Nostalgia is for suckers. The past ain’t as good as you remember, and shit wasn’t simpler back then.
Turds don’t turn into diamonds just because they aged. With the exception of some girls I went to high school with. You know, the ones in band with no self-confidence, who paid attention in class and who married early to some guy who treated them like shit because they didn’t think they could do better. Then, as everyone else settled into their miserable insignificant lives, those girls found another gear and started liking themselves. They dumped their boat anchor hubbies, did Pilates, become librarians. Now their social media overflows with pictures of them looking so fucking good in that “I’m hot because I don’t even think about it; I just take care of myself” way. I would love to splatter my nostalgia all over those girls.
Otherwise, nostalgia is a lousy excuse to bathe in the lukewarm bathwater of familiarity. Rather than embrace the badness of today, all the new and horrible things that are just outside their door, people look backward at awful things they’re familiar with: Remember Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden and Salt-N-Pepa? Yes, but why?
Fear Street: Part 1 – 1994 is based on old R. L. Stine young adult horror novels that weren’t nostalgic; they were actually written in the 90s. The movie is the first of a trilogy on Netflix that taps into those old books, now hoping to sucker in old people who read them back then and teens who just want to watch scared teens.
The trilogy goes backward in time from 1994 to the 17th century. Part 1 harkens back to the 90s and it breaks more sweat than a fat hooker at a Kiwanis convention making sure you know that. It’s chock-a-block with music from NIN, Ministry, Garbage, Bush, Soundgarden and others that should have stayed buried in the 90s. There are crap posters on walls, AOL chat rooms, malls and an overlong scene reminding us that B. Dalton was a bookseller. It’s like a guy at work who keeps quoting lines from some movie you like to continually prove to you he’s cool.
Despite the R. L. Stine pedigree, though, Part 1 – 1994 is intended to be a trip down memory lane of 90s horror movies, like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Final Destination. Instead, it’s a polyester blend made from their oily residue. Those movies were awful, full of dimwitted teenagers making bad choices, and masked bad guys from urban legends that haunt them in leafy small towns where the adults are few and incompetent. There’s usually a bumbling sheriff who represents the authority kids can’t trust. And this one has one too.
The bad news for this movie is that Scream, made in 1996, did a far more entertaining rehash of the tropes. It made fun of them while this piece of shit leans heavily on them for plotting. It hopes old nostalgic people want to relive bad plots, and young people are just as dumb of consumers as their parents were.
Part 1 rips off the past, but also cleans it up, and filters it until there’s not a single bit of grit left. That was the only charm of those teen slasher flicks. They only felt sinister because they were made on the cheap and felt sort of sleazy. This movie feels like it has plenty of budget; they could have done something nice but chose instead to spend their riches imitating something shitty. Fear Street is sterile, a facsimile far removed from originality. Nobody involved felt they needed to make the characters or the plot compelling. It just needed to be familiar. And, it doesn’t have the one thing that made the 90s tolerable: boobs.
In Part 1 – 1994, some teenagers played by people in their twenties live in a crappy, apparently very lightly populated town, and are stalked by demons raised by a witch who was tortured there centuries ago. She’s still pissy about it. The demons assume human form and wear skull or other masks. They slash, chop, and hatchet the plucky teens. But they are very clean, PG-13 killings. Actually, the movie says it’s R, but it feels soft like PG-13, like it’s adhering to very strict guidelines about how bloody or gross it is allowed to be.
There is the heartbroken girl (Kiana Madeira), her ex-girlfriend (Olivia Scott Welch), nerdy computer kid who figures out the mystery (Benjamin Flores, Jr.), and a couple of stoners (Julia Rehwald and Fred Henchinger). Together they concoct a plan to trick the witch. Of course, the stoners die. Of course, the nerdy kid gets a kiss. Sadly, no bras are removed. There is an ineffectual lawman, played by the low-rent lovechild of B.J. Novak and Scott Baio (Ashley Zuckerman). He doesn’t help at all. But he does look concerned or constipated a couple times. The only other adults in the movie are quickly dispatched by the killers for getting in the way, and the town is otherwise empty streets that look very much like a backlot somewhere, or like what Hollywood thinks generic small towns look like.
Fear Street wants to pretend it’s an homage to the shitty movies of the 90s. It’s not. Homage requires showing respect. Scream was an homage, and a spoof. But Fear Street just apes, rips off and adds nothing. Instead, it subtracts by not telling a coherent story or coming up with a reason to give a fuck about the characters. This horseshit doesn’t feel for one second like it was ever something someone felt passionate about. No, it’s a corporate exercise, an easy cash grab that sucks morons in with nostalgia and nothing else.
Look, if you want to look to the past, look back to the good shit. The great movies and music, the undiscovered gems or the ones that had a real impact. If all you want is garbage, there are dumpsters outside full of fresh, new garabage. You don’t need to go dig it out of the landfill of your past. Two Fingers for Fear Street: Part 1 – 1994.