Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Leigh Janiak
Starring: Sadie Sink, Emily Rudd, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Welch,
Ryan Simpkins, Kiana Madeira
1994, the first instalment of director Leigh Janiak's trilogy of
horror movies based on RL Stine's Fear Street books, was a love
letter to the slasher movies of the '90s. It was mediocre, but then so
were the movies it was evoking. The second instalment is set in 1978, and
with its summer camp setting it initially seems we're in for a similar
tribute to the golden age of American slashers. Sadly, era specific needle
drops, tight t-shirts and short shorts are the extent this middle chapter
goes to capturing the tone of late '70s slasher flicks.
The action, what little there is amid all the exposition, takes place at
Camp Nightwing, a Crystal Lake-esque summer camp for teens who seem a
little too old for this sort of thing, and staffed by teens who seem a
little too young to be looking after a horde of kids.
Our heroines are the Berman sisters – rebellious redhead Ziggy (Sadie Sink) and her uptight camp counsellor big sister Cindy (Emily Rudd).
When the camp's nurse - whose daughter committed a massacre before taking
her own life – freaks out and attacks Cindy and her boyfriend, Ziggy and
Cindy come up with wildly different theories as to her motivation. Cindy
blames drugs, while Ziggy believes she's the latest to become possessed by
the area's resident witch. When another counsellor becomes similarly
psychotic, the blood begins to flow.
Okay, when I put it like that, 1978 sounds like it's a fun
riff on Friday the 13th, The Burning and Sleepaway Camp. What could go wrong? How do you make this sort of movie a snoozefest?
Well thanks to Hollywood's current obsession with "world-building",
1978, just like 1994, spends most of its time trying to invent its complex lore on the fly.
This means we're forced to listen to various youngsters telling us the
plot for a fair chunk of its running time. Listen Plotty McPlotface, we
don’t care. We're here for a slasher movie, not a lecture on local
legends. Couldn't we at least get this stuff in flashbacks rather than
having to listen to exposition heavy speeches? Or was the budget blown on
licensing all those '70s tunes?
When 1978 does remember it's a slasher it admittedly doesn't
hold back. There are some seriously vicious kills here, and it's
surprising how egalitarian the movie is when it comes to its victims, with
young teenagers chopped up alongside their elders. But of its 110 minutes,
only about 10 minutes feel like the sort of movies it's homaging.
Stephen King famously outlined the difference between horror and terror.
Horror, he argued, was relatively easy to pull off – think jump scares or
gory kills. Terror was more difficult and required real talent to execute,
as you had to work hard to get under your audience's skin through the
creation of suspenseful sequences. 1978 has a few brief
moments of horror courtesy of its sub-Jason killer, but terror is notably
absent. There's one scene in which a pair of teens find themselves trapped
in a confined space with the killer. It's the sort of sequence that should
be one for the ages. Think the raptors in the kitchen of
Jurassic Park, or that scene in War of the Worlds when Tom Cruise tries
to evade the alien probing the basement he's hiding out in. But Janiak is
clearly no Spielberg, and completely botches the sequence by failing to
convey spatial relations.
Two chapters in and Fear Street is one of the big
disappointments of 2021. You can't piss down horror fans' backs and tell
us it's raining. We've seen this sort of thing down before, and done well,
and crucially done by filmmakers who seem genuinely interested in the
genre rather than just in mining cheap nostalgia.
The upcoming final chapter is set in 1666, which means the needle drops
will be absent, so maybe we'll get something of more substance than the
first two instalments.
Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is on
Netflix from July 9th.
