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.