Mr. Pat
- Oct 26, 2021
- 4 min read

Fear Street: Part Three: 1666

The 336th review!

Well, I'm going back to work today... But I still have my lottery ticket on the fridge that I plan on checking on after I write my review. If all of a sudden the production values on my videos go through the roof, you will know why. But before that, I have to discuss...

Fear Street: Part Three: 1666 (2021)

As I've made abundantly clear, I have not enjoyed this series. One was really bad, two had spurts of being enjoyable and now we get to the third. I'm not going to go too deep for the synopsis because this is where the series startz giving you answers. Anything I try to explain may give things away and this movie is too recent for spoilers.

What I will say is we get the backstory of Sarah Fier and how the legend isn't really what everyone has been told. First, I need to get something out of the way, the first half of the movie takes place in 1666 in Ohio. The problem with that is the first settlement in Ohio was Marietta in 1788. I understand the writers of this movie are about as subtle as a brick through a window so they just couldn't let the spooky date go by without using it.

After we learn the backstory we jump back to 1994 and back to what Deena and the gang are up to. You know what? This movie might be my favorite installment. It was the only one of the series that wasn't chock full of melodrama and people acting as annoying as possible. Although, for some reason, I hate the little kid baddie with the baseball bat. I don't know why, but anytime he was on screen I wanted someone to punt him.

The stuff in the past kept me interested long enough even if I didn't buy it shaking out the way it did. To my surprise though, it gets a lot better once they switch to my least favorite cast of characters. Their last stand is a lot of fun and it was pretty awesome when the baddies get doused in blood. I was really into the movie at this point and it surprised me by how much I was enjoying it compared to the last time I was watching these characters.

It's not perfect by any stretch though. I didn't get Sam at all. Why was she possessed in the first place? The protagonist from the second movie didn't get possessed, and we found out who they thought was behind everything actually wasn't, so it doesn't make sense why she'd get taken over and Deena or Ziggy didn't. Then they manage to break the devil's hold on her with... the power of love. Also, there was a hidden antagonist that I didn't buy at all. The first two movies offered no hints about their true intentions and then all of a sudden the big bad is super evil. It's like the movie thought OK, we established this person as evil, so let's just have them drop all pretenses of being good now and make it super obvious. I think this movie had some good ideas but the writers didn't know a good way to fit them together so they haphazardly mashed them all together with duct tape and glue sticks. Meanwhile, because this is Fear Street it continued the series' tradition of a stabbing to the stomach being only a minor inconvenience. Each one of these movies had a person get stabbed in the tummy and brush it off minutes later with no side effects. There's a scene at the end where the movie tries to scare with a character getting stabbed in the stomach, but it doesn't work because we saw that story three times already and they were fresh as a daisy minutes later. Afterwards they show how the stabbing wasn't what you thought, but I ask, why bother? People aren't hurt by stabbings in the stomach in this series.

Those were my only problems with the final installment because, like I said earlier, I actually thought this was the best one. Granted, it's not saying too much but I give this movie credit, I rolled my eyes the least while watching the final chapter. It's a low bar to clear, but I give it credit because I was entertained by the movie on its own merits. I still didn't care about any of these people outside of Josh and didn't care what happened to Deena or Sam but they were more tolerable in this. I think it's because Sam spent most of the movie snarling.

OK, it might be hard to tell based on the review but I liked this movie more than I disliked it, and honestly, if you're interested in this series, I'd just watch the third and skip the others. They give you a recap that explains how they got there and cuts out the many, many annoying moments from the other movies. You don't need to see the others because the "huge" reveals don't really land because there's really no hints to what they've been building to. It just kinda happens and you're left to accept it because the movie says so.

The series as a whole is really bad. I have no desire to revisit any part of it. But I want to be fair to part three. As a standalone film, it's good. I liked it. 1666 cut out a lot of the fat and got right down to business. I also liked the back in time stuff because it forced the movie to get an original score and not just shoehorn in popular songs from the era to pop the audience (although they do that when they get back to 1994.) It was tense and had a pretty fun chase that was set up by the movie's first surprise, and that was the surprise that I liked.

The movie shines when they go back to the mall. I liked how they brought Martin back to help, although I can't imagine he would be THAT gung ho, considering their sales pitch, but I'm glad he came back. Without him, you don't have the cool fight scene.