Hooooleeee shit guys, this was actually the worst one. Whereas the first two were simply irritating at worst and laughable at best, Fear Street 1666 epitomizes my main criticism of this entire Film Trilogy Event.
This didn't need to be three fucking movies.
'Deathly Hallows' had more right to be two movies than this shit-show had any right to be three. I said before that 1978 was redundant but at least it maintained the slasher chic from the first film instead of diving lady-balls first into the Hammer aesthetic without having a fucking clue what it was doing. 1666 is not only redundant, it removes just about everything that had a semblance of fun from the previous films (at least for its first half). Not only that but it takes the most interesting element of the whole series - that being the mostly unseen witch, Sarah Fier - and turns it into a massive woke red herring.
SPOILER ALERT: It wasn't Sarah Fier at all. In fact, she wasn't even a witch. She was framed by the dreaded straight white male who used his pale-skinned powers to pass his privilege down through generations to fuck over women and minorities... I mean Shadyside. This is why Sunnyside is such a one-percenter's paradise and Shadyside is apparently a run-down nightmarish shithole despite having a mall bigger than my hometown. Again, we're never really shown how bad Shadyside is and we're barely even shown how GOOD Sunnyside is in comparison. Given what we see neither place seems to be all that bad aside from the witch related nonsense. Oh, I'm sorry, I mean WHITE MALE ENTITLEMENT.
The film opens, naturally, where 1978 left off, just as Deena reunites Sarah's hand with her body. This triggers a vision in which Deena is now seeing Sarah's final days through her eyes back in the year 1666 when everybody spoke in terrible Irish accents.
Sarah is a lesbian - I know, what a shocker - and frequently engages in some low-level flirting with the pastor's daughter, Hannah (portrayed by the same actress who plays Deena's girlfriend, Sam). After an encounter with a local witch and an almost sexual assault at a party in the woods, Sarah and Hannah decide to put the 'lick' in 'frolic' as they munch the rug under the stars.
Naturally this angers the Lord since it was dark and the trees were in the way and he couldn't watch. So Union Proper is hit with a strange blight, causing fruit to rot, the well to be poisoned and the local priest to go postal and kill twelve children. So far an obvious consequence of homosexual activity in the area, but being the ignorant savages that they are, they opt to blame witchcraft instead. Typical.
So after a short witch-hunt the guy who got put down by Sarah at the party in the woods pipes up and says 'Yeah, I totally saw Sarah and Hannah getting balled by the Devil in the woods, honest.' This is followed by Hannah automatically being chased down and Sarah deciding that in order to save her lady love, she must become the witch the townsfolk believe her to be. Wow, that actually sounds kind of cool. I'm getting visions of Sarah becoming a Sam Raimi-esque demon woman and trying to kill everyone in the village. She gets out of control then maybe Hannah has to put her down resulting in Sarah, distraught by the betrayal, putting a curse on the town. That sounds like it would actually be a cool backstory. It could even serve as a somewhat poignant allegory for Sam and Deena's relationship, prompting some level of introspection....
Nope, it turns out local soy-boy Solomon Goode (ancestor to Sheriff Nick Goode) has been trading souls to the Devil in order to attain his own personal wealth and prosperity. He then proceeds to hack off Sarah's hand and turn her in to the townsfolk to be executed. Sarah confesses to being a witch and claims that Hannah had nothing to do with it. She lays a curse on Solomon Goode and his children and his children's children and his children's children's children.
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| For Three Months |
Deena wakes up back in 1994 just as the Sheriff shows up. She pulls her brother into hiding and she says to him - and I shit you not, with the straightest face imaginable - 'Goode is EVIL!'
I'm not kidding, some chucklehead wrote that in a screenplay and probably even thought it was clever. For a series that's supposed to be somewhat self-aware, it lacks a lot of self-awareness.
So Deena and Josh steal the Sheriff's car and explain everything to Ziggy, ultimately concluding that in order to end the horrors in Shadyside, they have to kill the Sheriff. To do this they enlist the help of some black guy who had a bit part in the first movie to turn the local mall into a giant booby trap. And since the undead spree killers are currently attracted to Deena's blood, they pretty much drain her dry to the point where they're able to spread it along the walls, write useless and inane messages on shop windows that the killers will neither notice nor comprehend and fill buckets and fucking supersoakers with the stuff. Just how Deena is still walking around, let alone able to fight evil, is a mystery for the ages; but hey, anything to bring down the straight white male patriarchy, eh?
So they trap the killers, lure Sheriff Goode into the mall and Ziggy uses the bucket trick from the last film to cover him in Deena's blood, making him a target of the killers.
The Sheriff escapes into the catacombs and Deena follows him into the room with the big pulsating tumour testicle from the previous movie and seriously, what the fuck is that thing? Is it the Devil? Why would the Devil take the form of a big cancerous looking nutsack?
So Nick Goode explains that his family has offered souls to the Devil ever since their ancestor Solomon Goode first did so in 1666. This has allowed him to become Sheriff and his brother to become Mayor whilst leaving Shadyside in a state of horribleness, apparently inescapable by public transport. They then show Nick Goode praying to Satan wearing a fucking KKK hood.
He proceeds to call Deena a dyke and tries to kill her. Deena forces the Sheriff to touch the pulsating man-sack causing him to have visions of Sarah Fier calling him an incel or something. Just how Deena knew that would happen is up in the air.
She kills the Sheriff, the undead killers fall down and everyone lives happily ever after because apparently you can kill your local law enforcement official and somehow frame him for being a serial killer - while the brother of said law enforcement official is still the fucking mayor - and nothing will come of it.
This film was fucking garbage. The first half is BORING and I mean watching paint dry boring. It's an entirely different tone from not only the previous films but from the second half of THIS film, eschewing the slasher aesthetic for a more 'The Witch' style affair and of course, it doesn't work. It's jarring, especially if you've watched this directly after the previous film.
It also doesn't help that after almost an entire film's break from her, we're back to suffering through Deena's sanctimonious bullshit. Kiana Madeira's countenance frequently resembles a bulldog licking piss off a nettle and combined with the scripting makes her characters deeply unlikeable.
I also have no idea why everyone speaks in this stilted Irish accent. Weren't the colonies mostly English? And I admit my history is rusty but I'm pretty sure there was a little more to witch trials than a bunch of men sitting in a chapel saying they saw someone get fucked by a horse in the woods. I'm not saying it didn't happen but maybe you could have done a little more research? Honestly it just comes off as another excuse to go 'Men bad, women good.' This film is basically the 'We're the granddaughters of the witches you couldn't burn' meme in movie form.
Speaking of which, I've refrained from calling the series woke so far. The last two movies certainly veered into the victimhood narrative and the subversive doomer nonsense that's indicative of these kinds of politics; but really that could just be teenagers being whiny and self-centred and given that many screenwriters nowadays seem to be on the mental level of teenagers this is par for the course. But this one... this one is woke. From its message regarding historical privilege to the Sheriff praying to Satan wearing a fucking KKK hood....
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| Had to be done. |
... to the fact that the main characters are all from 'diverse' or 'marginalised' groups banding together to take down the evil straight white male law enforcement for historical injustices, this film definitely wears its identity politics on its sleeve. The tokenization is so bad that they have to get Martin, the black mall janitor and minor-minor character from the first film to fill out the minority cast at the end. He has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in this series but he's treated like a staple of the group throughout the climax.
At this point I might as well just review the whole series as one piece, I mean that is probably how they want us to look at it.
The characters range from bland to obnoxious to outright sociopathic. Everything about it is indicative of the teenage rebel middle-finger to society cringe that's infected a lot of mainstream culture these days. As a series of slashers it barely makes the cut, no pun intended. It's got the deaths and some are even memorable; but the borderline unbearable characters and needlessly padded storyline saps any fun pretty quickly.
The sudden shift from the faux-slasher aesthetic to the Hammer one is jarring as hell. For the previous segments you could at least tell that there was a tongue planted in someone's cheek somewhere, but with the 1666 segment it becomes po-faced and overly serious.
As previously stated most of these movies are flat out redundant. Certainly the second and third movies could be pared down to a couple of expository flashback sequences for all the information they give us. I didn't need to see the massacre in 1978. I didn't need to see Sarah Fier eating fish under the night sky. This could have been one movie. That wouldn't have necessarily saved it, this is Netflix after all, but it would've wasted a lot less time and brain cells.
The series also seems adamant that I'm going to root for Deena and Sam's relationship as if it's some kind of love that reaches across time or some shit. Personally I give it about a month after the end of the story. I've seen more convincing relationships in a Stephanie Meyer novel.
We end up with what is essentially an anti-climactic ideological lecture. Wouldn't it be cool if they end the series with the main characters having to battle some mental looking witch in prosthetic makeup? Too bad, your villain is a rural white dude in a Sheriff's outfit. Look there's nothing wrong with subverting clichés or adding little twists to shake up a formula provided that you have the material to back it up. The Fear Street series doesn't have the material. It has a few decent death scenes and some good songs in its soundtrack. That's about it.
The characters spend a good portion of their time bitching about how their lives suck and at the end they change not one iota. Absolutely zero character development takes place, especially in regards to Deena. She's just as whiny, sanctimonious and obnoxious as she was at the start of the series. This is not a hero, this isn't even a protagonist. This is a fucking GOON.
You know who the real hero of this series was? Sheriff Nick Goode. Were his methods questionable? Sure. But really, look at some of the people he killed. A teenage drug dealer who drafts little girls into her enterprise, the nurse who was selling said drugs to a teenage girl and a raging degenerate imbecile who - let's face it - probably would have raped someone eventually. Sheriff Nick Goode was cleaning up the streets of Shadyside. You can't convince me otherwise.
And how is he thanked for this fine public service? He gets a knife in the eye by a local goon who ultimately sees no consequences for her actions. Good job America. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery. Goode is EVIL!
I'm DeadEye and what are the chances that these movies received a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes?
