You Don't Look Hip: July 2010

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Two, Freddy's Coming For You

Freddy's Revenge

This movie is probably considered by many to be the Mulligan of the Nightmare series. It barely follows the original and hardly expands the mythos. You could probably skip this one and watch the third movie, and not have any inpact on the story. It's actually a lot worse than I remember. It's a failure for really so many reasons.

I guess the big one is the paradigm shift. The storytelling really doesn't follow the original. There's really only two dream sequences in the film; the first and last scenes. And they're pretty much the same scene. It's more of an Amityville or Poltergeist type thing where a family moves into a haunted house, and the spirit is trying to make the residents murder people. So instead of killing people in dreams, Freddy uses the protagonist, Jesse's, body to kill people in reality.

Also, when Freddy does take over Jesse's body, he acts completely out of character. He runs around like a mischievous imp or The Leprechaun or something, and instead of his playful cat/mouse chase, he just stabs people that randomly get in front of him. His powers throughout the film seem to be magically locking any door and making things so hot that they catch fire (even the pool)?

And I understand that Lisa loves Jesse and she knows he's going through some shit, but she's very tolerant of his douchey behavior throughout the film. After he tells her he killed Ron, she's like, "Jesse it's OK." Really? It's fucking OK that he killed his best friend? Even if she doesn't believe this, she doesn't seem very concerned with his confession. And what's the deal with Jesse running away when he gets the 10-inch Freddy tongue? I'm sure Lisa would be OK with that. You gotta use that shit, son.

And to stop Freddy in this movie: love. Lisa loves Jesse so much that he turns back from Freddy into Jesse. That's way lamer than that apathy bullshit we had to deal with last movie.

A lot of people blame this movie's failure on the strong homosexual undertones, but I don't know. The Jeepers Creepers movies were totally gay, and they were awesome. I'm sure there are others if I really thought about it. It's like when people are blaming gays for ruining the institution of marriage, when it's like: No. Marriage always sucked. Don't go blaming this on gay people.

Friday, July 23, 2010

This is Fucking Cool

Thursday, July 22, 2010

XX X

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Melvins/Isis

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The New Moon Knight

Friday, July 16, 2010

One

A Nightmare on Elm Street

So a couple of weeks ago, I said that I was going to revisit the Nightmare series as an adult and see how they still hold up. This was what I said about the first one:

"Genuinely scary, well made movie."

It pretty much sums it up. Strong writing, directing, FX; acting is pretty decent (especially compared to some low budget horror at the time). And it is a lot scarier than I remember.

I think that because Robert Englund had such a strong personality in later films, you almost forget how dark the original was. Freddy's a lot more lecherous, and really doesn't have any funny one-liners. The dream settings are more realistic, but the imagery is way more abstract. Even the deaths are a bit more brutal, and not as goofy.

In the same way that subsequent films changed my perception of the character, they also changed my perception of the film as a serious horror movies. As good as this film is I always equate Craven's biggest contributions to the genre as The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left, but Nightmare really deserves a lot more credit than just being remembered as Craven's biggest commercial success.

There were a couple of things that bothered me:

1) At the end, Nancy builds traps, booby traps the house, puts her mother to bed, sets her alarm, and goes to sleep all within the span of ten minutes. Now, to call this a stretch is being a bit liberal, but what bothers me even more is that even though Nancy's mother is pretty sauced and in bed, what's to say that she doesn't get up and go to the bathroom or kitchen or something? She could very easily get blown up or crushed by one of Nancy's traps. Nancy's asleep and won't be able to stop her.

2) My other problem is something I see a lot in ghost stories, and Freddy Krueger is essentially a ghost. Although originality is good, it helps to have a preexisting mythology. Vampires are killed with wooden stakes or sunlight. Werewolves are killed by silver. Frankensteins are afraid of fire bad. When dealing with a new monster, solutions are pretty much arbitrarily made up by characters as they go, and seem to work for no other reason than that the film needs to end.

In this example, Glenn mentions halfway through the film that some Eastern religions believe that to take away a dream's power, you have to not believe in it. Why does he have any reason to believe this would work with Freddy? Who knows? There is no absolute when dealing with dream-mythology, but in order to build towards a climax, there needs to be some kind of resolution.

Anyway, to further convolute this, Nancy pulls Freddy into the real world before she makes him disappear by not believing in him. At this point he's no longer a dream, so why does this still work? And why doesn't she just stop believing in him when he was still a dream? It seems that making him real and having him chase her through the house is just a lot of unnecessary work.

The final scene doesn't really make any sense plot-wise, but its weird and scary, so I think it works.

Even with these complaints, its still a very good movie.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Good Riddance

See you in Hell, Asshole.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Here's Something I Stumbled Upon...

It looks like this has been a meme for a few years now, but fuck you. I just discovered it. Apparently, people are making chiptunes versions of pop songs. Here are some that I like:

Thursday, July 8, 2010

You Just Made Me Vomit in My Own Mouth

NO! YES! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'm always upset that every time Steve Carell is promoting a movie, he goes on The Daily Show and not Colbert. Even Stephen was arguably The Daily Show's best running gag, and its been six years since Carell left, and I've been waiting. If anyone watched The Report last night, you would have seen the first new Even Steven in what I gather has been seven years.

Anyway, today I watched all the old segments on the Comedy Central site. I was originally going to put up some of the best, but they were all amazing. Here's every Even Stephen I could find:

9-20-99

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Friday, July 23, 2010

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Friday, July 16, 2010

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Friday, July 9, 2010

Thursday, July 8, 2010

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