second favorite after Salem’s Lot.
Bookended by this exchange, which happens after a whole lot of horrific stuff happens:
Nick: I was thinking that once we get outta this, we could start a book club or something? Maybe, uh, Stephen King’s new one’s supposed to be good, I hear.
Ziggy: I’m done with King. Judy Blume for me from now on.
Sex and Skin: Medium-soft-R teen schtupping, featuring sidebutts, brief fullbutts, sideboobs, brief fullboobs.
Our Take: Maybe this is an old-man-yells-at-cloud take, but the Fear Streets are too much pastiche for my taste, and that Nancy Drew-mystery-meets-punish-the-humping-teens-slasher gee-whiz/tasteless tonal aesthetic feels incongruous, more stapled together than seamlessly integrated. They’re earnest when they should be tongue-in-cheek, unwieldy when they should be (pardon the impending word choice) cutting. They struggle to rise above the plot clutter and referential din, and never sink low enough to make you feel like you’re watching something you shouldn’t, which is the precise charm of circa-’81 axe-and-butcher-knife stalker cut-’em-ups. And the big thing 1978 is missing? A decent villain. This baddie is as generic and dull as they get, a gormless possessee plodding around with an axe, the charisma equivalent of dividing by zero. Nobody’s going to dress up like him for Halloween.
All that said, 1978 improves upon its predecessor, being slightly less nostalgia-drenched, less reliant on jump scares, a little better at giving us a reason to give a crap-and-a-quarter about the characters. Director Leigh Janiak keeps the film relatively light on its toes, and forgoes the neon palette for the requisite earth tones, which are less overtly try-hard flashy. Funny: How the campers endure the attempted murder of a counselor by the disturbed nurse, yet just soldier ahead with the color war because otherwise the terrorists win I guess; the obvious emphasis of a drawerful of butcher knives in an early shot; the line “My sister’s in the toilet!”, which is an amusingly literal declaration. Less amusing: Scenes of dumb stoned teenagers with an old map and flashlights stumbling over freshly dug, unfilled graves and a cellar full of Satanic bric-a-brac; that old crumbler of a scare tactic where disembodied voices whisper characters’ names to spook ’em; and enough with the Stephen King namedrops and the Kansas needledrops.
I understand how some audiences will find Fear Street to be an enjoyable remix of familiarities, and appreciate the layer-cake generation-hop storytelling, its contrast of the lily-white happy-happy-joy-joy privileged Sunnyvale residents with the diverse, long-suffering Shadysiders, realists all, no bubbles here. It also occasionally delivers a nice, gory kill, like 1994’s lovely bread-slicer scene, surely your grandma’s favorite bit; 1978 goes so far as to have the killer slaughter children, albeit offscreen, the rare moment when it truly pushes our buttons. Next week’s Part Three leaps back to the year 1666 and incorporates much of the cast from the first two, although how, we don’t know yet — so there’s potential to shake off the shackles of nostalgia and maybe hoe a more creative row. Not that we should expect The Witch, mind you. This series is still more Scooby-Doo than Sleepaway Camp or Dressed to Kill.
Our Call: STREAM IT, I guess, because of its salient enthusiasm — and because I feel like I’m in the minority, sitting on the borderline between taking it and leaving it. Fear Street Part Two: 1978 improves slightly over its predecessor, although I still struggle with my cool indifference to its post-Stranger Things algorithmic nostalgia calculations.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
