Fear Street Part One: 1994 ★★★½

Fear Street Part Two: 1978 ★★★½

Fear Street Part Three: 1666 ★★★

AMERICAN author R.L. Stine has had a formidable career, selling more than 400 million books.

The great majority of his work has been a mix of adventure, fantasy and horror aimed at children and teenagers.

While the Goosebumps series is horror-light, Stine’s Fear Street series is for teenagers and has more adult themes and violence.

I wonder what Stine thinks of the 2021 Fear Street film trilogy which considerably ups the violence and gore as well as adding sex scenes to the mix.

The trilogy was originally shown on Netflix one film at a time over three weeks.

directed by Leigh Janiak, with a script co-written by Phil Graziadei and Janiak, from an  The film follows a group of teenagers in Shadyside who are terrorized by an ancient evil responsible for a series of brutal murders that have plagued the town for centuries.

The trilogy is set over three timeframes in the neighbouring suburbs of Shadyside and Sunnyvale. As their names suggest, Shadyside is the original town site where the working class continue to dominate, whereas Sunnyvale was a satellite suburb that eventually became home to the more affluent.

Rivalry between the suburbs has continued throughout the years, deepened by Shadyside being the location for murder sprees amidst folklore that the original town was cursed by a witch.

Part One occurs in 1994, commencing with another murder spree, this time in the Shadyside Mall after closing time.

The media again reports Shadyside as the murder capital of the United States, but the story around the younger population goes a young woman named Sarah Fier placed a curse on the town before being executed for witchcraft in 1666.

Our lead character, Deena, has just broken up with her girlfriend Sam who starts being targeted by dark forces.

The two girls, plus an assortment of friends, relatives and acquaintances witness increasingly supernatural occurrences and join forces to find out why Sam is being targeted and how the centuries-old curse can be lifted.

Part One is quite strong, creating a Stranger Things vibe with sex, violence and some surprising gore thrown in.

The cast are all good but the structure weakens the pacing and impact.

For the first hour none of the characters are particularly likeable and when the script tries to flip the audience to their side, it’s a little late in the proceedings and the pacing and tension suffers as a result.

Another problem is the jumps in logic required, which also holds for the entire trilogy.

For example, the cops are universally useless and these teenagers’ parents rarely sighted.

Still, the final confrontation with a bunch of resurrected killers is a lot of fun.

The same issues also dog Part Two which is set in 1978 and focussed on a massacre at a school camp, ala Friday the 13th.

It provides opportunity for us to find out more about some of the characters when they were younger, but most of them are just as annoying for the first hour of the film.

The police are even more useless and there is barely an adult over the age of 25 in sight at this school camp.

While there are a few scares and gory moments, the action gets a little repetitive.

Part Two ends with several discoveries that set up Part Three which goes back to the 1666 and the original events that created the Sarah Fier curse.

Most of the cast also play characters for the section set in 1666 and this decision tends to keep taking you out of the story.

Some of the actors transform well into the new characters but others look strangely out of place.

The leaps in logic are particularly bad and you can feel the two hour running time more than the first two instalments.

The final act is relatively satisfying but these killers seem a little too easily despatched in the end.

Despite quite a lot of faults, the Fear Street trilogy is an entertaining film mash-up that will satisfy a wide audience.

Having said it takes time to like the characters, Kiana Madeira and Olivia Welch are very good in the lead roles.

There are more than 150 other Fear Street books providing plenty of material for an extended television series which is probably its best suited medium going forward.