Sixteen sixty six will commence again!

Well we’re finally here. A day late, a dollar short, and probably long after anyone who cared enough to watch Fear Street Part 3 has already seen it. But since WordPress is a shit hole and the only views this review is going to get are from bots crawling for posts to like, let’s dive in to Fear Street Part 3.

The ending of Fear Street Part 2 had me interested in how the trilogy would play out. Not interested enough that I didn’t wait several weeks before watching it, but interested nonetheless. The conclusion to a horror series is always the least part since, let’s face it, the genre is a dead end most of the time. There’s only two ways it can usually end; with the main characters surviving and moving on, or with the realization that the monster can never be killed. Occasionally both.

At the end of Part 2, Deena (Kiana Madeira) reunites Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scopel) with her hand, and the movie ends with Deena suddenly appearing in 1666 in the form of a vision, but now she’s Sarah Fier. The first half of the film takes place in 1666 as we see the backstory of Sarah Fier and Hannah Miller (Olivia Scott Welch) who also happen to be in lesbian with each other. The town is in the grips of a pandemic as the crops are dying and the animals are devouring their own children. Someone has made a deal with the devil, and the town is on a rampage to find out who the Satan worshipping culprit is.

Who do you think they blame.

Most of the characters in 1666 are portrayed by actors from the first two parts of the show, although to my understanding many are not actually supposed to be ancestors of those characters. The most obvious is Kiana Madeira and Benjamin Flores Jr., who play Sarah and Henry Fier when neither Deena nor Josh are her descendants. There’s probably some symbolism about how no matter how things change they stay the same, but ultimately it ends with really bad 17th century accents from most of the characters. It’s like how a 90s teenager would think people in the 1600s talked.

The second half of the movie takes place in the present of 1994, thus being dubbed Fear Street Part 3: 1994 Part 2. The gang has to figure out a strategy to stop the curse on Shadyside once and for all and to defeat the witch and the laundry list of nigh unkillable murderers from several centuries worth of death at its beck and call. There’s really not much to say here without spoiling the plot, but I was happy to see that the child we kept seeing in flashbacks and in the trailers makes an appearance finally. The kid with the mask beating the crap out of people with a bat.

There’s a line in David Wong’s book What The Hell Did I Just Read that says; “They didn’t have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.” That sentiment is completely on display here as show writers Leigh Janiak (also director) and Kate Trefry make it quite clear that the Shadysiders of the past were not the hapless victims held hostage to a witch. The people of the present paying for the sins of the past and all that mumbo jumbo.

Given horror movies tend to be as formulaic as egg drop soup, I have a special place in my heart for any movie that throws me through a loop. Fear Street Part 3 did just that. The first two parts were decent slashers that you kinda already knew what was going to happen. The third movie is a nice bookend that brings it all together.

Verdict: A