Category: Film Reviews

He’s All That (TV-MA)

Addison Rae, Tanner Buchanan.

Also appearing here is Rachel Leigh Cook — who you may remember took her glasses off thus signifying her transition from nerd to looker in 1999’s She’s All That. Here she plays Anna, mom to lead girl Padgett (Rae). A high school senior, Padgett doesn’t just dress fancy and use eye-puffiness-reducing masks for funsies; she’s a paycheck earning, free-stuff getting social media influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers. She even helped her boyfriend Jordan (Peyton Meyer) gain followers and jump-start his pop star career. But then she catches Jordan cheating on her — and, horror of horrors, the moment is livestreamed. She loses her sponsorship (which she’d been counting on to fill her college fund) and finds herself meme-ed as “bubble girl” from the snot bubble in her nose during her break-up crying. To earn back her followers (and her sponsorship) she agrees to a bet with frenemy Alden (Madison Pettis): find a loser and make him a hottie. Alden picks as the loser a flannel-wearing 1990s throwback named Cameron (Buchanan, who is also on the TV show Cobra Kai and is really making a nice career out of nostalgia-based media).

Cameron is all sarcasm about high school and taking film photos with messaging about the shallowness of society, which his best friend Nisha (Annie Jacob) finds entertaining. (Nisha is probably the movie’s most interesting character overall. When Netflix turns this thing into a series or cinematic universe or whatever, it should follow Nisha.) At first he isn’t sure what to make of Padgett’s sudden interest in him, but soon, and with some nudging from his younger sister Brin (Isabella Crovetti), he finds himself genuinely starting to like her. Likewise, Padgett starts to see Cameron as more than just a project, but will the secret of what led her to start hanging out with him jeopardize their chance at a real friendship?

Ooo, will it? If, based solely on the movie’s title, you sketched out all the beats in this movie and then took a drink every time the movie hit one, you’d be drunk before the first half hour. He’s All That hits every expected plot point — but delightfully. This movie knows what it is and knows who is watching it, a group that probably includes some actual teenagers but probably also includes a fair number of me-agers who saw the 1999 original and enjoy the Snapple-and-a-Hot-Pocket treat that is this silly blend of “Ha! That guy!” and teenage rom-com storytelling. So pop some popcorn and watch this puppy, fellow Olds; come for the Rachel Leigh Cook and modern day Clueless-y look at excessively rich teenagers, stay for an entertainingly cast supporting character who shows up in the movie’s final scenes. B Available on Netflix.

Vacation Friends (R)

John Cena, Lil Rel Howery.

Marcus (Howery) and his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji) are in Mexico for a relaxing getaway — or it could be relaxing if Marcus weren’t so tense about all of his plans for his big proposal. When they get to their fancy suite, which should be all rose petals and romantic music, they find a soggy mess from a burst Jacuzzi from the room above. Despondent and unable to find a room at any hotel better than a Best Western by the airport, Marcus and Emily agree to accept the offer of random fellow vacationers Ron (Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner) to stay in their giant suite (which happens to be the one whose leaky Jacuzzi flooded their room). Rona and Kyla seem crazy to the tightly wound Marcus, what with their carefree jet-skiing and their cocaine-rimmed margaritas, but, in the spirit of having a romantic vacation, Emily convinces him to just go with it. Eventually, the four end up having an adventure-filled week, full of bar-dancing (Marcus) and bar fights (Kyla) and culminating with Marcus and Emily getting married (for real? Maybe?) in a cave by a shaman type and then getting so drunk Marcus can’t totally remember the rest of the evening. And maybe doesn’t want to, as the flashes he does remember seem to suggest that he and Kyla got a little friendlier than is cool for the night of one’s wedding to another person.

When they say goodbye to Ron and Kyla at the airport, Marcus and Emily are fairly confident that they will never see that couple again but then, in the midst of the festivities for their “real” wedding — with Emily’s posh, disapproving parents (Robert Wisdom, Lynn Whitfield) running the show — Ron and Kyla show up again.

Cena and Howery have very good buddy (or maybe reluctant-buddy) chemistry. This is the type of role that makes great use of Cena — one that balances his physicality with his comedy chops. And the pairing with Howery works to complement both actors, playing up Howery’s stress so that he isn’t just a straight man to Cena’s wackiness. Orji and Hagner are also key elements to the mix here, not just “girlfriend role” characters who fill out the scene. Hagner in particular has a kind of good-hearted, upbeat zaniness that feels like a blend of Kate Hudson and Isla Fisher.

Have the dumb “crazy people in extreme situations” comedies changed or have I changed, because Vacation Friends feels like the kind of movie that might have once annoyed me but that I really enjoyed. I mean not “and the Oscar for best original screenplay goes to” enjoyed but laughed a couple of big belly laughs at and basically liked spending time with. Is this another example of a movie being more suited to the relaxed atmosphere of one’s own sofa versus the “you paid money to be here and even more money for this popcorn” of the theater, where one (me) may be less forgiving? I don’t know the answer to these questions but I do know that Vacation Friends was enjoyably stupid fun. B Available on Hulu.

Kate (R)

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Woody Harrelson.

Birds of Prey underused Winstead’s awesomeness in her role as The Huntress and this movie feels like the demonstration of how much more action hero she has in her. Here, Kate (Winstead) is an assassin who is bothered by a job that had her killing a man right in front of his teenage daughter, Ani (Miku Patricia Matineau). Months later, she tries to tell her handler Varrick (Harrelson) that she wants to retire but as you know if you see even one of these movies, retirement is seldom in the cards for your fancy assassin-types. Instead, she finds herself poisoned with about a day to live and seek vengeance on everyone who had something to do with her fast-approaching death.

The movie is set in Tokyo and takes place mostly at night, giving the whole thing a kind of neon coolness. She does a fair amount of snazzy fighting — some shooting, some stabbing, one guy is felled by her getting him to trip. Winstead is entertaining enough that I regularly forgot the movie didn’t have a whole lot more going on. This is a fine if not particularly innovative pick for when you just want some low-effort action. C+ Available on Netflix.

Disney Princesses Remixed: An Ultimate Princess Celebration (G)

This special/short film is primarily a handful of performances by what the internet tells me are Disney stars (in the live-action people sense) doing pop (or in one case, punk-y rock) takes on Disney movie songs. Brandy also shows up to sing an original song. The whole thing is knit together with a framing device that has a skateboarding, Disney-loving young girl picking the songs and princess qualities to build the remix with the help of an Alexa-like personal assistant. The gist of all of this is, I think, to sell the princesses, even some of the older ones with soppier character stories, as good and non-problematic modern girl avatars. And I think this special is fairly successful at this. The songs, while a bit on the poppy side for my personal taste, were a hit with my kids, whose big complaint is that there weren’t more. B Available on Disney+.

Worth (PG-13)

Michael Keaton, Amy Ryan.

Keaton gives a solid performance, reminiscent of his work in Spotlight, as Ken Feinberg, the lawyer who was the Special Master of the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund. Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11 he is appointed to get victims’ families to sign on to receiving money from the U.S. government in lieu of suing — the airlines, among other possible targets. His team has to deal with the raw emotions of people who recently lost loved ones, many of whom see pretty much any dollar figure as an insult. Though full of individual heartbreaking 9/11 stories (many of which are based on real people or are composites of real people, according to an article in Slate), the movie is actually largely a procedural about how Feinberg attempts to balance the staggering weight of the emotion of the situation with what both Congress and the president paint as an urgent need to get the financial aspect of the deaths settled without potentially economy-tanking lawsuits. The movie shows Feinberg mess up in his initial attempts to present the fund to the families, and slowly learn how to navigate his difficult task. This is not a particularly fun watch but it is a solid group of performances and an interesting look at the messy, personal aftermath of the attacks for those who lost someone. B+ Available on Netflix.

Come from Away (TV-14)

Jenn Colella, Sharon Wheatley.

This musical play tells the story of the passengers from all over the world who found their flights diverted to Newfoundland on Sept. 11, 2001. The Broadway cast performs a live stage production, recorded earlier this year in front of an audience of people wearing masks as we see in the movie’s opening scenes. The cast, most of whom play several characters (identifiable by a change of hat or jacket and maybe a different accent), make up the townspeople of Gander and the people from across the globe who wind up in the town after a harrowing day on a plane. Sometimes, literally more than a day, as passengers sat on their airplanes, between flights and just waiting on a tarmac, for 28 hours. We meet the mother of a New York City firefighter, a couple who find their relationship fraying, a man from London who becomes smitten with a woman from Texas, a female pilot who knew one of the pilots in the hijacked planes as well as the head of the local SPCA who is desperate to get food and water to the pets stuck in airplane cargo holds, various small-town mayors, a new TV reporter. It’s a lively show that manages to have humor and energy while still capturing some element of anxiety and the gravity of the event it’s depicting. And it does a good job of bringing us up close to the performers while still letting us see some of the staging magic. B Available on Apple TV+.

The Ice Road (PG-13)

Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne.

This movie is so exactly-as-advertised that sometimes it almost feels too simple: Mike (Neeson) is part of a group of people driving three trucks with heavy equipment across an ice road in Manitoba. At least one of the trucks needs to make it to a collapsed mine within some 30 hours to save the lives of 26 miners stuck inside. The roads have technically been closed because it is now early spring, so the first challenge the truckers face is the potential for the ice to crack and send them and their trucks very quickly into the freezing waters. As you’d expect, more challenges develop along the way.

The team includes Mike’s brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), a veteran who requires Mike’s constant care due to PTSD and aphasia that jumbles his words; Goldenrod (Fishburne), the man who put together the team; Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), a young trucker who has worked with Goldenrod in the past, and Varnay (Benjamin Walker), the insurance guy connected to the mine.

Trucks drive on ice, complications arise — that’s pretty much the movie. And that’s fine! For all that not every performance or line of dialogue feels particularly Oscar-winning, it’s a movie that holds your attention and provides a solid mix of action, suspense and “huh, ice roads, cool.” This isn’t Neeson’s best “late-career action Neeson” performance but he knows this territory well and turns in a perfectly workable performance. B- Available on Netflix.

The Last Letter from Your Lover (TV-MA)

Shailene Woodley, Felicity Jones.

Also Nabhaan Rizwan and Callum Turner (who I couldn’t place until I looked him up on IMDb; you may know him as Frank Churchill from 2020’s Emma.).

Present-day newspaper writer Ellie (Jones) finds letters from the 1960s between J, whom we learn is Jennifer Stirling (Woodley), and Boot, her pet name for Anthony O’Hare (Turner), a then-newspaper reporter. They meeton the Riviera, where Jennifer and her wet-blanket husband Lawrence (Joe Alwyn) are sort of vacationing. Mostly, he runs off to deal with work things and she’s left alone, which is how Anthony finds things when he shows up at their house to interview Lawrence for a profile. J and Boot, as they start to call each other, end up spending time together, forming a friendship that, when they return to London, turns into an affair.

We see this story play out in flashback as Ellie, who thinks maybe there’s a good feature in this story, finds letters in the newspaper’s archives with the help of archivist Rory (Rizwan). Naturally, reading all these love letters together causes these modern people to start to feel some feelings.

If you generally like romances (particularly with this kind of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society events in the past/events in the present structure) and enjoy period wardrobe (I could fill up an online shopping cart with Woodley’s dresses and accessories) and need something on in the background while you fold a bunch of towels or pay bills, The Last Letter from Your Lover is fine. I feel like some very good naps could be generated by the scenes of well-dressed people drinking cocktails and listening to period music. If you need something more, like heat generated between any of the couples or really compelling characters or interesting dialogue, you probably need to look elsewhere. C+ Available on Netflix.

Val (R)

It’s the documentary you didn’t know you needed about Val Kilmer, narrated with Val’s words read by Jack Kilmer, Val’s son and an actor himself. Val tells the story of Kilmer from a childhood of making movies and having fun with three brothers in the suburban greater Los Angeles area through his career that often seems like a long, only occasionally successful attempt at finding acting jobs that really speak to him. He played Iceman in Top Gun and was a Batman but his real passion seems to be for a Mark Twain movie that he was attempting to get off the ground by touring with a one-man theatrical production called Citizen Twain (according to Vulture, since Kilmer suffered extensive loss of his voice due to throat cancer and its treatment, that production has turned into Cinema Twain, a filmed version of the play that he was touring with pre-pandemic). It’s an intriguing project and one that helps you to understand Kilmer the artist as opposed to just Val Kilmer, Hollywood celebrity. This movie is itself the project of Kilmer’s long love of shooting video and the fact that he saved boxes of footage from his life over the years. Thus do we get to see him clowning around with babyfaced Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn backstage at a play they all worked on long ago and footage of his family, including a movie-loving younger brother who died as a teenager. The movie feels like a scrapbook, collecting his own video, clips of movies and interviews and other souvenirs from his life. It’s a fascinating approach to a biography and an interesting glimpse at acting as a life’s work. B+ Available on Amazon Prime.

Jolt (R)

Kate Beckinsale, Stanley Tucci.

Also Laverne Cox, Bobby Cannavale, Jai Courtney and Susan Sarandon on occasional narration.

Lindy (Beckinsale) has extreme impulse control issues. It’s not that she drinks too much or dates too many of the wrong men (though, as she explains to her therapist Dr. Muchin, played by Tucci, she’s done these things too). When provoked by the irritations and annoyances of everyday life and everyday jerks, Lindy responds by beating the tar out of the provocateur. She’s tried drugs, extreme sports and military service as ways to dampen or channel-elsewhere these impulses but nothing works until Dr. Muchin outfits her with a vest that gives her an electrical jolt at the press of a button. With this button she’s able to not grievously injure the jerk giving a hard time to the valet outside a restaurant or the rude waitress inside as she nervously attempts a first date with Justin (Courtney). 

After the first date goes unexpectedly wonderfully, Lindy is excited for their next date, but her joy at a possible new relationship turns into rage when she learns that Justin has been murdered. Detectives Vicars (Cannavale) and Nevin (Cox) won’t tell her much about Justin but Lindy knows just enough to start her own violence-filled investigation of his death. 

I feel like this movie, with its aggressive, self-conscious Bad Girl Attitude and overall low-rent feel, would have annoyed me had I seen it in a theater. But at home, drinking my own beverages and eating my own snacks and ignoring whatever chores need doing so I can give enough of my attention to Beckinsale’s performance, which is mostly made up of the rocker girl wig and a bunch of impressively high-heeled boots, I find I don’t need quite as much from a movie. Which is to say Jolt is kind of silly and junkfoody and totally fine. Beckinsale seems like she’s having fun, Cox and Cannavale seem like they’re having fun. Yes, the movie finds Lindy more spunky and charming than I do, but she’s not actively grating. 

In some better version of this movie, more could have been made about the ideas of free will, impulse control and Lindy’s ability to pick and choose how much to put up with and not. But this movie doesn’t dive that deep. It floats along the surface at a fast enough clip to be a solid choice for the thing that’s on when you don’t want to have to pay too much attention to what you’re watching. C+ Available on Amazon Prime.

Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It (PG-13)

National treasure Rita Moreno tells the story of her life and her career in this charming documentary.

This movie is full of Latino performers who talk about how Rita was their role model, particularly for actresses like Eva Longoria, Karen Olivo and Justina Machado (who costarred with Rita on the recent remake of the series One Day at a Time).Rita talks about what the lack of diverse parts for Latina actors meant for her and how she was able to slowly break free of a career of playing “spicy” temptresses (her commentary on things like the direction to be more “spicy” is a delight). She also discusses the added yuckiness of gender dynamics in Hollywood, the many times she felt she had to just grin and bear it to keep working. Despite all this struggle, Moreno also expresses her joy with her career, how much she loves performing and how she’s been able to wrestle with personal demons to be in what appears to be a very good place, with a supporting role in the upcoming remake of West Side Story (the 1961 movie being where she earned that O in her EGOT).

At 89 (90 later this year), she seems to be having an absolute blast, whether she’s chatting up Jimmy Kimmel or hanging out backstage at One Day at a Time or calling BS on some aspect of the politics of the movie’s present (2018, as far as I can tell). This 90-minute movie is a warm, energetic visit with your funny, sarcastic aunt. A Available for rent or purchase and coming to PBS at some point in the future. The first three seasons of One Day at a Time are available on Netflix. Some of the fourth season episodes are available on Paramount+ and one more is available on Hulu. The animated “The Politics Episode” from Season 4 doesn’t seem to be available anywhere? But the 1961 West Side Story is available for rent or purchase, as is 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, another musical featuring Moreno.

No Sudden Move (R)

Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro.

A simple job that will earn everyone a good chunk of cash for a few hours of work goes all kinds of wrong in this new cops and crooks movie set in the 1950s from director Steven Soderbergh.

Curt Goynes (Cheadle) doesn’t trust the mysterious Mr. Jones (Brendan Fraser) who hires him or the two men, Ron Russo (Del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), who join him on what he’s told will be three hours of work earning him $6,000. That job: babysit the family of Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a man who has access to an important document. If he’ll go to his office and take the document out of his boss’s safe, his wife Mary (Amy Seimetz) and his children Matthew (Noah Jupe) and Peggy (Lucy Holt) will be fine — at least, so the men who hold them at gunpoint say. The men wear masks and assure the Wertz family, as they themselves have been told, that nobody will get hurt.

Of course, even a “simple” job can go awry, with all sorts of layers and unseen alliances. The movie has some nice small roles for the likes of Ray Liotta, Matt Damon and Jon Hamm. This isn’t the bouncy fun of the Ocean’s movies but it is a very Soderberghian cool crisp cocktail of capering and doublecross with just a dash of dry humor. B+ Available on HBO Max.

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Fear Street: Part Three 1666 (R)

Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr.

Also Gillian Jacobs and other people who appeared in the first two movies.

The Netflix trio of Fear Street movies wraps up with this episode that takes us all the way back to the beginnings of Shadyside and Sunnyvale, back when they were one town called Unity and a young woman named Sarah Fier was hanged for witchcraft. Deena (Madeira), the Shadyside teen battling zombie serial killers who managed to stay alive when so many other teens didn’t, attempted to put Sarah Fier to rest at the end of the last movie and was suddenly plunged back into 1666 and into the body of colonial-era Sarah. We see the past play out with many of the same actors from the previous two movies playing roles here, including, crucially, Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), Deena’s Sunnyvale girlfriend, now standing in for Hannah Miller, the pastor’s daughter and Sarah’s sweetheart.

After showing us 1666, the movie returns to 1994 for a final (or is it?) showdown.

What is the big evil creating a legacy of murder in Shadyside? It’s not just the patriarchy but that’s also not an incorrect answer. This factor, and a general “stand up against various forms of bigotry” strain running throughout, helps to give the movie some pluckiness; I was getting some real early-seasons Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes off several parts of this movie (in the best possible way). This series ended up with a pretty top-notch cast of young actors for these sorts of roles — Madeira in particular is a great Final Girl-style action hero.

I also like the overall presentation of all three films: there is decent craft in all aspects of these movies and fun soundtracks (no expense spared in the music here). And I like the three-Fridays-in-a-row release schedule. You can binge them now but you could also have made an event out of their release. I’m impressed, good on you Netflix and R.L. Stine adapters. I gave the first two movies B+; I think this fun little triple feature might just deserve an A- overall. Available on Netflix.

Gunpowder Milkshake (R)

Karen Gillan, Lena Headey.

Also Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Paul Giamatti.

Sam (Gillan) is a no-nonsense assassin working for crime guy Nathan (Giamatti) in this richly colored, entertainingly mannered shoot-’em-up movie.

Sam learned the business from her mom, Scarlet (Headey), who had to take off abruptly 15 years ago after angering the wrong people. For reasons that don’t quite make sense, Scarlet doesn’t leave the then-teenage Sam at the Library, a sort of professional association for lady bad-asses staffed by some lady bad-asses: Anna May (Bassett), Florence (Yeoh) and Madeleine (Gugino). But when the now young-30s-something Sam has herself killed the wrong people, she turns to the Librarians to help her dispose of some weaponry and later for some extra firepower. She also finds herself protecting the 8-year-old Emily (Chloe Coleman), who quickly starts to call herself Sam’s apprentice.

Gunpowder Milkshake feels like a very appropriate name for this movie in that it often comes across like a McFlurry or a Blizzard with bits of Guy Richie stylings and the Kill Bill movies swirled with thick ribbons of John Wick and a vaguely Carmen Sandiego outfit worn by Gillan. The result is not unpleasant. It’s a bit weird and lumpy at times, like some pretzel-fudge-cookie-dough-cinnamon concoction would be, but it’s overall affable. It’s an accessible ladies-kicking-butt-plus-slo-mos movie. It’s violent but not cruel, it has its gory moments at times but not grisly. It has the feel of a highly stylized, well-cast one-off comic book come to life. B- Available on Netflix.

Werewolves Within (R)

Sam Richardson, Milana Vayntrub.

You know Milana Vayntrub even if you’re thinking “who is Milana Vayntrub?” She is the woman-girl-lady of indeterminate age from the AT&T ads and when you see her here she feels at least as famous as your average sitcom star, bringing the same quirky energy from the commercials to her character here.

Vayntrub plays Cecily, the mailwoman in Beaverfield, who shows around Finn Wheeler (Richardson), the new forest ranger in what turns out to be a pretty strange small town. A man named Sam Parker (Wayne Duvall) has pitted neighbor against neighbor, husband against wife, with his offers to buy people’s land to bring his pipeline through. Cecily also fills Finn in on assorted hot Beaverfield goss — who left who for whom, who had an affair with whom and who is just a straight up weirdo.

With a big storm approaching, the town is suddenly shaken by two startling, maybe-or-maybe-not connected events: a woman’s small dog is eaten while she lets him out on a leash, the townsfolks’ generators are slashed and damaged. Add to this the dead body that Finn finds and soon everybody is holed up in Jeanine’s (Catherine Curtin) inn, trying to figure out whether the danger is outside or inside.

As the title suggests, “werewolves” soon become the most considered suspect — even if there are plenty of other people with motive for Muhr-Der and also, really, werewolves? It’s a fun little blend of locked room murder mystery and possibly-creature horror and the movie seems to play the tone just right — jokey but not aggressively so and with characters who are wacky but not insufferable. I guess you could call this movie (which is apparently based on a video game) horror but I feel like it is far more a light (well, light with some gruesome injury and death), fun comedy. B Available for rent.

Fear Street Part 1: 1994 & Fear Street Part 2: 1978 (R)

Kiana Madeira, Benjamin Flores Jr.

Also Olivia Scott Welch, Julia Rehwald, Fred Hechinger, Ashley Zukerman and, primarily in the second movie, Gillian Jacobs.

In 1994, the town of Shadyside is once again dealing with the sudden and gruesome deaths of a group of people — in this case, several people at the local mall — at the hands of someone who never showed any particular kill-y tendencies before. It’s the Shadyside curse, say residents; the town has seen serial killers before, one every couple of decades it seems. For Deena (Madeira), it’s just further proof that she lives in a cruddy town and has a go-nowhere future, especially since her girlfriend Sam (Welch) moved to neighboring Sunnyvale, a town full of big homes and rich kids and seemingly zero serial killers. Even though the mall killer is shot and killed after his initial spree, a sense of danger still pervades the town, especially after Sunnyvale kids start to torment the Shadysiders with a skeleton mask similar to the one found on the killer. When the skeleton mask figure continues to appear, Deena and her friends start to wonder if it’s really a prank or if, in the words of a note slipped by Sheriff Nick Goode (Zukerman) into the mail slot of the reclusive C. Berman (Jacobs), “it’s happening again” and all the killings are a part of the legend of Sarah Fier, a woman hanged as a witch in the area centuries earlier.

Certainly, that’s what some of the kids thought in 1978. As Deena, Sam, Deena’s brother Josh (Flores) and others fight the skeleton masked killer, they find a mention of C. Berman, the person who survived the last round of serial killings in Shadyside. They reach out to try to get some advice for how to fight whatever it is they’re fighting.

In 1978, several kids were murdered at Camp Nightwing (I mean, of course they were, with a name like that). Sisters Cindy (Emily Rudd) and Ziggy (Sadie Sink) Berman were at the camp, Cindy as a counselor and Ziggy as a much-bullied camper. As the camp prepares for the “uhm, huh”-ily named camp game Color War (a kind of Capture the Flag that pits Sunnyvalers against Shadysiders), camp nurse Mary Lane (Jordana Spiro) seems to have some kind of mental break and tries to kill camp counselor and Cindy’s boyfriend Tommy Slater (McCabe Slye), saying that one way or another he’s going to die that night anyway. Ziggy is sad to see this happen to Mary, one of the few people in camp who has been nice to her, and is drawn to a notebook on Mary’s desk that has notes and maps related to Sarah Fier. Mary’s daughter Ruby Lane (Jordyn DiNatale) was the serial killer during a spate of killings in the 1950s and Mary seems to have been investigating the town’s murderous history and the curse that Sarah Fier supposedly put on what was then the town of Union before it separated into Sunnyvale and Shadyside. As the sisters, Tommy and fellow counselors start to look into Mary’s findings, murder once again takes hold of someone.

These classic slashers are not typically my kind of movie and this is very much a classic slasher, with some real gory, red corn syrupy deaths. But there is a pluckiness to these movies, sort of like the Scream movies without the self-conscious meta commentary. The leads — Deen, Josh, Sam and their buddies in the first movie, the Berman sisters and some other camp counselors in the second — are appealing and are able to balance the tension and jokiness that give these movies their energy. I was also impressed by how the first two movies fit together and tease the third, Fear Street Part 3: 1666, which will be released Friday, July 16, on Netflix. So far, these movies are two solid entries in a potential triple feature. B+ Available on Netflix.

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