Director: Matt Palmer
Writers: Matt Palmer, Donald McLeary
Stars: India Fowler, Fina Strazza, Katherine Waterston
Synopsis: When the “it” girls competing for prom queen at Shadyside High start to disappear, a gutsy outsider discovers she’s in for one hell of a prom night.
After an experimental release strategy with the initial trilogy, the Fear Street franchise has now returned on Netflix for a new installment, specifically adapting R.L. Stine’s The Prom Queen. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel of slasher pictures, the movie still solidifies itself as a welcome return for one of Netflix’s best series, ensuring they can make as many installments as they can every couple of years. Why not have a lean, meat-and-potatoes, 89-minute-long slasher that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and go-for-broke conclusion that’s perfectly attuned to the sensibilities of 80s filmmaking, where the subgenre blew up, not only in cinemas, but on VHS? Sometimes, that’s all you need in a movie to be entertained.
Director Matt Palmer takes over the reins from Leigh Jeniak and presents a relatively easy going time where you fully know how the story will pan out. However, in this case, it almost doesn’t matter, even if it rips heavily from the Prom Night franchise. If you’ve seen any of these films, Prom Queen has virtually no surprises. One knows exactly who the masked assailants who attack Shadyside High’s prom are, and you don’t even need to put two and two together to figure it out. As soon as the moving pieces are all introduced, we know who the killers will murder first, and who will end up as the movie’s final girl.
Though for the benefit of this review, and for the people who want to check it out, I will not reveal a thing. Let’s just say that, even with a giallo-like twist, worthy of Dario Argento, that occurs as five minutes are left to the movie which caught me completely off-guard and actively improved upon who the telegraphed killers were, the movie goes through the motions and offers little to no excitement in the storytelling department.
Even the characters are as paper-thin as it gets, including the protagonist, Lori Granger (India Fowler), who vies to become the school’s prom queen after a traumatic event in her family made her Sunnyside High’s laughing stock, notably to its pack of popular girls, with leader Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza) constantly finding ways to humiliate Lori.
Lori, of course, gets the most development, but it’s not as interesting as in the first Fear Street installment, when we actively spent as much time as possible with the characters to solidify their dynamic before many of them were killed off in gratuitous, often cartoonishly violent ways. That’s why, for Prom Queen, the main attraction isn’t the relationship (or lack thereof) between the characters, but the kills, alongside another incredible, synth-heavy score from The Newton Brothers, which, in many ways, recalls the work of John Carpenter, without feeling like a blatant carbon copy.
Seeing masked killers exact their blood-soaked plan in motion through often hilariously perverse slaughters is what makes slashers like these so unabashedly fun. The retro aesthetic from cinematographer Márk Györi frequently combines the emulsion of 35mm film with the sheen of a VHS camcorder brilliantly, adding some verve and texture to a movie that desperately needs one, especially in how it stages its practical kills. Utilizing weapons at their disposal, including a paper trimmer for the movie’s funniest sequence, Palmer showcases how schools are filled with as many dangerous objects as possible that, in the wrong hands, can lead to our gory demise. This ensures Prom Queen always has some forward momentum and never stops delivering on what we want to see out of such a movie like this, even if it stumbles along the way.
When it eventually reaches its denouement and throws at us an unexpected reveal, it solidified the deal for me that Prom Queen may be the best installment in the Fear Street franchise since Part One: 1994. It’s fully aligned with the sensibilities that have made giallo stand the test of time for genre aficionados, and delivers a lean, but fiendishly good time at the movies. And if you’re watching it with friends, the experience may be even better, though one hopes Netflix comes out of their “streaming or nothing” shell and finally embraces the potentialities that theatrical can have for some of their titles like this one. Here’s hoping their tune will change when Greta Gerwig shows them what they’ve been missing next year…
