Nine

2010

Well, this is it; what everything else has been leading up to.  First off, let me say that I while I had no expectation that this would live up to the original or some of the better sequels, but I thought that it would at least be better than Dream Child and maybe Freddy's Revenge.  Unfortunately, that's not the case.  What's so terrible about this movie?  I'm glad you asked:

Before I even start to talk about the film itself, I'm going to mention how much I hate Platinum Dunes.  They're absolutely awful.  Aesthetically, all of their movies look the same.  They've got this cookie-cutter formula to remake horror films, and they all look the fucking same.  And it's Michael Bay.  Why aren't there more explosions?

The new Freddy looks like some Mongoloid reject from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The reasoning is that the makeup looks more like a burn victim, and producers were trying to make this a more realistic film.  This is the same reason I don't like these shitty Batman movies that everyone has a boner for.  Because at the end of the day, I'm watching a film about a guy who dresses up like a bat or a ghost that kills people in their sleep, and there's no fucking way that you're convincing me that it's remotely realistic.

You know what would be a realistic movie: Freddy Krueger rapes some kids, gets burned alive by their parents, and stays dead (because, realistically, that what dead people do).  Maybe the kids repress it.  They're probably socially awkward, and probably have be held down and beaten to climax, but still wake up everyday.  Maybe someone commits suicide.  Maybe its a parent who can't live with murdering someone.  Anyway, that could make an interesting realistic film, but it wouldn't be Nightmare on Elm Street.  If you're going to take the fun out of a movie about a guy who creatively murders people in their sleep, what are you left with?

Which brings me to the creativity aspect of everything.  As I've said reviewing previous movies, this type of vehicle can allow some really unique surreal dream sequences.  Just about every dream is the opening scene of the original, with Freddy making sparks in the boiler room, or set in the preschool.  And what's with the fucking preschool flashback?  Was the school run by the gardener?  This was 1997.  People were suspicious about this kind of thing.  No one noticed that the gardener was playing with these children a little too much?  Why was he allowed in the classroom?  He's a fucking gardener.  Where were the teachers?  Why was he allowed to take these children into the basement for such long periods of time?

And the nursery rhyme children are the ghosts of the main characters.  Wait.  What?

Then they introduce the concept of "micro-naps."  That's when you start to fall asleep with your eyes open and hallucinate.  So now Freddy appears when kids are semi-lucid.  So pretty much all the time.  There is absolutely no build-up or suspense in this film.  It's just jump-scare after jump-scare until it loses all meaning, and Freddy's presence isn't even the least bit frightening.  I don't know if it's because I'm old and appreciate suspense and buildup (like I prefer Alien to Aliens).  I guess with texts, Facebook, hula hoops, Zimas, and Pac Man video games, kids today have attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds. 

They also establish that if you stay up for 70 hours, you fall into a coma.  When this happens to Nancy, Freddy reveals that this was his plan all along so that he could rape her forever.  Pretty clever of Freddy.  But then he immediately tries to kill her without even one rape.  What happened to your genius plan, Oppenheimer?  So then they pull Freddy into the real world, chop him up, and burn him.  I actually liked the final scene.  It was gory and kind of cool.

One more thing:  I understand that to make money, movies have to be made so that the dumbest of retards can understand, but was it absolutely necessary for the establishing shot that prominently features the Elm Street sign?  Were people commenting at test screening, "I get the nightmare part, but where is Elm Street?"  Why does everything have to be shown in flashbacks?  Can audiences no longer process dialogue unless there are images in front of them?  And halfway through the film someone has to say, "If you die in your dreams, you die in real life."  Are there people who wouldn't come to that conclusion by watching the first half of the movie?

So there's that.  I should be done with Freddy Krueger stuff on this website.  For the most part, it was a pretty good time.  I'll probably do another franchise in the future.  There are two very obvious ones to choose from, but if anyone has any other ideas, let me know.  And on that note: Screw your pass!

Eight, Better Stay Up Late

Freddy Vs Jason

This is barely part of the original franchise.  Firstly, it was made nine years after the previous installment.  Secondly, it wasn't include in the box set I bought in 1999.  Thirdly, it's the only Freddy movie that I saw for the first time as an adult.  Everyone knows that when something's made when you're already an adult that it's stupid and doesn't count.

Anyway, this wasn't as painful as I thought it would be.  Maybe because my expectations were so incredibly low.  I don't know.  I think the biggest problem with these types of things is that they spawn from hypothetical questions that fourth graders ask, yet because creators don't want to alienate half the audience (although, I could be biased, but I don't think it's a 50/50 split), so you have a compromised ending with no clear winner.  You have an explosion caused by a third party that blows up Freddy, so Jason wins.  But Freddy breaks the fourth wall and winks at the audience.  So did Jason really win?  Does that ending satisfy anyone?  Fuck it.  I'm done with these films now.

Or am I?



I'm not.

Watching the remake tomorrow night.

Bonus Coverage

If anyone hasn't caught an episode, Nick Swardson's Pretend Time is pretty good.  This was a sketch from a couple nights ago.  I thought it's pretty appropriate for this site.  The quality's sub-par (it's video-taped off of someone's TV), but it's what I found:



Freddy also made an appearance on South Park last week.  Not as good as Swardson's but still funny.  For some reason, the video's reversed:

Seven

New Nightmare

 I've been putting this off.  Not so much because I don't want to review this movie, but completion of this review sets me up for watching Freddy Vs Jason, which is something I never wanted to do again.

Anyway, this movie's kind of "meh."  Like the last one, there's stuff that I liked and stuff that I didn't like.  It's kind of cool that even though they said they were done, they decided to make the seventh film this weird kind of metafiction about Heather Langenkamp.  See, it turns out that this ancient demon that murders people in their dreams has been subdued for years because he's entertained by Freddy movies.  Now that the franchise is dead, he's back to murdering (in the form of Freddy) unless Wes can make one more killer movie to stop it.

There was an underlying self-awareness about the franchise's popularity and its fans that was pretty cool.  It was also cool to see cameos by a lot of New Line guys and actors from previous films.  It's also the first film of the franchise directed by a veteran director (Craven was fairly green when he made the original).

Which also works against it.  As great as the directing is, it comes off as pretentious. It doesn't have that fun slasher vibe that the other ones do.  Makes it kind of long to watch.  Also, this is one of those cases where less is less.  They don't show Freddy in the dreams very much.  I guess Craven was going for a more realistic feel, which doesn't really work, and the overexposure of Freddy in the final scene negates that anyway.  And Dylan mentions several times that Rex (his stuffed dinosaur) protects him from Freddy.  This leads me to believe that Freddy is fighting a T-Rex in the dream world.  That would make an awesome movie.  Also, (I said this before), I don't want to see a movie about a little kid.  What am I, The Pope?

In the end, they stab Freddy in the tongue and burn him in an oven.  Just like Dylan's favorite story, Hansel and Gretel.

Six, Grab Your Crusifix

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

I'm really starting to regret my decision to watch some of these movies.  Although this is a step up from the previous installment, it's not as good as I remember.

( note: This was originally intended to end the series, and in a way, it was the last film to follow a linear progression, so for all intents and purposes, I am going to treat this film like it is the last.)

Some Background:  The film was released in September of 1991, and the popular slasher franchises of the eighties were not dying gracefully.  Audiences were losing interest in the quickly, poorly made sequels.  Both juggernauts, Nightmare and Friday hadn't released a film since the summer of '89 (if anyone doesn't know, this was the summer that defined the summer blockbuster).  Over two years; this is the longest gap in either franchise's history.  New Line Cinema decided to give these once great franchises a proper (somewhat) sendoff.

In August, Jason Goes to Hell premiered and was unlike any other Friday film (I'm not going to go into how or if it worked).  The following month, Freddy's Dead premiered with a similar departure.  Twin Peaks was huge at the time, and it has been cited many times (even referenced in the film itself) for the strangeness of the plot and the humor.

What I Liked:  At the time, it was cool because they did something a little different.  Everyone was tired of the slasher formula.  This took place ten years in the future, where there are no children left in the town of Springwood.  It had some (alhough goofy) memorable death scenes: the blackboard-scratching, the power glove.  There were some great cameos: Rosanne and Tom Arnold were great.  Johnny Depp came back to the franchise that launched his career for a hilarious scene.  Alice Cooper was Freddy's abusive father.  A young Boba Fette, Breckin Meyer was in it.  This film also has probably my most quoted Nightmare phrase: The map says we're fucked.

What I Didn't Like:  Although said death's were funny, Freddy's personality was becoming bland, and really was on the decline since the third film.  Then they decide to reveal Freddy's nonsensical and muddled origin during the final fifteen minutes in a 3D (Apparently, the technology existed before last year. Weird) segment.

What the Fuck:  First we see Freddy as a young boy, playing with a hamster in class.  So I guess he wasn't always evil.  But no.  It's cool, because he only took it out to smash it with a hammer.  Awesome.  He's well on his way to becoming a serial killer.  And then instead of being horrified that a student smashed a hamster, his class makes fun of him because his mother was raped by a hundred maniacs.  Also awesome.

When he's a teenager, Freddy is found cutting himself before his drunken stepfather beats him.  I guess he's a victim.  Oh, wait.  No he's not.  He doesn't feel pain, and murders his stepfather. Cool.  Then as an adult, Freddy has a family and a house with a picket fence.  How perfect.  But then his bitch wife discovers his forbidden murder basement, so he has to kill her.  But it's OK, because Freddy loves his daughter?

Then, right before Freddy is murdered, these dream-sperm demons that have been around since the beginning of time are like, "Hey.  You're the most evil guy ever.  Can we chill with you?"  And Freddy's like, "Yeah."  So they go in him and that's where he got his dream powers.

What Kills Freddy:  (I realized that I forgot this part in my last review.  I went back and added that if you want to check it out)  Freddy's daughter put dynamite in his pants.  Who'da thunk it?

Five

The Dream Child

I can't exactly explain why, but this movie is just awful.  Unlike the second film, this one follows the paradigm of the previous installments.  It just fails on so many levels.  It's almost OK.  Really.  The badness is kind of subtle.  Why doesn't it work:

There's a little kid in it.  Role Models is the exception.  Apart from that, little kids tend to make movies suck.  Also, why is the unborn Jacob like a five year old kid in dream world?  He's an unborn foetus.  Everyone else retains their appearance in dreams.  If Jacob can make himself older, why not an adult instead of an annoying little kid?  Personally, I think that I would like to see a movie with Freddy palling around with a foetus (Someone call Platinum Dunes.  I've got a treatment for Nightmare on Elm Street 2).

The kids are adults.  They're college graduates.  They're too old too even be a part of some sort of sorority house massacre.  I'm not sure why, but it only works when teenagers are getting murdered (probably why Platinum Dunes rejected my Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2: Baby Meat script).

Low Body Count.  Like three.  Which is unacceptable for a slasher movie in 1989.  I guess it tries to build suspense, which I normally prefer, but this just comes across as boring.

I'm not sure how I feel about Freddy's demise in this film, but it is pretty wild.  Freddy gives Jacob power, so Jacob vomits on Freddy causing this movie's souls pop out of his chest, thus turning Freddy into a foetus so that Amanda can put him back in her womb before his claw pops out of her stomach.  It's not really established in the film anywhere, but I it makes Jacob powerful, so I guess it makes sense.

Four, Better Lock Your Door

The Dream Master

If there was ever a Freddy blockbuster, this is it.  There's not much plot, not much character, but there is a steep body count, and the aesthetics are fucking amazing.

The dream imagery is very vivid.  The unnatural bright colors really convey that something is wrong under the facade of a nice suburb.  It's almost got a David Lynch quality of a modern setting with these Fifties-looking buildings and cars.

I really can't call it my favorite due to lack of tension and plot and such, but it's probably the most fun of the series.  The dream sequences are the more stream of consciousness kind of surreal than any of the others; the junkyard scene here the whole world is claustrophobically covered in cars, the pizza scene in the diner, all the long organic spinning hallways, the bug scene, the time loop, and the car crash.  It's all amazing, and it all really scares me on a subconscious visual level.

But my favorite scene, the one that I still dream about (and didn't completely realize what I was dreaming of until last week), is the Purple Rose of Cairo scene. I really love everything about this scene. The green light at the box office is just so subtly creepy.  Alice walks into an old grandiose theatre and sits on the balcony and watches an old black and white movie with all the dead kids.  Then the movie turns into the diner and she gets sucked in while everyone else is unaffected.  From the diner, she sees herself (in color) asleep in her chair.  The the doors shut, the diner is now in color, and we're in a completely different dream.

Do you get how much I love the visuals of this movie?  Now let's talk about the plot.  The first third of film consists of Freddy finishing off the remaining kids from the last movie.  So I guess what happens between Nightmare 3 and 4 is that after most kids institutionalized in Westin Hills (and one of their therapists) die, the remaining kids are released and they all go to the same high school.  This implies that they all lived in the same town, even though they didn't know each other when they were committed.  Either that, or their parents decided to all move into the same town after the kids were released.

Also, Kristen gives Alice her Dream Warrior powers as she's dying.  Why would she do this?  With Kristen dead, Freddy wouldn't be able to get more children without having her pull kids into her dream.  And why would Freddy kill Kristen at this point?  How did he know that she would give her powers to Alice?  He could have fucked himself.

And then, as people die, Alice is supposed to get their powers.  But really, she just knows Karate, gets the nerd girl's bug thing (which is an object; not a power), and says everyone's catch phrases.  And that really doesn't help her stop Freddy anyway.  When Alice finally goes through the looking glass to confront Freddy, these powers pretty much lead to a stalemate.  She defeats him by hearing that Dream Master poem and holds up a piece of glass so that Freddy sees himself and explodes; possibly the lamest Freddy death yet.

I didn't really know how to fit this in, but I figured that I should also mention that the screenplay was co-written by Brian Helgeland and Linnea Quigley's boobs are in Freddy.

Three

Dream Warriors

After the abortion that  was Freddy's Revenge, this feels more like the real sequel.  Without retconning anything, it picks up with characters and styles of the first film.  I originally said that it was a close second, but I really think that it's better than the original.

First off, let's talk about the cast and crew.  Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, and John Saxon all returned.  After rejecting Craven's original script because it was too violent and vulgar,  the studio had Frank Darabont rewrite it.  It was Angelo Badalamenti's second score after Blue Velvet.  The cast also featured early performances from David Arquette's sister and Larry Fishburne.

The film really enriches Freddy's mythos.  Freddy's character is more sardonic like we've come to remember him.  The dream imagery is a bit creepier, and more stylized towards each victim.  It has some of the most memorable dreams of the series: the trackmark mouths, the nurse with the Freddy tongue, the TV death.

Freddy's mother, Amanda, is introduced, along with the "Son of a hundred maniacs" chant (which I could be wrong, but I also think that there are times in the series where "a thousand" is used).  The goofy themes of a nun being raped by a hundred lunatic inmates might have been too campy for the first film, but fits in nicely here.  It also features what is arguably Freddy's most famous line: "Welcome to Prime Time, bitch!"  Although I was always partial to: "I said, 'Where's the fucking bourbon?'"

I mentioned that with the first two films, that conquering Freddy almost seemed made up as they go with no real logic except to wrap up the movie.  In  Dream Warriors, the ghost of Amanda Kruger tells Neil to bury Freddy's bones in sacred grounds.  Even though this solution is nearly as random as the other two, at least it comes from good authority (a ghost with some understanding of the situation).  Therefore, making some kind of sense.  It also states that the souls of the dead children make Freddy more powerful, which is an clean way of establishing that Freddy can have any magic power that the suits the story.

This is I think (I still have a bunch to re-watch) the only Nightmare film where adults believe the kids.  Although, there are still quite a few that believe that Freddy is nonsense; the girl hanging from a TV in the wall is chalked up to suicide.  Another thing that's odd: when they mention that Amanda Kruger got locked in the asylum for the holidays, that implies that the asylum closes down like a department store or something.  Like, what, does the staff just lock up and leave the inmates by themselves all weekend?

The sequence when the kids discover their dream powers is kind of silly.  Also, no one has the power to fly?  Isn't that what everyone wants to do in their dreams?

I also think Nancy makes some decisions that she is too smart to make.  By bringing the kids into the dream world, she and Neil (a doctor) sacrifice a few of them to stop Freddy.  Seems a little irresponsible.  It also seems weird that she falls for Freddy's trick at the end, but I guess it makes for a dramatic death.

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.

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.

Ten...

Never Sleep Again

Growing up as a child in the 80's was a pretty unique experience.  The decadence and excess that appeared in nearly every aspect of the culture seemed normal.  The horror movies of yesteryear evolved into blood-drenched slasher flicks.  At the height of special effects and animatronic technology, the films went from being about fear suspense to the spectacle of on-screen death.  Sequels after sequels got churned out of any movie that could become a franchise.  A new generation of monster kids were born, worshiping characters that generally referred to by their ordinary first names.  And no one was cooler than Freddy Krueger.

If you're like me, and still have an affinity for these movies, I can't recommend this documentary enough.  It came out a couple of months ago (in conjunction with the remake).  It's a comprehensive four-hour retrospect of the original eight movies, the television series, and New Line Cinema.  It's got interviews with just about every actor, director, writer, and producer that isn't too famous to be in a Freddy Krueger documentary.

It's really interesting.  Some of it I knew.  Some of it I didn't.  But I watched it all in one sitting (apart from pauses for drinks, bathroom, phone calls, etc).  There's a really cool stop-motion intro with scenes form the first movie.  I got it from Netflix, so I can't comment on the bonus disc.

Watching the documentary also made me realize that I probably haven't watched many of these movies since they were first pressed on DVD eleven years ago.  There's a lot of stuff that I forgot from these movies that I used to spend many a late night (and sometimes sit through an afternoon; remember when television wasn't so conservative?) watching.  I once even watched them all at once (consecutively, not simultaneously).  I don't know if I'd recommend that, but I'm proud to say I've done it.

Anyway, I'm going to go back and watch them all to see if they still hold up.  I'll get some reviews up in the next few weeks.  Since my box set predates Freddy Vs Jason, I have to rent it, so we'll have to see how motivated I am to do that.  I didn't see the remake (something else I wanted to but couldn't motivate myself to do; I really hate Platinum Dunes, and can't bare even the aesthetics), but maybe I'll get up a review when that's on DVD.  Anyway, here's how I remeber the films.  We'll see how my newer reviews compare:

Nightmare on Elm Street:  Genuinely scary, well made movie.

Freddy's Revenge:  Some cool sequences, but an overall failure.

Dream Warriors:  Really cool and fun.  A little goofy.  Very close 2nd after the original.

Dream Master:  Like 3, but less story and more death.

Dream Child:  Not bad, but boring.  I think there was a body count of 3.  Unacceptable.

Freddy's Dead:  Really weird and silly, but still really enjoyable.  Alice Cooper.  Alice Cooper.

New Nightmare:  I give credit for trying something new, but it didn't work.  Some really cool and creepy moments.

Freddy Vs Jason:  To be fair, it's the only one I first saw as an adult, but just terrible.

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010):  Probably awful.