HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 74
6th of 6 films with a person of color as director or lead. (excluding Asian)

OK, so how was this going to go? The exuberant psychedelic fun of 1994 or the shallow tired mediocrity of 1978. Weeeelll, somewhere in the middle I suppose.

Fear Street: 1666 swirls all its overcomplicated world building into a cacophonous frenzy here. For many, that makes it suck. I actually preferred that quality to the first film and missed its absence in the second (ok, 1978 was less confusing but it was also less interesting, IMO). Here it's OK - to be honest, I was relieved when the 1666 setting ended and we went right back to 1994, because I think this is the only era that Leigh Janiak nailed an appealing aesthetic for.

I had a bunch of issues with the film, that folks have probably already expounded on here ad nauseum. Again, the writers are either not concerned or just oblivious to any kind of era appropriate detail. These are millennial teens dressed up as 17th century Puritans and the film does nothing to convince us otherwise. Puritan teens probably didn't have drug fuelled raves in the forest with their friends. I mean, would you put that in a film set in an Amish community? Because the Puritans were about 5 times stricter than those folks. Also, I respect the continuing commitment to the queer theme for our protagonist, but to have these two girls willing to get it on in such a risky way (in terms of discovery) is pretty hard to accept - lesbianism wasn't something that anyone would have been really OK about acknowledging the existence of - the millions of queer folks who must certainly have been around really just suffered through hellish repression, and probably repressed it in themselves in 90% of cases. I know all this can be explained away as OK for the purposes of the plot, but it just feels like lazy writing - the assumption that the target audience also wouldn't know or care, and I'm sure that was a conscious decision.

There's a big twist about halfway through the film as to the whole cause and nature of the Shadyside curse and I have to say it's painfully obvious from about 10 minutes in. Again, not a huge issue - I was never really on tenterhooks about it anyway - but it's another instance of a muffled impact.

Having said all that, I did still enjoy this. There's just something kind of fun about these teeny horror flicks - despite some of the more obnoxious aspects of that (which let's face it, are only obnoxious for an older audience because they relate to today's teen generation, and not our own or from previous generations, which we would be more indulgent of - why is that I wonder? Is it because we have to put up with that teen culture in real life, so don't like to see it reflected or pandered to in movies as well?). I just find these characters much more appealing than the ones from 1978 - who all take a back seat in this film, whether it's in 1666 or 1994 - so it just makes it that much more watchable.

Am I glad these films were made? Yeah, definitely. Not totally stellar horror for mine (apart from the first one which I really did enjoy) but it's all still pretty good fun.