Fear Street: Prom Queen 1988 is the quasi-sequel-prequel-reboot-installation-continuation to Netflix’s 2021 Fear Street trilogy, based loosely on the R.L Stine book series of the same name.

The movie follows some girl with a name I forget as she runs for Prom Queen

against her high school bully or something, but there’s a killer on loose. 

Basic enough? 

You got it?

Good.

Let’s be clear, Fear Street: Prom Queen is awful.

It is not a fall from grace.

It is not a bummer, a shock, or a disappointment.

Do not let the four-year veil of summer nostalgia blind you.

The original Fear Street trilogy was a sagging, stupid, boring, bloated, 

self-indulgent, codswallop of sanded-edges, cardboard-charactictures, ran-through writing, and a safe, smiley-glad-hands, cute-little-bow-ending.

For all the years of backed up venom I have to spew about Fear Street, 

compared to its inbred little sister Prom Queen, the original movies are first class art. 

The original trilogy had an interesting concept: What if we made three movies about a small-town’s grisly haunted history? The films would be set decades apart and released chronologically in reverse, unraveling the mystery further and further as you go back in time?

It’s a good idea. A great concept. Gimmicky but compelling.

Sure the team behind the films executed that concept with the grace of a blind ballerina and expertise of a one-handed abortionist. Even still, there was a built-in hook that could drag even proudest of cinematic-snobs and cynics through the atrophying runtimes. 

Point being that at its core there was something dragging 

Fear Street’s sloppy narrative along…Prom Queen has none of that.

With its ninety-minute runtime and ten-minute script

the movie crawls to the finish line for the bare minimum. 

An hour and half sucked away. A vampire of time and memory. 

One of the most boring movies you will ever see. 

Paper thin characters with paper thin performances. 

A nothing story sinking in a stagnant bog of unnecessary exposition and dramaless dramatics,

Dancing along with no sense of rhythm.

An all-fat script of every cliche and regurgitated hack-story-crutch 

Strung along by bland setpieces, strung out by cheap slasher homages just cute enough to make us nod our heads and feel so clever.

Nostalgia in excess was the drug that gave Fear Street life. 

In Prom Queen, it overdosed.

I’m still waiting for 1988. What I bore witness to was a Party City-parody of 1980-whenever. Modern hairstyles, language, performance, and Netflix standard inclusivity-all of which is token and blunderingly unsubtle. 

It is not inclusivity. It’s equal opportunity to make studio executives richer.

The whole thing looks cheap in the worst kind of way. 

A seventy-million-dollar budget carries a long way to the middle. Ubiquitous, clean and dull. Flawless and unbearable. Corporate, committee, institutional indifference buffs out every perverted-patina of interest that came from the slashers of days-gone. 

There is no danger, no thrill, no edge. There is no fear. There is no life. 

It’s not even enough of a proficient technical work to warrant its banality. 

Every facet of filmmaking is soul-crushingly inept.

There is not a single positive thing to say. 

And I will personally refute any compliments given as polite lies.

A soulless, spineless, mindless bore of a horror-whore.

√-0/10 stars.