Fear Street: Prom Queen Parent Guide

Shadyside has always been cursed, and while Lori Granger (India Fowler) knows she can’t change that, she wants to tackle some of its other problems. That’s why she’s running for prom queen. The award will almost certainly go to one of the school’s “Wolf Pack” of mean girls, led by the petulantly cruel Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), but Lori wants to give the school another option. If she can’t break the curse, she can at least teach the local bullies a lesson. It’s an uphill battle, certainly, but Lori has her friend Megan (Suzanna Son) in her corner. When prom arrives the girls quickly learn they’ve got bigger problems than some catty high school bullying: Shadyside High’s 1988 Prom has already had a few fatalities, and it looks like all the candidates for Prom Queen are on a killer’s list…

Much like the previous films in the Fear Street franchise, this entry is a big sloppy kiss for retro slashers. The title had me expecting Carrie, but it’s more like Mean Girls ran headlong into Friday the 13^th. The plot doesn’t give us much to think, and the twists and turns are pretty predictable, but that’s because the movie is doing everything it can to ssqueeze as many tropes as possible into 88 minutes, and the writers did an impressive job.

That short runtime is definitely a blessing, given the movie’s overall lack of narrative substance, but it compensates by dazzling you with oversaturated late-80’s style. Retro vibes apart, the film is a bit of a letdown, though. While the earlier entries in the series also relied on throwback style, they brought a little more to the table story-wise. I like them enough that I’ve actually re-watched them since reviewing them – they’re good Halloween fun.

My hopes for this flick were never all that high, and the movie met me just a little bit above my expectations. It’s not masterpiece theater, and the D’s across the board for content certainly indicate some impediments to family viewing, but this is a film built to cater to slasher genre fans; not general audiences. To be fair, Fear Street: Prom Queen does a good job of picking up a lot of the pieces a good slasher needs, even if it doesn’t do anything unexpected with them. Not that slashers are famous for innovation –