Fear Street Part 2: 1978

Fear Street Part 2: 1978

2021

Trailer

After the second of Leigh Janiak’s speed-run trilogy loosely based on an enormous number of R. L. Stine books, I’m even more confused about who these are for. Where the Scream-alike Part 1: 1994 felt like a 15 cert until it got much gorier than expected this feels very much an 18 for the level of violence, (brief) sex and naughty words while still having plucky kid protagonists.

After twisting the first part to reveal it was late in a run of supernatural slashers with a consistent origin, we cycle back to the survivors investigating and get a movie-length flashback to the previous example which plays as pretty much the pop-culture version of Friday The 13th where it’s Jason hacking his way through the camp from the start. It also takes a while to get to the hacking, giving time to get a bit more invested in the victims than in most of the films it’s riffing on, but when it comes it goes pretty fast. And it’s also willing to kill a bunch of kids - although with gory discretion shots where the main teen characters get axed to bits on screen.

It also doesn’t add all that much to the developing story. We see more details of how the supernatural slashers work, but we’d gotten a bit of that already in 1994, and we got the climactic step up where multiple slashers return there as well, covered more thoroughly. We do get a nicely unpleasant The Thing moment showing where they come from, though. There’s more of the Sunnyvale / Shadyside conflict, which does add a bit.

As not a fan of Jason I wasn’t keen on this one. I was also intermittently distracted by outside factors like how much one of the cast reminds me of someone else. (Which happened with someone else in 1994. It’s just an odd thing I got hit with.)

Next: 1666.