The hits keep coming.

In Fear Street Part Two: 1978, the omnipresent soundtrack puts Kansas, The Buzzcocks and The Runaways in heavy rotation as the second movie in the Fear Street trilogy on Netflix dispatches its teen cast with gruesome regularity. Though the second movie picks up where the first one left off, it is not just a continuation; Part Two has a self-contained plot within the overall framework of the story.

Deena, Josh and Sam, the trio that survived the first movie, thought they had the whole witch’s curse thing resolved, but at the end of Part One, the evil witch Sarah Fier, who cursed the town causing a plethora of unstoppable killers to pursue the teens, with one murderous spirit possessing Sam. The teens seek out the sole survivor of a previous attack: a woman who gives her name as C. Berman (Gillian Jacobs, Community.)

C. (her name is only revealed at the end of the movie) was at Nightwing Summer Camp (the reference to the DC character never pays off) with her sister when the entire camp was attacked. The story flashes back to 1978 where Ziggy (Sadie Sink, Stranger Things), one of the sisters, a Shadyside resident, is being brutally bullied by the Sunnyvale kids in the camp. (The first movie established the animus between the two towns.)

Ziggy is at the camp with her sister Cindy (Emily Rudd, Dynasty) and the two do not get along. Their relationship has been fraught ever since their parents split up and Cindy turned into an uptight goody-tow-shoes, much to Ziggy’s chagrin. At camp, the sisters mostly go their own ways; Ziggy avoids the bullies and Cindy hangs out with her boyfriend Tommy (McCabe Slye) and his druggy pals.

When the camp nurse takes a turn and attacks Tommy, he finds himself strangely affected afterwards. When that strange affect turns into a murder spree, Cindy and friends try to figure out what happened. That leads them to the nurse’s strange book collection that includes a tome all about Sarah Fier.

The book features a map of the camp and instructions on how to put an end to the curse. That’s easier said than done, especially after the friends become a target of Tommy and end up getting horribly murdered one by one while they explore the catacombs beneath the camp trying to find the witch’s bones.

Meanwhile, Ziggy has her own problems, trying to fight back against her enemies and move her camp romance with Nick Goode (the sheriff in the first movie) forward. Eventually the two sisters resolve their differences and team up to fight Tommy, the curse and everything else in the camp that is trying to kill them.

Part Two does not spare the gore; the killings in this one are carried out with a nauseating attention to detail and can take a seriously uncomfortable amount of time. The twist ending isn’t terribly surprising, nor, of course, is it truly an ending as the final scene moves the plot even further into the past for Fear Street Part Three, 1666.

Despite all the gore, Part Two has more suspense than scares. It would have been nice to see more of Gillian Jacobs, but at least the acting in this installment is an improvement over the first Fear Street, and the movie avoids the usual problems with the middle movie movie of a trilogy, where the second film is just the filler in between the world-building first part and climactic third. Part Two could stand alone.

Hopefully the third movie is a fitting resolution to the story and not just an excuse to blast Pachelbel’s Canon and other needle-drops from 1666 in the background.