Fear Street Part Two: 1978 came to Netflix on July 9, 2021. The second film in the Fear Street Trilogy continues building the suspense and terror of the Sarah Fier story. While the first film laid down the foundation with less visual bloodshed than we’ve seen in straight up horror films. The second entry into the series is darker, bloodier and leaves us with the feeling of helplessness.
At the end of part one, Deena receives a call from Cindy Berman, the only living survivor of the Camp Nightwing Massacre. Cindy meets with Deena, her brother, and a possessed Sam, at her house. We then crash back into the past and to Cindy’s nightmare.
Now that we’ve said that… welcome to Camp Nightwing in 1978! Once again, we’re shown that Shadyside houses deplorable teenagers, do-gooders who think they can get away from the stink of their hometown and the troublemaker tweens who don’t care anymore. On the other side of the tracks, this installment reinforces Sunnyvale as the good kids with bright futures. But death doesn’t discriminate… or does it?
Ziggy, Cindy’s baby sister, is a tormented camper. She’s bullied by other campers and almost strung up by Sunnyvale campers. She befriends Nick Goode, the future sheriff of Sunnyvale, and it’s revealed they have feelings for one another. He wants to protect her and maybe get a bit of revenge on those bullies.
During the course of the film, a counselor named Tommy becomes possessed and goes on a killing spree through the camp. Nick Goode gets the campers out of town, but not before Cindy and her sister Ziggy are attacked at the base of Sarah Fier’s hanging tree. When Nick finds them after the bloodshed has stopped, he revives Ziggy and tells police her name is Cindy. In a twist, Cindy Berman never survived. Ziggy did.
We are then left with a really excellent cliffhanger involving Deena.
That’s the short and sweet of the film. While many believed the first to be the weakest installment of all three, we think this film is. That said, it’s a good film and does what a second installment should, it gives us more information about what would be going on before passing us to the final one. It’s brutal, it’s harsh, and it works.
