Death's A Dance, Make It A Prom!: Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
Rating: ****
Starring: India Fowler, Suzanna Son, Fina Strazza

The 2021 Fear Street trilogy is, without a doubt, one of the more unique movie events made for the slasher sub-genre. It's practically one five-and-a-half-hour-long film inspired by R.L. Stine's young adult book series of the same name, divided into three parts, each to be played a week from one another. Though each entry has their own strengths and weaknesses, resulting to varying qualities per film, the all-in-all result is still a unique and adventurous blend of supernatural terror, generational trauma and gory slasher action.

Now, the franchise returns with a standalone title set in the same movie universe, this time an adaptation of Stine's book The Prom Queen, done gorier, messier and reeking of pure 80s nostalgia. 

It's 1988 and the small town of Shadyside is getting ready to celebrate one of the few good things to look forward to every year, the high school senior prom and the race for the Prom Queen crown! For this round, the candidates are mostly within the same clique known as The Wolf Pack, led by pompous queen bee Tiffany Falconer. She and her three cohorts are up against street-smart weed dealer Christie, who's just doing it so she can annoy Tiffany, and Lori Granger, the underdog candidate whose mother is rumored to have murdered Lori's father during her own prom many years ago. For Lori, to be crowned Prom Queen is a chance to represent the sunnier side of Shadyside, to break the town's gloomy reputation of being the breeding place of homicidal serial killers and masked psychos, thus hopefully freeing her and her mother from being looked down upon as tragic cases. 

On Lori's side is her horror geek bestie, Megan, rooting from the sides as she go about trying to ruin the Wolf Pack's morale by pranking them with horror effects and magic, from self-dismemberment via prop hand, to life-like replica of Tiffany's head left curiously floating in a punch bowl. However, Megan soon finds herself and Lori are in a horror movie of their own: someone in a red rain slicker and masked-up like a ghoul is out cutting down the competition, hacking up the prom queen candidates and, too, pretty much anybody else who happens to be in their way with an axe. By the end of the night, will there be anyone left alive to be crowned Prom Queen?

A more back-to-basics entry from a film franchise centered around witch curses and maniacs that can regenerate from demonic goo, Prom Queen (2025) is your classic high school bodycounter flick mixing in girl drama with good old-fashioned hack 'n slash, ala Heathers (1988) crossed with Prom Night (1980). Admittedly, this is a direction that isn't going to garner a lot of favorable opinions after the trilogy's more unique swing at the slasher sub-genre, but for those who are not in an overly demanding mood and simply want to watch a dead teenager film for the fun of watching a dead teenager film, this movie serves!

Prom Queen (2025) unfolds quite nicely as we breeze through its high school dramatics and be rewarded for sticking through the scenes with a decent kill or two. Maybe even a dance-off! Yes, the paint-by-number approach is still riddled with slasher tropes like couples repeatedly sneaking away from the party to hook up, only to get a knife buried into a head or being relieved of their limbs with an axe, but the movie isn't one to shy away from doing something shocking and nasty whenever it can to keep everyone on their toes, mainly offing some likable characters, as well as having a madman publicly go after a victim through a crowd while the Prom Queen coronation is happening. The deaths are also a splashy bunch, a real showcase of blood and guts here with a brutal buzzsaw to the face and a savage axe double-murder being among the better examples! 

The throwback aesthetics is workable enough; the snappy soundtrack full of 80s mood classics and modern retrowave is a good hear, plus the fashion sense and lingo here do strike a nostalgic nerve, quite passable attempts for a late-80s slasher tribute such as this. By the near end of the film, we're treated with a twisty set of reveals that, while isn't exactly new or surprising, it still pairs pretty well with the bonkers motivation the killer have for massacring teenagers during prom. It's the kind of crazy slasher finale we've grown to love and I'm all for it! 

Overall, Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) may not win every horror-living hearts out there, but for those who loves a gruesomely bloody teen slasher with the decent amount of nostalgic ham and craziness, this is a great movie to consider for your slasher viewings! Make it a date! 

Bodycount:

1 female hacked to death with an axe

1 female gutted

1 male had his hands lopped off with a paper guillotine, face smashed against a door

1 male had his face eviscerated with a buzzsaw

1 female startled unto a fusebox, electrocuted to death

1 female hacked on the head with a meat cleaver

1 male jabbed on the head with a knife

1 male found with a hammerclaw buried into his head

1 female had a leg lopped off with an axe, bled to death

1 male decapitated with an axe

1 female fell unto and impaled on a falcon statue

1 female fatally brained with a trophy, dies from her injury 

Total: 12

Is Mac and Cheese A Side Dish or A Main?: The Blackening (2022)

The Blackening (2022)

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg

For the longest time, the whole trope of Black characters dying first in horror movies baffled me since, being a guy obsessed with slasher films, I can only count maybe five titles out of hundred-ish wherein this instance holds true. (New Year's Evil (1980), Alone in the Dark (1982), Slaughter High (1986), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), and Scream 2 (1997), to name a few) I now understand that this is more of a stab at the token minority trope, a problematic movie practice of sacrificing characters of certain ethnicities to the threat as bodycount fodder and/or motivation for the hero (typically a white male) to do better in saving the day. Over the years, through social push, more big-name Black actors are given more access to show off their talents, resulting to horror legends like the late-Tony Todd, Ken Foree, and Keith David, as well as modern horror creators like Jorden Peele and Misha Green, gracing the screen with a great deal of prominent Black characters in memorable leading roles.

With this turn, the "Black guy dies first" trope is occasionally uttered around nowadays as a tongue-in-cheek joke. The same kind of cheekiness that gets us fun and silly terror flicks like this house-in-the-woods survival slasher, The Blackening (2022)!

It's a Juneteenth weekend and a group of old college friends are meeting up for the first time after ten years; the assortment includes gal pals Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and Allison (Grave Byers), and their gay bestie Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins); hunky African-descent Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls) and his former-gangster bro King (Melvin Gregg); life-of-the-party Shanika (X Mayo) and incredibly nerdy Clifton (Jermaine Fowler). They're all invited to a vacation house in the middle of the woods by their friends Shawn and Morgan, who are suspiciously missing the moment they arrived. Nonetheless, the gang starts celebrating like any people in backwoods slashers would, with a whole lot of Spades, diabetic Kool-Aid and a side of troublesome fling that may or may not open old heartbreaks. 

The good times can only go so long before the lights suddenly go out and, on their search to get the power back on, the group stumbles upon a hidden room full of board games. Including an obscenely racist-looking one called "The Blackening", consisting of question cards, a grinning Sambo fella on the middle of the board and, curious enough, game pieces seemingly made based on their specific personalities. When the game centerpiece starts asking them to pick a card and play, this is when things get really screwed up as everybody finds out that Shawn is dead and Morgan is about to be tortured by a masked killer somewhere inside the house. Making matters worse is the game room is rigged close and the only way everyone to get out alive is to beat the The Blackening, or die trying!

Keeping the record straight, The Blackening (2022) is less a horror-comedy and more of a comedy with horror elements. Yes, there are kills and killers, a sense of stake, and a mystery as to who is behind this entire bloody fiasco, though the approach taken here leans closer to satirizing slasher tropes through the eyes of sharply witty and street smart African-Americans. Think a Halloween episode of The Boondocks, only feature length and with a killer masked up to look like a damn minstrel show. This certainly meant that the movie has little in the sense of blood, tension and scares, but the unapologetic energy of its writing and characters when it comes to poking fun at horror tropes, as well as showcasing jokes outside of the horror spectrum, is incredibly infectious down to the funny bones! (A running gag involving conversations through eye contact only being my favorite!) 

A good deal of this workability stems from the incredible chemistry and performances the entire casts have, from the hearty humor surrounding around Lisa and Dewayne's friendship jeopardized by Lisa's love for Nnamdi, to the no-nonsense loudness of Shanika and Carlton's cringe-inducing awkwardness. Their reaction to the bloodshed practically lampoons the roles of Black people in horror media, mainly being quippy, lucky and even straightforward enough to actually best the killer in a lot of encounters despite some painful, embarrassing, and painfully embarrassing blowbacks on their part. (Splitting up. Accidentally hurting themselves with their weapons. Getting high on Molly while being hunted down. Y'know, the usual backwoods horror theatrics) Interestingly, it is through this lampooning that The Blackening (2022) also took its chances to examine how modern culture and its many attempts to define ethnic communities led to harmful judgement within these circles, a lot of it light-heartedly addressed during the times the friends are forced to play The Blackening and test their Black-ness, only to later resurface as a motive in this movie's plot twist. While nowhere a grandeur deconstruction, it is an intriguing insight to pull within the movie's remarkably coherent humor.

The Blackening (2022) is, without a doubt, very "Black" and I just love it for that! It may not do much as a horror flick, but as silly fun little movie you can sit back and relax to, it's a whole party, baby! So grab some Rap Chips, down some King's Kool-Aid, and treat yourself with this roaring riot of a comedy slasher!

Bodycount:

1 male shot on the neck with a crossbow

1 female killed offscreen

1 male repeatedly stabbed with arrow heads

1 male shot through the neck with a crossbow

1 male had his head pulped with a candlestick, stomped dead

1 male shot with a crossbow, kicked into a well (?)

Total: 6 (?)

Camping The Camp: Bloody Murder (2000)

Bloody Murder (2000)

Rating: *1/2
Starring: Jessica Morris, Peter Guillemette, Patrick Cavanaugh

Well, boys and girls, can you name that one infamous hockey mask-wearing slasher known to lurk around the woods killing teenagers? If you answer 'Trevor Moorhouse' then I'm both impressed you even remember the guy, and disappointed coz you've probably never seen a Friday The 13th film. You're an anomaly of a slasher fan and that makes me sad...

So in this direct-to-video cheapo, trainee camp counselors fixing up Camp Placid Pines are disappearing one by one after bringing up a campfire boogieman named Trevor Moorhouse, who may or may not be responsible for cutting down the local population for a few years now. As suspicion variously falls on one another, our heroine Julie decides to do some amateur sleuthing to try and figure out who could be responsible for the potential murders going around the camp. And apparently this includes scenes of imagined scenarios wherein other characters are committing the murders to throw us off, and hilarious voice-over work whenever a letter is involved...

Bloody Murder (2000) was released around the time Scream (1996) made witty and satirical deconstruction of horror flicks look like the hottest thing to do, and it often feels like it with scenes shamelessly ripping and calling out slasher tropes, most of it coming from the resident horror nerd Tobe, who bemoans wry remarks like "...a great time to be walking through this camp alone. Why don’t you just paste a sign on my back that says ‘Please Kill Next’." (Yes, dude. We get it. You're trying to be Scream (1996)'s Randy) The result is nowhere as engaging nor as clever as it wanted to be, considering the whole murder mystery angle is clumsily handled with too many obvious red herrings and an acting tone dangerously leaning towards parody, courtesy of its eight-grade level writing. 

Nothing simply works here, not even the slasher elements which are awfully chaste by dead teenager flick standards; there's hardly a drop of blood for a good deal of these kills, no workable stalking or chase scenes involving a hapless victim and our masked murderer, and the raunchiest this movie ever got is a make-out session in the woods where no one got naked. Plus, the whole 'Trevor Moorhouse' shtick just isn't cutting it with how much the plot tried making him a household name here, making a mountain out of a molehill when the guy hardly even has the presence that demands attention, even more so when the killer ends up being someone we hardly paid attention to. But, hey, the movie seems to be dead set on making Trevor Moorhouse the next slasher star, so much so they're willing to risk a dumb twist ending featuring the hockey-masked maniac. (May have worked, though. This damn movie got two sequels, believe it or not...)

Perhaps the aim here was to be so bad it's good, but all I got is a whole lot of bad and very little of the good. If any. Bloody Murder (2000)? More like a bloody waste of film reel...

Bodycount:

1 male hacked up with a chainsaw

1 female stabbed with a kitchen knife

1 male shot to death with arrows

1 male had his throat cut with a kitchen knife

1 male gets a lawn dart thrown through his back

1 male found hanging dead atop a tree

1 male killed with a chainsaw

Total: 7

Death Comes For Legacies: Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Rating: ***1/2

Starring: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt

It's been, what? Fourteen years since the last Final Destination movie? In all honesty, Final Destination 5 (2011) would have ended the franchise on a high note by being an absolute godsend entry for managing to still keep the idea of Death personally picking off disaster survivors brutally frightening and morbidly fascinating within its back-to-basics story. Not to mention that one neat twist in the near end that I'm sure surprised a lot of the audience the first time they saw it! But through the next years, the rumor mill kept hopes of another round of the "howdunnit" bodycounting alive, this including talks of a story set at the medieval ages, to ones focusing on a group of first responders. (Frankly, a period piece Final Destination movie would have been interesting. Maybe then they would finally address who or what the flying fridge kept giving these random people visions of terrible disasters?)

Now, Death is back once more, and this time it takes a bloodied flying log through the legacy sequel trend, with a big emphasis on "legacy".

The scene starts at 1968; young Iris is surprised by her boyfriend Paul with a fancy dinner high up at a newly opened Skyview Tower, a classy restaurant built hundreds of feet above ground. What Iris didn't know is that her man plans on proposing to her there, all the while Paul isn't aware that the love of his life is carrying his child. When the two learns of each other's little secrets, the couple couldn't be happier for themselves and one another, thus everyone clapped and is happy.

Until some brat's coin toss somehow leads to the tower's glass dance floor shattering, a massive explosion, and the structure falling apart, killing everyone.

As Iris falls to her death, this turns out to be no more than a recurring nightmare and the source of night terrors for one Stefani, a present day college student. It's been two months since she started dreaming the disaster and, hoping to find its source so she can live normally again, Stefani pries information out from her extended family who hesitantly reveal to her that Iris is her grandmother, driven insane by her constant lookout for Death ever since that visit to the Skyview and is now dwelling inside a fortified cabin at a secluded mountain clearing.

Tracking her grandmother down, Stefani learns that Iris was successful in preventing the tower's collapse, saving the lives of everyone there. Of course, Death didn't like that its plan got screwed up, so it starts to kill off every survivor in the order they would've died that time, along with their respective descendants who shouldn't exist to begin with. The matter that everyone walked off living and breathing from that tower meant Death took a very long while to eventually get to Iris' bloodline (so long, dare I say, that if it was a movie, it would take three or four sequels just to do it justice), but with Iris now terminally ill, she theorizes Stefani's getting these dreams as a sign that her family's next to bite as soon as the cancer finally do her in. 

Stefani didn't buy any of this at first, but a well-projected weather vane through grammy's head moments after their meeting was enough to make a believer out of the girl, who then starts to go through and take to heart Grandma Iris' impromptu gift, a Bible-thick journal full of tips and tricks on how to avoid Death. The rest of her family, as you would expect, was skeptical by all of this until, that is, someone's dad got his face mulched by a runaway lawnmower and a cousin gets a gruesome yet unusually humor-driven incident involving a garbage truck. By then, it's a desperate race against time to find a way to break the cycle, which may include a heartfelt final appearance of Tony Todd as the mysterious mortician William Bludworth, a kooky plan to kill-and-resurrect a cousin through a triggered peanut allergy, and maybe even a darkly humorous suggestion of infanticide to steal the fresh soul's years, though thankfully nobody bothered to do after, perhaps, one of this film's best exchanges.

In fact, one of the key good points of Bloodlines (2025) is how the two families are written and portrayed, just a colorful bunch of fun and likeable characters despite their flaws. The film generously gives good bits after good bits of just how close they all are (Uncle Howard's kids and their cousin going through the house looking for a tiny adorable pet turtle, for one. And then there's Richard Harmon's Erik, a tattoo and piercing-studded assholey joker-type, shown to have a photo of his dad giving him a fatherly smooch on the cheek set as his phone's wallpaper, which successfully tugged my heartstrings), and it's this warm bond that's something mostly absent throughout the franchise, thus greatly welcomed here for giving the movie an identifiable theme and tone, as well as a relatable raise of stakes.

When it comes to the messy meat and bone of the movie, Bloodlines (2025) does kick things off with one of this franchise's best opening disaster next to Final Destination 2 (2003)'s vehicular pile-up; just brutal carnage all over. Blood, guts and charred bodies grace the screen full of splatter and a dash of dark comedy here and there. (Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head plays on a radio before hapless dancers start getting splattered on the hard concrete from a fall. A penny's weight causes a piano to tip over and fall through and, satisfyingly, on top of an obnoxious character. Just to name a few) This dip into grim comedy occasionally shows up across the rest of the death scenes, making the massacre here oddly balanced in terror, gore and cathartic laughs as MRI magnet flies metal debris through soft flesh, or an accidentally-chained nose piercing escalates to a deadly blaze.

The excitement, unfortunately, starts to fizzle down around the final act as the remaining family decide that the best course of action to keep Death at bay is to have them, or at least one of them, fort up inside late-Grandma Iris' "deathproof" cabin as long as they could, so the rest can live their lives to the fullest. Now, see, this is when Bloodlines (2025) starts to get sloppy with its direction as, for one, this plan is just dumb; with Death managing to kill off Iris using the structure of the cabin against her, the whole place is basically imperiled and this is further hammered down by the number of hazards originally meant to keep the Grim Reaper off now posing as dangers against the doomed family. And, yet, they continue ahead, resulting to even more deaths and a near-death experience that may or may not have broken the cycle.

I could have tolerated this shortsighted turn of events as it did still feature a few nicely executed set-pieces, but even when the movie rears up its inevitable twisty final disaster, Bloodlines (2025) couldn't even bother to come up with a more creative exit. Practically speaking, they just did the ending for Final Destination 3 (2006) again, only with little to no exciting build-up, looking awfully cartoonish and has Final Destination 2 (2003) logs thrown in because, well, fanservice. Yawn.

Quite a shame, really, as I would have given this entry a better rating given that they tried harder and better for its finale. Still, the journey before that is a whole baggage of fun, one that isn't shy to toss around an emotional core in the midst of all the crushed bodies and witty jest, reminding us to cherish our time with our loved ones. All I can say is I'm glad we have Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)! It's imperfect, but worth a watch! 

Bodycount:

1 elderly female gets a projected weather vane through her head

1 male had his face shredded by a lawnmower

1 female crushed to death inside a trash compactor

1 male gets a magnetized wheelchair crush and impale him into a malfunctioning MRI machine

1 male gets a magnetized metal spring through his head

1 female crushed by a falling light post

1 female crushed by an airborne log

1 male crushed by an airborne log

Total: 8

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