By MICHAEL GINGOLD

Starring India Fowler, Suzanna Son and Fina Strazza
Directed by Matt Palmer
Written by Matt Palmer and Donald McLeary
Netflix

When the FEAR STREET feature trilogy debuted on Netflix four years ago, it offered both a trio of individually entertaining horror films effectively evoking past eras (1994, 1978 and 1666) and a satisfyingly interconnected saga centered on the town of Shadyside and its centuries-spanning legacy of evil. The new FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN, unfortunately, has neither of those qualities; it’s a shallow callback to ’80s slashers that pays only the briefest lip service to its predecessors. “It’s worse than ’78,” a cop says toward the end, and sadly, he’s very right.

That line, a wall display commemorating “Camp Nightwing 1978,” a graffito reading “Sarah Fier Lives” and a very latecoming visual reference are about all that connect PROM QUEEN to the other movies. It is otherwise a self-contained story with little sense of the overarching bad mojo plaguing the town of Shadyside, despite the opening narration from heroine Lori Granger (India Fowler) claiming that it’s “where the future crawls to die.” Her voiceover works overtime setting up the people inhabiting Shadyside High School in 1988, ticking off many familiar boxes. Lori is a good girl with a troubled past. Her best friend, Megan Rogers (Suzanna Son), is a nonconformist horror fan who makes masks and other scary props in her spare time. Lori’s hallway antagonist is Tiffany Falconer (Fina Strazza), who leads a gang of biyotches called “The Wolf Pack.” Lori has a crush on handsome classmate Tyler (David Iacono), but he’s going out with Tiffany, though he might actually like Lori too. Oh, and then there’s martinet Vice Principal Dolores Brekenridge, who “used to run a convent for reforming bad girls,” played by Lili Taylor in the Mary Woronov role.

It’s said, mostly by the Wolf Pack, that Lori’s mom killed her dad years ago, and Lori hopes to restore her rep and her self-confidence by defeating Tiffany and her fellow Wolf Packers to become queen of Shadyside High’s upcoming prom. There’s another wild card in the competition in the person of bad girl Christy Renault (Ariana Greenblatt), but this potentially interesting character is dispatched before she can have any meaningful impact. The dispatcher is a lurking killer who, with his (her?) long red rain slicker and deformed mask, suggests the villain of DON’T LOOK NOW writ larger. The murderer seeks to whittle down the contenders for prom queen and, in another familiar touch, crosses out their photos in a yearbook as the body count rises.

FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN doesn’t spend a lot of time on setup; it’s less than 25 minutes old before the dance begins, and the characters start finding excuses to wander off into out-of-the-way parts of the school where they can be victimized. Director Matt Palmer won praise for his 2018 British thriller CALIBRE, but here it appears that he and co-scripter Donald McLeary watched a bunch of vintage teen-kill pictures and took notes, without applying much thought to giving the film an identity of its own. (Their storyline bears only the most basic resemblance to R.L. Stine’s FEAR STREET: THE PROM QUEEN book.) By now, there have been almost as many 21st-century homages to ’80s slasher films as there were ’80s slasher films, and the form requires a lot more imagination and cleverness than is on view here.

What’s especially frustrating about FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN is the number of promising setups that aren’t given payoffs. Megan attends the prom with Lori in male drag, but any potential romance between them remains the love that dare not speak its name. Wolf Packer Debbie (Rebecca Ablack) says, “I know where the bodies are buried, Tiffany better remember that,” but gets bumped off before she can make use of that knowledge. There’s a creepy janitor (Christopher MacCabe) right out of 1980’s PROM NIGHT, who gets the absolute minimum of screen time required to establish him as a red herring. Instead of pursuing these story avenues, the movie marks time with stuff like Lori and Tiffany suddenly dropping everything for an out-of-nowhere “dance-off” to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” which winds up having no effect on anything.

“Gloria” is one of the many decade’s greatest hits (“Never Gonna Give You Up,” “She’s Got the Look,” “Hungry Like the Wolf,” etc.) on the soundtrack, which evince Netflix’s deep pockets yet are among the only elements that evoke the ’80s setting. The others include the homagistic synth score by The Newton Brothers, the lack of cell phones and some of the teens checking out their local theater’s showing of PHANTASM II; since that movie was released in July ’88, their prom must occur pretty late in the season. (Or maybe Shadyside is caught in a time warp, since the venue’s other attraction, MIRACLE MILE, didn’t open until 1989.)

One thing that distinguishes FEAR STREET: PROM NIGHT from its inspirations is that it’s a lot gorier than those past slashers were allowed to be under the influence of the MPAA, with many of the slayings done practically by prosthetics supervisor Steve Newburn (who’s walked this territory before in THANKSGIVING and HELL OF A SUMMER). The assorted severings and mutilations, however, only provide momentary jolts in a film that’s too generic and undernourished to be dramatically involving or genuinely frightening. Here’s hoping that any further visits to FEAR STREET find more adventurous material to address.