Fear Street Part One: 1994 Review

Nostalgia is a powerhouse today, with all forms of electronic entertainment graverobbing our memories of years past, both the good and the bad. The horror genre in particular is victim to this, due to their usually cheap budgets and lingering eye for the distasteful. Gore and nudity are all cheap thrills, throw in some other clichés and bam, you have a movie. Or at least that's what the folks at Netflix think with their latest streaming experiment, "Fear Street." A trilogy of loosely related films, the digital entertainment platform is releasing one film every week this month, a sort of halfway point between movies and series.

I think it's brilliant: no longer are films something you normally watch in the theaters; now the only thing differentiating the two mediums is their runtime. From Netflix to Hollywood: "checkmate."

This first entry, dubbed appropriately "Part One: 1994," takes place in the haunted town of Shadyside, where a witch mix with a masked killer at a camp, a knife-wielding kid in a skull costume and more. From what I gathered about the next two episodes, they all are based in this sad little city, with grumpy prepubescents, a small police department and a high school rivalry with the neighboring academy. It all makes for a bit too derivative blend of the usual tropes, filled with swearing, bloodshed and yes, even teenage sex. Wouldn't be trash without the sex.

But what saves this initial pic is its consistent acting and the little touches that set it apart from all the "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" knockoffs. Oh sure, there is the obligatory hospital slaying, the friend who always knows what's going on, the skeptic sheriff, among many other standard slasher film stereotypes, but there is also a solid story about accepting who you are, the power of friendship and love. I get it, the genre really has seen a lot of duds since the seventies and eighties, but when I can walk away not feeling like I spent two hours yelling at the screen "... don't go in there," it deserves special mention.

Kiana Madeira plays Deena, your typical hormonal teenager who's mad at the world and especially her ex Sam, played Olivia Scott Welch who's moved to the richer community down the road. Their relationship feels more real than this type of film really demands, two terrific actresses who not only have believable chemistry but also capture that feeling all minors have where the world "doesn't understand them." After some generic hooliganism at a football game, Sam's new boyfriend's car crashes into the burial of the Sarah Fier (scary name, screenwriters), who put a curse on the land just before being executed for witchcraft. A few drops of blood from the wreckage later, and, well, let's just say that the deceased don't like being waken up anymore than a juvenile does on a Monday morning.

That's enough of the plot, nobody puts on a movie called "Fear Street" expecting Oscar-nominee material: you want bare skin and slaughtering, and you want it exploitative and you want it now. In that front, the film delivers the goods. It does shy away from actual nudity, but who knows? Maybe that's what the sequels are for.