October Horror Challenge 2022 #16: "Fear Street Part 2: 1978"

Time marches on, and we move on to the second Fear Street movie in the trilogy. This one takes place in 1978, so it's supposed to have the vibe of a 70s horror movie. As I enjy 70s and 80s slashers, I was curious to check this one out and see how it stacks up to other sllashers of the time period. So how does it fare?

In thiis movie, school is out for summer 1978 and Camp Sunnyside is open for business as the campers look forward to a week of fun. But chaos reigns as another Shadysider is possessed by evil and driven to kill. As the bodies pile up, the campers are forced to look to the past, to find the origin of the curse, and stop the evil once and for all.

This movie is really uneven. It suffers greatly from middle child syndrome, as it is the second film in a trilogy, so it has to carry the information from the first movie, tell its own story, and give an intro to the third movie in the story and end on an unfinished note. It's a lot for any movie to carry, and that's why this movie workks better on paper than it does when it plays out in front oof you. It's just too jumbled with all the storylines jostling for purchase and none of them really getting to shine throguh, which is a shame because this is a pretty strong story idea on its own and it would make a good movie on its own without having to carry the added weight of continuing the first movie's story while simultaneously ushering in the third movie's story and never really having time for its own story to shine through.

The bullying we witness in this movie is unreal. A girl gets burned with a lighter and accused of being a witch right in the first few minutes of the story, and the camp counselors make out like its her fault, which pisses me off. There's plenty of gore to keep you occupied and the scnees of the killer stalking the victims are gory fun. The movie just gets bogged down by exposition too easily and there's a bunch of stuff about the witch Sara Fier and how she started the curse, and that's all very interesting, but it gets in the way of me enjoying the fun, gory 70s-era slasher we're trying to have here, which is kind of a shame. Overall this isn't a bad movie, just trying to do too much and cram too much into its running time.