![]() The glimpses we get of their private lives are about as interesting as an after-school special. Oh, sure, they raise hell and chase tail, but not in a way that anyone is really the worse for wear. As we watch our heroes grapple with the murderous fallout of a post-football game prank that awakens an ancient (or at least pre-industrial) evil, one can’t help but notice that these ostensibly sex-and-drug-crazed adolescents are somehow rather clean-cut. Meanwhile, the teens themselves sell drugs, wreak havoc on students from a rival school, and seek to get laid, following in the time-honored traditions of teenagers throughout history.Īnd yet… there’s something strangely lifeless about the events and imagery of Fear Street. During the film’s 106-minute run time, we see fresh-faced teens take axes to the face, knives to the gut, and-in one memorable sequence-a bread slicer to the skull. Likewise, the literal and metaphorical guts of Fear Street Part 1:1994 feel at least superficially like a throwback to another time, when violence and especially sex weren’t quite so uncommon in mainstream film releases. ![]() There’s something strangely lifeless about the events and imagery of Fear Street. The late Eighties/early Nineties soundtrack is a bit too on-the-nose, yes, but it at least deploys slightly deeper cuts than Captain Marvel‘s “Just A Girl”-set fight scenes, and Janiak clearly has an above-average interest in verisimilitude. If Fear Street isn’t really the pitch-perfect Nineties horror facsimile that some reviews have made it out to be, it at least passes the smell test in a way that Marvel and DC’s throwback films ( Wonder Woman 1984, Captain Marvel) cannot. (Like many recent pieces of throwback media, Fear Street Part 1: 1994 blurs the Eighties and Nineties into a commingled mess of neon and grunge that suggests Twisted Sister and Pretty Poison might have toured with Nirvana and House of Pain. This is a movie that wears its influences not just on its sleeve, but square in the center of its chest: self-aware neo-slashers like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, sexually charged high-school horror flicks like Disturbing Behavior and The Faculty, and a healthy dash of the neon-and-teased-hair grand guignol of the mid-Eighties slasher golden age. It’s a capable, skillfully executed introduction to a film that follows gleefully in the increasingly distant footsteps of the mid-90s teen slasher boom. Stine book series on which the film is based). (In this case, a snobby customer who purchases and then mocks the same R.L. In short order, traps are laid and sprung, knives are thrust into teenage flesh, and the first victim lies dead and gutted, ready for the opening credits to begin-although not before a bit of knowing meta-commentary is dispensed. and Nineties signifiers flitting through the frame-Software Etc, Hot Topic (still more mall-goth than anime-fan), and a litany of other long-diminished brands. In the first few minutes of its first installment-set in 1994 in the murder-stricken suburban town of Shadyside-we watch as a skull-faced killer pursues his teenage victim through a late-night mall, Nine Inch Nails pounding over the P.A. ![]() REVIEW: Fear Street Reveals the Poverty of Pastiche Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street sets out to revive the teen slasher, but seems content to play around with its corpseįear Street-the new three-part horror series from Netflix and director Leigh Janiak-begins with a promising burst of neon, blood, and period-appropriate music.
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