FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN (2025)

New streaming on Netflix!
Directed by Matt Palmer.
Written by Matt Palmer, Donald McLeary, R.L. Stine.
Check out the trailer here!!

As Senior Prom approaches, the Prom Queens of Shadyside High start disappearing. Still, one of the unlikeliest contestants Lori Granger (played by India Fowler) has dreams of reinventing herself by winning the crown. Meanwhile, a bright red raincoat wearing hatchet killer lurks in the darkness whittling down the competition.

FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN is blanded down with lame 80’s references, toothless MEAN GIRL-isms, and shaky motivations for pretty much all characters involved. Let’s start with the 80’s. It would be great if those behind this film knew a little bit about the eighties other than snagging a boppy playlist off of Spotify. Yeah, I like some of the music from the eighties as well, but no one in this film looks or acts as if they actually existed in the eighties. It was an era of bad hair, terribly loud styles, excess, and self-centeredness. After watching FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN, I watched the 80’s slasher THE MAJORETTES, simply to cleanse my palette and wow, it’s night and day. Look at the hairsprayed bimbettes in THE MAJORETTES and then at the Honey Boo Boo’s in PROM QUEEN. None of the girls in PROM QUEEN were committed enough to even get their hair cut to look like the authentic eighties gals from those eighties films. This is just a teen slasher that lifts the eighties culture when it is convenient and forgets about it for the rest of the time. 80’s tunes are only used to make strum those nostalgic chords, but noting about this movie exemplifies the era it so proudly touts.

But this is not really a film for me. It’s safe teen girl horror with groups of girls treating each other cattily, thrift shop fashion shows, and dance offs. While the 80’s slashers weren’t necessarily deep character pieces, at least it felt like the slasher was trying to appeal to both men and women. Here, all the tropes that were set in Hallmark movies twenty years ago apply. And sorry, while there were sometimes cool corners where people busted out a breakdance, a dance battle would have been laughed out of the gym in my school. In a movie filled with lame moments, this dance battle scene is the worst. Then there’s an out of the blue scene where the Prom Queens strip down to bathing suits and do another dance number. I perplexes me as to what kind of monstrous conglomeration of talent thought this script up, where and when did they grow up, and what they were actually going for. There’s a scene where a guy is put into a bad light for grabbing a girl by the wrist, but not fifteen minutes earlier, the film shows the entire female cast who are supposed to be teenagers, prancing around in bathing gear. Nothing matches. Nothing makes sense. FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN feels as if it were made by people who certainly don’t like horror but also have no clue what it was like to be teens.

On top of it all, it makes no sense that Lori Granger would be going for the title of Prom Queen. Sure, later it is established that she wants to make a change in her life and she thinks that becoming Prom Queen is going to do that. Sure this sentiment is completely misguided, but never in the film does the character realize that her aspirations were off track. Her friend tries to let her know this isn’t her, but that doesn’t stop her from going toward that goal. And while I won’t go into it here, the motivations for the killer are off as well. Of course it has to do with who wins the prom, but this person seems like they would be the winner anyway. Why kill all of the contestants, if you were confident that you would be crowned Prom Queen in the first place?

Littered through PROM QUEEN are elder actors like Lily Taylor, Chris Klein, and Katherine Waterston set up to be either red herrings or actual killers. But the killer themself is basically another Ghostface ripoff. There’s no real reason why the killer is wearing a bright red raincoat and weird raisin mask. No backstory to the look of the killer is given other than that…well, it kind of looks creepy and if you reference ALICE, SWEET ALICE, that’ll give you some cred with the horror-philes, right? The kills themselves are ok. There is a lot of hatcheting and the occasional spattering of blood and hacking off of limbs, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

There’s an after credits sequence that attempts to tie in with the previous trilogy, but since that was released four years ago, it’s a bit of a stretch to expect viewers to remember the reference. The Original FEAR STREET trilogy worked because I think it had an interesting through-way story as well as a decent handling of the 80’s era. The slasher motif felt fresh and felt like it was being made by people who actually grew up during the 80’s slasher era. Still, it was light and boppy and fun. FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN pales in comparison. It’s a bland and disappointing follow-up, indicating that if you don’t know the era you’re writing about and aren’t into horror, you should not be doing an 80’s horror nostalgia play.

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Music Written by Tim Heidecker
Music & Arrangement by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy https://youtu.be/PDySbxQgZMg
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