Prom Queen’ Hits Rotten Tomatoes With a Tarnished Crown

After four long years, Netflix‘s Fear Street series is finally back with Prom Queen, but does the new slasher measure up to the expectations set by the original trilogy? According to its Rotten Tomatoes score, not so much. Debuting with a “rotten” rating of just 50%, it appears that the Shadyside sequel is dividing critics down the middle, with some calling it “a slick ride of panic” and others “a massive nothingburger.”

Starring an ensemble cast that includes the likes of India Fowler, Suzanna Son, Fina Strazza, and David Iacono, Fear Street: Prom Queen adapts the 15th book in R.L. Stine’s beloved series, and centers around Shadyside High’s annual prom celebration, which sees the school’s wolfpack of It Girls busy with its usual sweet and vicious campaigns for the crown. When a gutsy outsider puts herself in the running, and the other girls start mysteriously disappearing, the class of ’88 is suddenly in for one hell of a prom night. It’s a familiar premise to slasher fans, but unfortunately one that doesn’t work, according to Sharai Bohannon from Horror Press:

“Fear Street: Prom Queen feels like CW and Tubi had a baby behind a Radio Shack in hell. Not in a fun and chaotic way. More like the people didn’t understand the assignment and assumed their audience does not have standards.”

“Fear Street: Prom Queen is an insanely bad movie that is neither dramatic nor horrifying,” adds Archi Sengupta from LeisureByte.com. Kristen Maldonado from Pop Culture Planet was equally unkind to the new Netflix slasher, saying that it “drops us into what feels like a Temu Stranger Things version of the ’80s, where the soundtrack is the most authentic thing about it.” Ouch! Nick Schager from The Daily Beast notes that it’s “cartoonishly gory and drearily unoriginal and predictable,” while MovieWeb’s own Greg Archer calls it “a bloody slash fest, heavy on gore and light on mystery and intrigue.”

More to come…

Source: Rotten Tomatoes