Ghosts of Fear Street (1998)

 

Director: Ken Kwapis

Screenplay: Karl Schaefer

Based on the book series by R.L. Stein

Cast: Christopher Rich as PJ Murphy; Talia Balsam as Anne Murphy; Vincent Berry as Joe Murphy; Alexandra Breckenridge as Kit Murphy; Azura Skye as Cricket; Cameron Finley as Mickey; Red Buttons   as Grandpa; Alan Wilder as Safety Czar; Rick Overton as Fred the Bugman

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Metamorphosis must be a rush!

Whilst Fear Street is a book series for young teens I had never heard of, I am fully aware of R.L. Stein, whose Goosebumps series was one I grew up on. Arguably, the first tastes of horror I got into as a small boy, and meaningful for all that means, I have nothing but admiration for him, alongside the vague recollections of the Goosebumps television series, screened in the United Kingdom, and the Goosebumps board game which, whilst with so many mechanical parts to it, I wished I still had and would have been something someone would have relicensed as a niche product for my age group. Prolific, Stein's book series Fear Street returned in 2021, when director/co-writer Leigh Janiak was able to put together a trilogy shot side-by-side and set in three different time periods, made over a period of multiple years beforehand. The films - Fear Street Part One: 1994, Fear Street Part Two: 1978 and Fear Street Part Three: 1666 - ended up being a Netflix streaming exclusive in 2021. This review is not those films, but a fragment which, as a twenty minute television pilot, barely shows what it would have been, which does present a potential challenge in reviewing, but is worth talking of.

It also presents the most mid-nineties thing from the get-go, for the opening credits, imagining the famous Dancing Baby meme, a piece of early animation from that era, re-imagined by very crude CGI dancing skeletons over the opening credits. I found it amusing, but it is definitely an acquired taste. More likely to interest is that, not wasting time, a young boy discovers his friend has turned into a spider creature due to a science project going wrong. With web shooters now under his arm pits, as he has already petrified his family and others, even a group in the middle of a game of Twister, threatening to suck out his friend's juices with a bendy drinking straw.

This is of course the story being written by PJ Murphy (Christopher Rich), a horror author for teens, an R.L. Stein stand-in, who has a family. This is where there not being any other pieces to this version of Fear Street, or a longer pilot, does become an issue, as you are left with questions to where this would this have gone. This sets up a wacky horror sit-com where Fear Street, which exists in this world, is a real place the family intends to go to so the wife's father can be moved, closing down the ghoulish bed and breakfast he was running with his late wife. The place is clearly haunted, where PJ was clearly basing his tales with some exaggeration on real things there, the snippets here offering a silly but potential rewarding work. Sadly as mentioned, you barely scrape the surface of the premise due to the quick pace of this short pilot.

There is the legacy of an uncle who just one day, out of curiosity as grandpa tells the kids, stuck a lightning bolt into his heart one day. In the background, someone has clearly antagonised the God of Crows for a one scene joke. There are the moments of seriousness too. Of the wife coming here initially wishing to close the bed and breakfast out of fear her children will be bullied as she was for living in Fear Street, the show that never was one which could have ran with her coming to terms with this place when she changes her mind, or that one of the sons, able to see ghosts, not only finds them an invisible ghost dog named Spooky, but can see her recently passed mother. There are also the characters I wished would have had a sitcom. They are namely Kristina, who prefers "Cricket" (Azura Skye), the cool Goth girl who names her spiders after Gigantor and Rodan who the older daughter of the family immediately finds is the best friend forever, even a possible sudden crush, in her cobweb and insect collection filled bedroom. Or there is her father Fred (Rick Overton), the bug man who PJ grew up with whose panic attacks cause him to turn into a bug.

The show, including some very crude CGI, could have been something I watched on Fox Kids or Nickelodeon, the potential Sabrina the Teenage Witch substitute, another show I openly was binging as a kid, in combining the supernatural with comedy. This was shown on television unlike pilots which never did, but never got to be successful however. Instead, it feels like an obscure marker for people involved who would progress in long careers before and after. Fear Street itself would resurface through Leigh Janiak's project as a director, and a co-writer, in the three films, but the director Ken Kwapis would be prolific in television and film, a man you may know for License to Wed (2007) with Robin Williams, one of the divisive Williams film, or The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (2005), or Follow That Bird (1985), a Sesame Street film, a journeyman if in the type of programming I openly I do not pay attention to. Everyone here was already in careers, and so ahead, in television, and if you were among the teenager/kid cast here, you could have been Alexandra Breckenridge as the eldest daughter who started here, who would go on in the lives of The Walking Dead and American Horror Story. The one exception, but showing how footnotes like this weave a variety of different media together, is that the grandfather is Red Buttons, a comedian/television and film star, and Oscar winner, who would still be working close to his 2006 passing, connecting this to classic Hollywood and the early forties/fifties era of American television in his presence.

Even the writer Karl Schaefer, who created the cult favourite Eerie, Indiana (1991-2), and was probably looking for an equivalent horror show for kids here, was producing and writing shows decades later, leaving this the alternative time line piece where, if it had been picked up, it would have been interesting what the show had become but also what it would have done for people beyond a potential audience with nostalgia for it decades later. All these figures' lives would have had this be prominent in their careers, and you could speculate how many other people we could tie to its legacy even if it had gotten only a single series. Sadly, it never got that series, and the content onscreen is not enough to really judge the virtues, only offer a tempting taste, a fun and breezy comedy horror production that would have likely been a sitcom in tone. The better world would have had at least one season or a feature length TV pilot, if anything, come to be, but that sadly was not meant to be.