Fear Street: 1666

The Fear Street trilogy comes to a merciful close with this inert and hopelessly uninvolving entry, in which the origins of the franchise’s curse are revealed and, eventually, the various heroes come together to finally end it. Filmmaker Leigh Janiak, armed with a screenplay written alongside Phil Graziadei and Kate Trefry, kicks Fear Street: 1666 off with just about as underwhelming and tedious an opening stretch as one could possibly envision, as the picture, which runs a punishingly overlong 114 minutes, boasts a first half focused on the impossibly dull exploits of several one-dimensional, aggressively undeveloped protagonists – with the viewer’s inability to work up the slightest bit of interest in or enthusiasm for their endeavors exacerbated by the actors’ uniformly flat and palpably uncharismatic efforts. (Janiak’s by-the-numbers and dimly-lit sensibilities do little to alleviate the predominantly lifeless atmosphere, as well.) And although the picture improves very, very slightly once it picks up where its predecessors left off, Fear Street: 1666, which has long-since obliterated one’s ability to care about the outcome of any of this, ultimately comes off as a seriously lackluster capper to a horror series that might’ve worked had all three entries been condensed into one hour-and-a-half feature (but probably not).

* out of ****