Fear Street: Sunburn (R.L. Stine)
Claudia Walker wakes up
on the beach and can't move her arms or legs. Laying there, she
realizes that she's been buried alive in the sand and that no one is
nearby. Despite her worries, she finally starts screaming in the
hopes that someone will hear her and come help her.
Claudia then flashes back
to the day she got an invitation in the mail from her old summer camp
friend Marla. She invited Claudia, Joy, and Sophie to spend a week
with her in her family's summer home. Claudia recalls Marla picking
them up from the train station and starts crying. A random guy
suddenly shows up and helps her out of the sand.
She notices that his skin
feels a little cold, which he explains away as being from the ocean.
He helps her back to the house and hesitates when she asks his name
before telling her that it's Daniel. Daniel, for some reason, knows
the code to enter the locked gate around the house and helps her
inside. When she tries to introduce him to her friends, who claim
they didn't know she was still on the beach, he disappears.
When Claudia tells her
friends about him over dinner, Marla claims that he's the ghost boy.
She says she saw him on the tennis courts once and that he lives in
the guest house. Just as they all start freaking out, she reveals it
was all a joke. We also meet her butler/servant Alfred when he serves
a salad and Joy screams. There was a worm in her lettuce, and she has
a massive fear of bugs. Alfred carries it away and serves them
hamburgers. Later, Claudia flips out when she thinks that she sees
someone in the guest house. Marla convinces her that it was just a
trick of the light.
The next morning, Claudia
and Marla have some alone time together. Claudia brings up Alison and
reveals that Marla's sister Alison died the summer before. Marla gets
angry and storms off. Later that same day, they head down to the
beach, and Sophie almost gets electrocuted when she grabs the
electrified fence and it's still turned on. She's okay, but Marla
keeps swearing that it should automatically shut off during the day.
They get a few minutes
alone before two random guys show up. Claudia swears that one is
Daniel but it isn't. They introduce themselves as Carl and Dean, and
they're kind of asses. They start going through their cooler and
picnic baskets without permission and basically tell Marla that if
she's good, they'll share with her. Joy and Sophie naturally think
they are the hottest things ever. Dean also slaps Marla and says he
was knocking off a bug before they run off.
Sophie and Joy get super
bored that night, and since there aren't many things to do in the
area, they decide to go to the boardwalk. Carl and Dean show up, and
Joy and Sophia pretty much immediately leave with them. Marla wanders
off, and Claudia gets all excited when she sees Daniel and
accidentally calls him ghost boy. When he hears her nickname for him,
she kind of just laughs it off.
Daniel still feels cold
to her touch, but he convinces her that she really needs to get on
the ferris wheel with him. When they get close to the top, Daniel
leans over the side and falls to his death. This causes Claudia to
flashback to what happened the summer before.
Alison was Marla's little
sister and a major pain in the ass. Every time she caught them doing
something wrong, she told on them. She showed up when they were
playing truth or dare and threatened to tell the counselors on them
if they didn't let her play. Marla gave her two options: tell them
about the time she made out with Marla's boyfriend or walk the log
across this massive gorge. Marla stayed behind, while the others went
with her. She got halfway across, freaked out, and then they all ran
away when the counselors came.
Claudia then comes back
to the present day and sees that Daniel is fine. He teases her and
says that since he's a ghost, he simply floated away. They flirt some
more after getting off the ride and wander around the boardwalk. Just
as they find her friends, she turns around and he's gone again. When
they get home that night, everyone heads to bed, but Claudia wakes up
when she hears Joy screaming.
It turns out that someone
sneaked into her room and put leeches on her after she went to sleep.
Marla flips out and rushes off to find Alfred. Once she's gone, Joy
says that she thinks Marla lured them there to pay them back for what
happened to her sister. After everyone finally goes back to bed,
Claudia goes downstairs for a glass of water and thinks that she sees
Daniel. Alfred pops up long enough to tell her that Marla changed all
the codes and that no one other than their group now has access to
the house.
The next day, they all go
water skiing. Sophie goes first and goes down hard. Marla claims the
boat stalled, and since Sophie seems to be drowning, Claudia rushes
out to save her. They both get caught in an undertow that drags them
out to sea. She passes out and wakes up to find that Dean and Carl
came out of nowhere to save them. They then admit that they stole the
boat to save them and take off. Joy finds that someone cut the rope
Sophie used and once again suggests that something is up with Marla.
Claudia flashes back to
what really happened that night last summer. Alison begged them to
help her but they still ran away. Claudia could still hear her
begging for help. The counselors searched for her the next day but
only found her blood stained shirt. The girls briefly wonder if Marla
brought them there to torture them before she pops up with chocolates
for them.
This next part is
cray-cray. Claudia goes for a walk on the beach and thinks she sees
Marla. The other girl runs away, and Claudia then realizes that there
are literally no animals or birds on the beach. A big ass dog comes
out of nowhere and chases her into the ocean. She and the dog fight
until she sees a shark coming towards her. Claudia then gets caught
in the riptide and pulled out to sea, but she does see the shark
attack the dog first.
Claudia wakes up on the
beach to see Marla standing over her. Marla says she saw her on the
beach and thought she was dead. She helps her back to the house, but
Claudia then realizes that the dog that attacked her was Marla's
guard dog. When they get back, she runs to get Sophie and Joy, but
Joy is out on a date. Marla then comes in and helps take care of her
injuries.
When Joy gets back, they
pack their things and decide to run away before Marla can stop them.
After opening a closet to grab some extra things, they see Marla's
body fall out. Though they think it's weird that they saw her earlier
and she now looks like she's been dead for a few days, they still run
outside. That's when they find that the fence is still active and
they can't leave.
They try to find the
switch to turn it off and stumble across Marla. Turns out that she's
actually Alison. She totally didn't die the summer before. Right
before she fell off the log, she saw Marla smiling and laughing at
her in the woods. When she came to the next day, she pretended that
she had amnesia. She then came to the beach house and killed the real
Marla before they arrived. Now she plans to kill all of them for what
happened.
Just as she starts
pointing a gun at them, Daniel comes rushing out of the dark. He and
Alison fight over the gun as lightning strikes and knocks out the
power. She gets away and runs towards the fence. Though she knows the
power is off, she grabs it right as the generator kicks in. Even
though Sophie survived grabbing the fence before, it electrocutes and
kills Alison.
Daniel then reveals that
he's Alfred's college student son. He didn't want his dad to get
fired for having him there so he hid in the guest house. Joy and
Sophie agree to go inside and call the cops, and Daniel decides to
prove he's not a ghost by grabbing Claudia and kissing her.
Isn't this the exact same
plot of Slumber Party, or was it Weekend by Christopher Pike? A bunch
of girls spend the weekend together with one sister who survived a
fire. In the end, it turns out to be the sister everyone thought was
dead bringing them there to enact her revenge.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there was another Fear Street similar to this plot. Is it wrong that I was more upset about the shark going after the dog then anything else in the book?
ReplyDeleteIt was super familiar, but I think a lot of books that came out around this time were "inspired" by others. And nah, the dog was a better character than these girls LOL
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