Following the success of its Fear Street movies set in the ’70s and ’90s, Netflix fills a gap in the market and sets a horror film in the 1980s. Finally.

When Netflix first got into production it looked like the streaming giant could be taking the prestige TV mantle from HBO, but in the last few years it has basically become Hallmark; a content farm churning out cheap, seasonal schedule-filler masquerading as movies. Rather than a Christmas-obsessed community, Fear Street: Prom Queen (a title that’s essentially four random syllables you can say in any order without affecting its meaning) is set in a town so fixated on the abstract concept of Prom that you half expect the twist to be that the girl crowned prom queen ends up sacrificed on a giant wicker Sissy Spacek to appease the prom gods.

But that would be too interesting to warrant inclusion in a Netflix film about a masked killer taking out all the candidates for a high school’s prom queen. These include mean girl Tiffany (Fina Strazza), her Heathers-style minions who are presumably running as paper candidates (apparently unconcerned about splitting the vote), and unpopular outsider Lori (India Fowler) who inexplicably wants to be prom queen because her dad died or something. All the characters (including the super-religious school principal) constantly tell each other not to forget the big night is coming up, as though that would be possible when every conversation is about getting your prom dress and going to the “prom room” with your prom date and playing some pre-prom ping pong followed by some post-prom dim sum.

Again the film has no such eccentricities, and is content to cycle through cringey dance sequences, horrible costumes and ’80s nostalgia ad gymnauseam. The prom-obsessed characters are intended as a pastiche of ’80s movies, but despite its relentless references to Prom Night, Carrie and Heathers (which isn’t even a horror film), the movie has no interest in catering to slasher fans – or to anyone for that matter. There are some decent kills but zero twists, and it appears to have been written by an AI that has been fed a few misremembered teen flicks, but mostly trained on other asinine Netflix content. They should have called it Prompt Queen.