Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
In an interview, discussing his career and specifically Scream (if I remember correctly), Wes Craven said that with a horror movie, if you give your audience a really good scare in the opening of the film, you don’t really have to scare them again like that until the end of the film. The first of the Fear Street movies, Fear Street Part One: 1994, has taken this lesson to heart. We have a very solid slasher movie opening, and that really does carry us all the way through to the end, which matches the energy of the opening sequence.
Obviously, based on the name, this is a film that takes place in 1994, and we’re going to really hit that hard in the opening bit, which takes place in a shopping mall at closing time. It’s a cultural snapshot that really sells the time period. No generation was more acclimated to mall culture than Gen-X, and director Leigh Janiak is tail-end of Gen-X. If you were in high school in the ’80s or ‘90s, there’s a better than average chance that you worked in a mall at some point, and you know that feeling of being one of the last people to leave, walking through that empty place, feeling like there’s something waiting for you around the next corner as you head out to your car.
That’s where we start. Heather (Maya Hawke) works in a bookstore in the local mall where our story takes place, and she arranges a ride home with Ryan (David W. Thompson), who works at another store. As she closes up, she finds herself stalked through her store by someone wielding a knife and wearing a skull mask. Ultimately, our killer catches poor Heather, and just as he is killing her, he is shot by the police, and revealed to be Ryan.
So, the opening is a bit of a bait-and-switch, because our main character is actually going to be Deena (Kiana Madiera), a high school student who lives in a town called Shadyside. We’re going to learn quickly that Shadyside is essentially a cursed town, filled with murderous events like what happened at the mall in the film’s opening. Regularly, someone will lose control and go on a killing spree, going back centuries into the past. Worse for the Shadyside folks, nearby town Sunnyvale is the exact opposite, with a multi-decade history of no real violent crime.
There’s a pretty solid spiritual, or at least motivational connection to a work like Stephen King’s It when you are talking about a whole town suffering under a curse like this. The difference is that Shadyside isn’t plagued by a monster from beyond space, but by a witch who was executed in the town in the 17th Century. The belief of many is that the witch, Sarah Fier, cursed the town with her dying breath, and that the mass murders and sudden rampages are all caused by her. This is a theory Deena’s brother Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.) subscribes to and discusses in online chatrooms.
Where things become an issue for Deena and Josh is when Deena’s ex Samantha (Olivia Scott Welch) unwittingly awakens Sarah and several of the past killers from Shadyside appear to awaken and start killing again. Deena, Sam, and Josh enlist the support of their friends Kate and Simon (Juilia Rehwald and Fred Hechinger) to keep Sam alive when it becomes evident that the killers are coming back from the dead not randomly, but in pursuit of her specifically, killing anything that gets in their way.
There are some really good set pieces in Fear Street Part One. A long sequence that takes place in the school, for instance, has some clear reference to the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and remains one of the more tense sequences in the film. It builds slowly, gives us a huge conclusion, and then starts up again almost immediately. The final confrontation, which takes place in an after-hours supermarket, is fantastic and features a couple of tremendous slasher kills—one that feels very new (although hearkens back to Intruder) and one that is pretty standard but comes as a shock.
The real issue, and in fact the only issue I have with Fear Street Part One is that it’s very clearly not a stand-alone movie. I would have been a lot more comfortable with this if the makers had simply called this what it really is—the first part of a miniseries. Turn this and the two follow-up movies into a six-part miniseries, and I’m in, because that’s really what this is, not three independent movies. When you ask me to watch a movie, I expect a full story, not one-third of the whole thing.
“But what about trilogies?” I hear you ask. Is Star Wars a complete movie? Is The Fellowship of the Ring a complete movie? They are—they are parts of a larger story, but they each tell complete stories. Fear Street Part One doesn’t. We know that we’re going to have to go to 1978 and 1666 to get the full thing, and so this film by itself is unsatisfying.
Why to watch Fear Street Part One: 1994: It’s a great set up for the larger story.
Why not to watch: It’s very clearly only a third of the full story instead of something complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment