Carnography

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Another remake of a classic horror movie that just so happens to have Michael Bay's name attached to it. It's almost as though he has some sort of primal urge to take nostalgia and destroy it. Let's hope he never teams up with Uwe Boll because I don't think the universe could cope with whatever resulted from it...

In the town of Springfield, some of the teens there are having a problem sleeping. Or rather, when they sleep they're stalked and tormented by a horribly burned man in a red and green sweater, with knives on his hands. And when he's finished playing with them in their dreams, he kills them. As they watch their friends die one by one, Nancy and Quentin also find themselves dreaming of the burned man, and take it upon themselves to discover the truth - what is the connection between them and this man, and what did their parents do a decade or so ago that has been kept hidden from them all these years? Furthermore, can they uncover the truth and stop what's happening to them before they fall asleep for the final time?

Let's start off with the best things about this Nightmare on Elm Street remake. First off, there's a scene in the movie, approximately at the start of what could be termed Act 3, in a pharmacy. Our heroine Nancy, having not slept for two or three days at this point, starts to experience microsleeps - effectively she's dreaming for a few seconds at a time while still awake. This leads to a scene where Krueger's boiler room and the aisles of the pharmacy start to blend together, with Krueger appearing and disappearing as well - but the effects of his swings and slashes at Nancy are seen in the real world as products on the shelves surrounding Nancy spontaneously get sliced open and sent flying. It's a very effective scene and one that really benefits from the advantages of CGI; its only flaw is that I think it could have stood to have been a little longer.

The other great thing about the remake is Jackie Earle Haley, who plays Freddy Krueger. Following in the footsteps of someone like Robert Englund to play such an iconic character is a pretty tough thing to do, but Haley managed it with aplomb. He got the role on the basis of his screen test for Rorschach in Watchmen, and succeeded in impressing everyone who saw him in the role of Krueger that he even got Englund's personal blessing to play the character. And let's not forget the wonderful coincidence that, back when the first film was being made, Haley actually went to audition for the role of Glen, and brought his friend Johnny Depp along with him - we all know how that ended up. Haley really does take the character of Krueger and make it his own though - it's not just the updated burn makeup (enhanced with just a little bit of CGI) but the little mannerisms he put into Krueger's character that make him stand out from Englund's portrayal without taking anything away; things like this Krueger's habit of twitching his razor-tipped fingers as he approaches his prey that stick in your head after you've finished watching the film.

Sadly, however, these are the only things I can really praise about the film, and even Jackie Earle Haley's performance can't carry the entire film. This Nightmare on Elm Street remake's major flaw is that it's just so very slow - we barely spend any time with our heroine until at least a third of the way through the movie, and even after that the movie feels less a horror movie and more a Nancy Drew mystery where Nancy and Quentin spend most of their time uncovering the truth about Fred Krueger and the preschool they all went to as children despite it being on the far side of town from them all. The dream sequences are... okay, but they feel fragmented and maybe reliant a little too much on CGI effects rather than atmosphere and suspense (always the danger with CGI). And when it came to chronicling the crimes of Fred Krueger while he was alive, they went too far the other way. Now, instead of him being a child killer and implied molester, Krueger instead is an outright child molester who even kept pictures of his crimes for his victims to find later (because the good parents of Springwood, always thinking ahead, decided to torch him and just pretend it never happened in the hope that their kids would (a) never remember and (b) no-one else would ever investigate). The balance is upset, especially during the part of the movie that attempts to convince us that Krueger was actually the victim of a McMartin Preschool-esque incident and was in fact entirely innocent. We know Krueger is/was a bad person; trying to pull a plot twist like that just isn't going to work here.

In the end, this remake is, at best, average. If it was an entirely original film, it might have been raised to "quite good", but this is a film that's pretty much impossible to watch without comparing it to its original, and as a result it suffers for it because we know that they managed to do a lot better the first time around with a hell of a lot less.

 

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Freddy vs Jason (2003) - the Krueger Perspective

Well, I wrote myself into a corner with this one, didn't I? Back in January, when I was doing my review series of all the Friday the 13th movies, I stated that I'd just have to do a separate review of Freddy vs Jason focusing on Freddy Krueger if I ever got round to doing a Nightmare on Elm Street series. Well, here I am in the middle of that series, and so here's a second review of FvJ - this time centered all around Krueger's role in the film.

You should all know the plot, and if you don't go click the link above and you'll be taken to a wonderous page that fills you in, but just for the record: Freddy Krueger is persona non grata in Springwood after an information suppression campaign worthy of a major government department, so he decides to send Jason Voorhees in to do his killing for him, figuring one undead serial killer is as good as another and if he can get people talking about him again and fearing him he'll get his power back. Unfortunately for Krueger, this plan hinges on Jason knowing when to stop, and when he doesn't Krueger now has to stop Jason as well as get back to killing kids on Springwood. Oh yeah, and there are some deeply annoying teenagers caught in the middle, but really, who's watching this for them?

One of the very first things that jumped out at me when watching FvJ is that it's the first film that actually dares to go where none of the others in the series really could - basically all but saying outright, "Freddy Krueger was a child molestor!" Krueger himself says a couple of lines that strongly imply this, but to me the most telling moment is when Krueger, pre-immolation, licks the back of a photo of one of his victims before placing it in a scrapbook. That single lick couldn't scream "kiddie-fiddler" any louder if it tried, and it almost makes me shudder even now.

So the movie is attempting to reconcile the original vision of Krueger as truly dark and reprehensible with the Krueger who spat out pitch-black one-liners in the later movies. Part of this I assume is because, in a film like this someone has to be more villainous than the other, and Jason Voorhees has never been one for true malevolence - he's more of a "point in direction of teens; let loose to go kill" monster. Freddy Krueger enjoys the suffering of his victims; he's far more actively evil than Jason ever could be. Of course, it also helps that they kept Robert Englund on to play Krueger (aside from the scene where he shoots out of the waters of Camp Crystal Lake like a SAM; there he's played by none other than Óscar Gutiérrez Rubio, better known as Rey Mysterio (Jr).

FvJ also attempts to bring as much of the backstory of the previous six films (New Nightmare doesn't count, occurring on the other side of the 4th wall) into this film, and it's at this point that my OCD gets triggered something terrible. We have Hypnocil being used to dope up the majority of the teenage population of Springwood, even though it's somehow still not gotten FDA approval in the time between Dream Warriors and now (although the fact that most of the teens are on it would possibly explain why so many of them appear to have drink, alcohol or anger management problems). Those who prove resistant to the drug or who just have the misfortune to see something they shouldn't get shipped off to Westin Hills, that great bastion of teenage psychiatric treatment, and no family members so much as raise their voices in protest, let alone blow the whistle on the whole thing.

Now add to that the fact that the last time we saw Springwood, Ohio, it was pretty low on teenagers and high on psychotic disorders (Freddy's Dead) but by the time FvJ comes along (and we have to be talking at least ten years canonically between movies here, even if you discount Freddy's Dead). This means that either everyone got their sanity back and got down to making babies at an obscene rate, or a lot of new people moved into Springwood and not a one of them questioned the town's "Drug first, ask questions never" policies. Which seems highly unlikely to me, but hey, what do I know. I freely admit my canon fixation is a result of OCD.

In the end, while Jason Voorhees gets the body count in FvJ, it's Freddy Krueger who gets the significant storyline. He gets to play with everyone, he gets the best lines and even gets some evolution of his character, even 19 years down the line. Of course, this was also the last time Robert Englund was to play Krueger in the movies - when the inevitable remake came along, they decided to go for a new face under all the makeup...

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Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

In preparation for making New Nightmare, director and writer Wes Craven sat down and watched all the previous Nightmare on Elm Street films. Apparently by the time he had finished, he claimed he just could not follow the storyline at all. After attempting to reconcile the plot of Freddy's Dead to the rest of the franchise yesterday, I think I know how he felt. Craven, of course, went back to an idea he'd had all the way back in 1987 while Dream Warriors was being made - breaking down the 4th wall and having Freddy Krueger trying to break through from the "film" world into the "real" world.

It's the 10th anniversary of the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie and Heather Langenkamp, now married and with a young son, Dylan, is doing publicity connected with that. Heather is stressed, however; there've been a lot of earthquakes lately, she's got a stalker who likes to sing the movie's children's rhyme down the phone at her in a Freddy Krueger voice, and she's not sleeping very well - and when she does sleep, she tends to dream about a creepy animatronic Freddy hand that goes bezerk on a set and starts slicing crew members up of its own accord. Then she gets asked by producer Robert Shaye and Wes Craven himself to star in a new movie. Craven's been having nightmares again, and he'e writing his new script based on them - and he needs Heather to return and play Nancy again against Freddy one last time. As things develop, the lines between fantasy and reality start to get very blurred indeed, as Heather begins to realise that the very evil behind the concept of Freddy Krueger is real and wants to escape into the real world to carry on where the films left off.

Obviously, New Nightmare is a very meta film, jumping between the idea of the "film" world and the "real" world with gay abandon (don't try to think too hard about where that leaves those of us watching the film or you're liable to make something go 'pop' in your brain). It plays with some of the ideas of horror film rules and customs that Craven would come back to a few years later with his postmodern hit Scream, but takes them in a different direction to where the latter film would end up. Here the lines between the story and Heather's "reality" become more and more blurred as the film progresses, until at the end where she "becomes" Nancy one last time to finally face down and defeat the Krueger-demon once and for all. Heather is, of course, aware that she's not actually Nancy, but the story doesn't care, and as it's in control it just shapes everything around her so as to make her play the role whether she wants to or not. It does this quite slowly at first, in ways that one wouldn't even notice (when things start falling apart for Heather, the first person she goes to for support and advice is the man who played her on-screen father, John Saxon, rather than any of her own family), but then gradually ramps it up - "Screw your pass," and one character's death mirroring a death from the original film being two examples before the end, where Heather finds herself dressed in Nancy's pyjamas once more, outside the house at 1428 Elm Street. It's never made entirely clear whether Wes Craven is seeing all of these events in his dreams as premonitions, or if his dreaming these events is actively writing them into existance, but either way it's clear that it's out of his control.

The concept of fairy tales is also strongly threaded through the story, specifically the story of Hansel and Gretel that Heather reads to her son through the movie. The whole story, in fact, can be seen as one dark fairy tale, complete with the Krueger-demon as the wicked witch, who needs to be defeated once and for all so that everyone can live happily ever after. I also personally liked the idea of the toy dinosaur as Dylan's "dream guard", as I had a similar setup when I was a child (although in a strange piece of lateral thinking, I imagined that Freddy Krueger himself guarded my dreams, figuring that there was going to be few people better to deal with nightmares than him. I'm fully aware that my childhood was strange.)

If there are any real complaints about the film, it's that it maybe feels a little too long in parts, particularly in the hospital scenes (yes, we get it, they're being dicks!) New Nightmare also has the lowest body count of the entire series, with a grand total of two on-screen deaths, which might well put off the more gore-hungry. Overall though, its willingness to play with the meta and take a risk with the storytelling as it does pays off and makes it one of the more enjoyable (if occasionally confusing) entries in the series.

 

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Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

The early 1990s were the time when movie studios decided to finally lay to rest their errant horror franchises. Jason Voorhees went to hell in 1993, as we've already seen, but Freddy Krueger had already beaten him there by two years and was waiting for him to arrive. Also, Freddy made the trip in 3D - because there's probably a rule somewhere that you can't have a long-running horror franchise without a 3D gimmick movie at some point. So we come at last to Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.

"10 years from now..." and Springwood, Ohio (population: rapidly dwindling) has run out of children due to Freddy killing every last one of them save one (we never learn this one surviving teen's identity, but at one point he was allegedly meant to be Jacob from The Dream Child - don't think too hard about how he can be in his late teens when the film says only 10 years have passed since the last movie or you'll risk your brain leaking out). Freddy manipulates this last teen into escaping Springwood so that he'll bring more teens back for Freddy to kill (apparently he's now unable to cross the town boundaries so he needs to find alternate ways of getting out) and the poor kid ends up in a teen shelter with amnesia. When they find a news clipping about Springwood in John Doe's belongings one of the shelter's psychologists decides to take him back there to see if it helps break through his amnesia, and three of the shelter's other kids accidentally tag along. Once there, they find that every adult in the town has gone utterly batshit due to Freddy's killing all the kids, and there's a new mystery to be solved including the until now unknown child of Freddy Krueger. Krueger's plan to escape of course succeeds and he starts to prey upon the kids at the shelter, leading to a final showdown between the shelter's psychologists (one of whom is a dream expert and played by Yaphet Kotto!) and kickboxing teen Tracy, who are determined to finally lay him to rest.

Freddy's Dead is, I think, one of the most visually striking of all the Nightmare series. It takes advantage of the 3D tools and the CGI, making some really arresting dream sequences (the computer game one maybe being the most memorable one). There's also the decaying, lost town of Springwood, however; its deserted streets, the dying carnival, the placing of the skipping rhyme around the town without actually saying it out loud... all of these things make the atmosphere of a broken, dying town and give everything that happens there an extra air of creepiness. Of course, it also has "Mr. and Mrs. Tom Arnold" cameoing as psychotic parents there too, chewing down on what scenery is left after Freddy's decimation of the town (there's actually several sneaky cameos in the film; just about everyone knows about Johnny Depp's appearance, but look out for Alice Cooper too). Freddy Krueger is also given a great deal of screen time as well, far more than the previous films, which allows him to really let loose with the pitch black quips and sadism that we all know. And the film's protagonists - Tracy, Maggie and Doc - are both likable and resourceful, figuring out pretty quickly that the best way to deal with Freddy is to adopt a version of the Nancy Thompson Home Defence strategy and just beat the crap out of him in the real world.

But... For all my gushing about those aspects of the film, they just make its flaws all the worse as well. And Freddy's Dead has a real problem with keeping its continuity straight. I've already mentioned the "John Doe/Jacob" snafu, but that isn't really an issue because it was never officially part of the movie; the film's real continuity disaster lies with the shoehorned revelation of Krueger's child. The big revelation upon which the film hinges on is the identity of mini-Krueger (I'm not saying who it is because of SPOILERS, but there's a limited cast so it's probably not hard to figure out), and how the town taking his child away was what caused Freddy to become the Springwood Slasher and then the ultimate dream demon. Except that we know this isn't true and the film itself contradicts itself by showing us that Krueger had already killed a whole bunch of kids before his wife and child discover his glove collection (although the selection of different killing gloves, all with different and nasty ways of murder, is pretty damn awesome and I wish we could have seen more of it). I just cannot stamp a seal of approval on a film that apparently doesn't even care about its internal continuity so blatantly, and so Freddy's Dead will always be not quite good enough to be declared one of the "good" entries of the series, despite how much I like the rest of it.

Two final points of trivia, however: director Rachel Talalay has gone on to have a quite successful career as a director, and most recently has directed several episodes of the new Doctor Who. Secondly, there's an interesting similarity between the dream demons who empower Krueger in the film, and the spirits/white bursts of light that leave Jason Voorhees' body at the end of Jason Goes to Hell. I'm pretty sure that's not a coincidence...

 

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

[Yes, I know; there's been a two-week break in this series and I'm a terrible slacker. Unfortunately a combination of real-life mini-disasters and some health problems got on top of me and I had to take some time off several things to recover. This will teach me not to have review notes not far ahead enough to deal with this sort of thing... Regardless, I'm back now and continuing as scheduled.]

By the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 came along, ideas for the franchise were starting to run a bit thin on the ground. After all, how many different ways could they bring an undead child-killer who murders teens in their dreams back, and how many new ways could they come up with to kill him at the end? In the end, they went for a variation of an idea that had been originally pitched to a pregnant executive - imagine a Freddy baby's claws tearing out of your body. That particular pitch wasn't used, unsurprisingly. but they decided to keep at least an aspect of the "baby Freddy" at least.

Alice, the Dream Master of the last movie, is finally graduating from high school, and she has a whole new bunch of friends who all act like they've known each other all their lives, despite us having never seen them before. Oh, and there's also Dan from the last movie as well - now Alice's boyfriend and making the beast with two backs with her on a regular basis. The happy times don't last long, however, as Alice suddenly finds herself dreaming while awake, and Freddy Krueger is apparently using those dreams to kill off her friends, starting with Dan. Could this have anything to do with the fact that Alice has also discovered that she's pregnant? And what's with Sister Mary Helena/Amanda Krueger wandering around in the dream world and giving out a D&D-style quest to "seek her earthly remains in the tower"?

A couple of things struck me while watching this movie. Firstly, I think Alice is one of the few, if not the only, heroine/Final Girl in horror who is sexually active and still a survivor (other than Sidney Prescott in Scream), which is both a good evolution of her character and an interesting thing to note (albeit also slightly depressing to see that it's so rare to actually happen). Secondly, I noticed for the first time (after watching five of these movies, for shame) that there's an underlying theme of pretty terrible parents in all the movies. The only exception is Alice's father, who's gotten sober since The Dream Master and now proves to be a pretty awesome guy, supporting and helping Alice in her pregnancy and standing up for her when Dan's parents threaten to take her baby when it's born - but all the other parents we meet are unpleasant, controlling, snobbish and so on. and now that I look back on the previous films I realise this was actually a pretty common theme. So I feel pretty stupid for not noticing this earlier.

However, The Dream Child is, in my opinion at least, the weakest of all the movies in the series, including even the remake (and we'll get to that in a few days). It was certainly the lowest grossing of the whole franchise (although Robert Englund still considered it a success), and appears to have had the least effect on the canon as a whole, unless you count the comic books released in the last several years. It's biggest problem, I believe, is that its perhaps the most bloodless of the series - the primary reason for this is that all three death scenes were heavily edited and so ended up looking rather... insipid, for lack of a better term. Dan's death is still the best, as he dies to Freddy effectively playing Pimp My Ride with him and merging him with a motorbike, but even then a lot of it was cut out. While I'll never be an enthusiastic fan of gore for gore's sake in movies, I'll still never understand the reasoning of cutting scenes from a slasher movie to make the movie effectively bloodless just to avoid a higher rating. This also means that all of Freddy's killings are made to seem like accidents (shares of Dream Warriors, but kids dying in accidents doesn't strike the same level of dread into people as the mass suicide plan) rather than murders or even suicides.

(Speaking of Dream Warriors, I'm pretty sure that Mark would class as one, what with his ability to transform into his comic creation, the Phantom Prowler, in his dreams. Too bad it didn't do him much good.)

The film also can't keep its own internal continuity straight, however, which is another problem. We're told that Amanda Krueger hanged herself... but they never found her body (hence the D&D quest for her remains). It might be just my OCD talking, but it's particularly off-putting when a film messes up like that... then again, it could also be seen as a sign of things to come as future movies make even more of a mess of the continuity...

 

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

By the time Part 4 of the Nightmare on Elm Street series rolled around, it and Freddy Krueger had become household names of horror. Hell, Freddy Krueger even got his own rap/hip-hop video alongside the Fat Boys titled Are You Ready For Freddy? (watch it if you dare, but it's pretty horrific viewing for entirely different reasons than the norm) - the single was also the theme for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Unsurprisingly then, The Dream Master turned out to be the highest-grossing film in the franchise - at least until Freddy Vs Jason came along...

After the events of Dream Warriors, Kristen, Kincaid and Joey have returned to a normal life, high school and all. Kristen still has dreams warning her of Freddy's return, however; she's proven right when a dog urinates on Freddy's grave and brings him back from Hell. Freddy then wastes no time in finishing off the last of the Elm Street children, but Kristen's last act before she dies is to gift her dream power to her best friend Alice, who is a lucid dreamer. This gift is a double-edged sword, however, as Freddy then uses Alice to bring others into her dreams so that he can kill them. In the end it is up to Alice to confront Freddy and defeat him in the dream world.

Allow me to shamelessly crib from IMDB for a moment. During the writing of the film, director Renny Harlin bumped into none other than James Cameron, who rather mockingly asked, "How are they gonna bring Freddy back to life this time?" Harlin replied, "A dog pisses fire on him and he comes back to life." And lo, it was so; albeit with some more metaphysical meaning behind it at the very least (a hellhound with the name of Jason, no less, summoning him back from hell and the like).

Unfortunately, just as Freddy's resurrection seems a little bit contrived and stretched thin, so does the rest of the movie. Don't get me wrong, it's still an enjoyable movie and keeps things going strong with Freddy's dream setpiece murders, but... I think I just wanted to like this movie more than I actually did. As an actual lucid dreamer myself (my trick is to be able to rewind any part of a dream I don't like and play it out over and over till I'm happy, which might itself make for an interesting fight with Krueger) I know I was thinking that there was much more that could be done with Alice's abilities, and yet until the end of the movie she, again, plays it rather passive. At least this time, however, she's our focal character for most of the movie so we can at least emphasise with her and go through the journey with her, unlike in Freddy's Revenge.

The film also lost a little something with its bringing back Kristen, Kincaid and Joey only to kill them off in the first 15 minutes. Kristen's death, yes, was at least integral to the plot, but the two boys' deaths felt very much like cheap (anti?) fan service (and in Joey's case a chance to have breasts show up in the film again for no reason). And speaking of Joey, how the hell did they write his death up on the police report? There is absolutely no way that could have gone down as an accidental death. Patricia Arquette wasn't able to reprieve her role as Kristen due to being pregnant when they were shooting, and so she was replaced by Tuesday Knight (who also sang the movie's other theme song, Nightmare). Knight is good enough in the role of Kristen, but there was a certain chemistry missing between her and Joey and Kincaid, which made their scenes together seem slightly awkward.

The dream deaths were all pretty original, albeit maybe a little more modern and stylised than in the previous films. Freddy killing people in bright daylight seems... wrong, somehow, although special mention has to go to Debbie's death, as I could sympathise with her entomophobia completely (although why she kept eating that food after finding a cockroach in it is beyond me). As for the ending - the "Dream Master" nursery rhyme felt a little unnecessary, kind of like they spent a long time coming up with it and then felt they had to shoehorn the whole thing in somewhere, but the actual method by which Freddy meets his death (this time) made sense and fitted in pretty well. As I said above, however, concepts were beginning to get stretched a little thin at this point, and as the franchise continued the quality began to drop...

 

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

With Day 3 comes Part 3: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The film is notable not just for the return of Heather Langencamp as Nancy Thompson, thus returning to the canon of the original film considerably more than Freddy's Revenge did; but also for the return of Wes Craven to the franchise. It's also notable for being the first major writing credit for one Frank Darabont, who is of course now better known for things like the TV series The Walking Dead and the movies The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist (despite that ending).

Six years on from the first movie (which makes it one year after Freddy's Revenge) and Freddy Krueger - this movie also marks the first time he's actually referred to as "Freddy" and not just as "Fred" - has been hard at work perfecting his teen-killing techniques. He's still torturing and killing the teenage children of the parents who torched him in the boiler room all those years ago, but now he's making them look like suicides in the waking world. Those few who manage to survive their dream encounters with him end up in Westin Hills, the local psychiatric facility, and treated for all manner of sleep and mental problems. One of these survivors is a girl named Kristen, who has the ability to bring others into her dreams. Along with the help of the now-adult Nancy Thompson, who has returned as a psychology grad student specializing in nightmares, Kristen and the other survivors use their dream abilities to fight Freddy on his own turf and lay him to rest once and for all.

Dream Warriors was the first of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies I ever saw as a teen, and I suspect this was the same for a lot of my age group - or, if not the first of the series they saw, then it quite probably was the one that left the most influence on them and on the growing pop culture phenomenon surrounding the series. As mentioned above, Dream Warriors was the first on the series to properly refer to Krueger as "Freddy"; the first to let him really run free with the wisecracks and pitch black humour that were to become his trademark as much as his razor-glove ("Welcome to prime time, bitch!" being perhaps the most infamous - and ad-libbed - of those one-liners) and it was the first film to give Robert Englund the lead billing he so richly deserved. They had briefly tried a different actor as Krueger all the way back in Freddy's Revenge, but it worked so badly they wasted no time in bringing Englund back and keeping him there for all the movies after that. There's also all of the canon that was kept around for the later films - Hypnocil, Westin Hills, the "bastard son of a hundred maniacs".

Another of Dream Warriors' strengths is that they weren't afraid to be creative with it. In the first two movies they had dome some playing around with one or two of the nightmare sequences, but in the end they never really strayed too far from the boiler room. In Dream Warriors we have dreams happening in several different places, and with plenty of original imagery - while most people probably remember the curiously phallic snake that nearly eats Kristen (and they had to coat it with green goo to make sure it didn't look completely phallic at that) as the most iconic dream sequence, for me it was the hall of mirrors near the end that stayed with me afterwards. The deaths are more creative as well, as well as more personally tailored to Freddy's victims - the TV starlet gets her big break in TV literally; the puppeteer gets puppetted out of the building by way of Freddy using his tendons as marionette strings; and so on. The idea of some of the teens being able to survive Freddy's dream attacks on them because of their "dream powers" - effectively lucid dreaming with a twist, is a new and original idea as well, so we don't have to worry about dragging out the whole "get Krueger into the waking world and fight him there" plotline over and over again.

The one part I didn't like about Dream Warriors is part of the ending. While Nancy, Kristen and the others are fighting Krueger in the dream world (and as an aside, I'm pretty sure that Kincaid's "dream power" wasn't just "super-strength" but actually being either Mr. T or Luke Cage), Nancy's father and the hospital psychiatrist are trying to find, bless and bury Krueger's bones to lay him to rest in the waking world. This plot thread leads to a climax where a stop-motion skeleton fights the two of them in an abandoned junkyard, and not only does it look so ridiculous it's stupid, it makes no sense in the rest of the backstory. What exactly is animating Krueger's bones and, if he can do that, why didn't he walk his skeleton ass to a safer place years previously? I'm just going to pretend that bit didn't happen.

Finally, Dream Warriors is notable for the screen debut of Patricia Arquette, an early appearance of Laurence Fishburne (back when he was just Larry) and the first appearance of breasts in the series (thank you Joey).

 

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1986)

Day Two of our Nightmare on Elm Street series, and obviously we're onto Part 2: Freddy's Revenge - aka "The One With All The Homoerotic Subtext". It's also the film that made the producers realise they had a workable franchise on their hands, as the film grossed twice as much as the first one - although they had to do it without Wes Craven at the helm, as he had never wanted A Nightmare on Elm Street to become a franchise in the first place.

Jesse Walsh and his family have just moved into their new house on Elm Street, five years after the events of the first movie, but things aren't quite right there. The whole house is as hot as a furnace for one thing, especially in Jesse's room. there are bars on all of the windows from the previous owner. And Jesse is having nightmares about a badly-burned man in a dirty red and green sweater and a glove with razors attached to the fingers. Yes, the family has moved into 1428 Elm Street, Nancy's old house, and it isn't long before Fred Krueger (yes, he's still Fred at this point) is trying to return to 'life' via Jesse's body (side effects include the spontaneous combustion of parakeets and sleepwalking into gay S&M bars). Jesse has to fight Krueger for control of his own body and banish him back to the boiler room once more.

So, about that homosexual subtext. Well, for starters it wasn't accidental or coincidental as most of us had thought for so long, as the film's writer has since confirmed that, yes, he deliberately put all that stuff in there. But there is a lot of it. The main character's name is gender-neutral; he spends a lot of time in just his underwear sweating - and a good amount of that time is spent in the company of another male in just his underwear; there's the strange focus on the gay gym teacher and the S&M bar; and of course there's the whole 'other side trying to come out of him/secret he's keeping from everybody' theme that Jesse struggles with through the movie. Add to that the fact that Mark Patton, who played Jesse, is himself gay and considered Jesse to be a closeted gay man himself and you have yourself a surprisingly gay-centric slasher film for the 1980s. However (and let's face it, you knew there was a "however" coming), I'm not sure I'd class it as a 100% gay-friendly film. The biggest issue I see with it is how Jesse is saved from being taken over by Krueger by his 'girlfriend' Lisa - thus implying the whole "love of a good woman can save you from being gay" thing. There's also a rather awkward scene about two-thirds of the way through where Jesse finds himself being influenced by Krueger to harm his younger sister - unfortunate implications abound if you think about it! Still, it's still remarkably progressive, all things considered.

As for the film itself... Honestly, Freddy's Revenge is really one of the weaker entries in the series. Other than Jesse's family being in the house that Nancy lived in the first movie, there's virtually no connection to the first movie. It breaks one of the cardinal rules of the series by having Krueger kill people in the real world while no-one is asleep (the pool party massacre, although I suppose it could be argued that the rules were different for that because of the whole 'possession' aspect). Finally, the abrupt shift in protagonist from Jesse to Lisa at the film's climax is jarring and falls very flat; after having gone through most of the film via Jesse's perspective, when we shift to Lisa suddenly we've got very little that we can actually use to identify or empathise with her. She's just a rich girl who likes Jesse. Worse than that though is the fact that she's pretty ineffectual in general. When the previous film in the series had a Final Girl in Nancy Thompson, who took the fight to Krueger, dragged him into the waking world and then dropped him with her anti-personnel home defense tactics, having Lisa do nothing more than simper, "I love you Jesse!" and implore him to fight Krueger is a pretty stupid tonal shift.

In conclusion, Part 2 is a pretty weak offering, and adds very little to the whole mythos of the series. Thankfully Part 3 came along soon after to put things back on track...

 

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

[100 entries! Somehow we've reached 100 reviews on this blog, and so to celebrate that (and reaching 18 months of the blog) I'm doing another review series. This time it's one of the other classic horror serieses, the Nightmare on Elm Street series. And because the series happens to be one of my other half's favourites, I've invited him to do the first review. So enjoy.]

SPOILERS! But if you read this page, you've doubtless already seen today's offering, A Nightmare On Elm Street. Written and directed by genre star, Wes Craven. Dealing with such greats of the business can be somewhat daunting. But is it actually any good?

Well, that depends on what you like in a slasher movie. Nightmare is noticeably dark, even by slasher standards. It's villain is one of the horror greats, the truly repugnant Fred Krueger (just “Fred” here, not “Freddy” until the sequel) [Trivia note: the name “Fred Krueger” is actually an amalgamation of two names from one of Craven’s earlier films, The Last House on the Left - namely the lead villain Krug and his associate, a child molester named Fred Podowski]. Fred is/was a child molester and killer (in the laserdisc and Anchor Bay VHS versions, his victims were the elder siblings of the four teens here). The molester part of that was only implied for twenty years before it was confirmed in the reboot a few years back but it was always pretty obvious why Fred had been killing kiddies. The story, and stop me if you've heard this one, is that Fred Krueger was a child killer who was burned alive when vengeful parents set fire to his boiler-room. No longer alive but not really dead enough, Fred becomes able to invade the dreams of the Elm Street kids (how is never really discussed) and stalks and kills them in their sleep.

Of the unholy trinity of slasher villains; Fred(dy), Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, Fred was always the most well realized, the most fully fleshed out as a character. With his ratty sweater, beaten hat, burn-scarred visage and his trademark finger-knife glove (which we see him make during the opening credits), all of these are iconic, thanks largely to Robert Englund's amazing performance. Englund would go on to play the character in almost every film (with the exception of the reboot), making the repulsive role his own. Fred's a wonderfully loathsome villain. Whereas Jason is, to some extent, a confused child and Michael is more force of nature than man, Fred is a fully developed character without an iota of redeeming features. Over time, Fred would develop into Freddy, displaying a caustic and biting wit. Although it could never be argued that this made him sympathetic, it did make him slightly more attractive to the viewer, even if only slightly. Here though, Fred doesn't even display that much wit. He's just a vicious and brutal thug who torments his victims because it amuses him.

There is one scene I would like to single out here. Nancy (our final girl) falls asleep in the bath. No nudity is present (and there is none in the whole movie), all we can see are Nancy's head and knees. But as she drops off, singing the skipping rhyme that would become synonymous with the series, Fred's hand, clad in its macabre glove, pokes out of the water between her legs. At Nancy's mother knocks on the door, waking her, the hand retreats. As Nancy nods off again, Fred pulls her into the dreaming and under water. That part is less interesting. What I want to note is the sexualization of Fred's actions. His arm reaches toward Nancy from between her legs. Reaching from her groin, a figurative rape, albeit an attempted one. Casting it in that sexualised fashion also explains why the girls, Tina and then Nancy, are Fred's preferred victims. Sure, he'll take guys too but girls are his target of choice.

The cast is relatively strong for a slasher flick. Englund, of course, is a well-known figure but he'd had a decent career even before that. Heather Langenkamp, playing final girl Nancy here, went on to have a strong career, mostly in TV. Making his début on film is Johnny Depp, playing Glen, Nancy's dorky boyfriend. Genre veteran John Saxon plays Nancy's cop father and it should be noted here that, unlike most slasher movie parents, the parents in this are mostly loving and fairly supportive, if sceptical of their children's insistence that a mystery burn-scarred lunatic is killing them off one by one. While the premise is a fantastic one, a villainous dream lord, the script or, to be more exact, the dialogue, lets it down slightly. Nancy addresses her mum as “mother” frequently throughout (possibly indicating a strained relationship due to the mother's drinking) and the dialogue throughout is stilted. Characters say exactly what they mean, occasionally lapsing into talking to themselves. The fashions are risible, as you'd expect from an early Eighties film. Depp sports a belly shirt in one scene. The music is truly atrocious and very, very Eighties, like a frightened cat dancing on a synth.

Deaths are ok. As it's the first instalment, the need to top the last film's murders hasn't kicked in yet. First victim, the doomed (by virtue of having a normal sex life) Tina, is dragged across the ceiling and gutted like a trout. Her presumed slayer, her boyfriend Rod, is hanged with his bedsheets in the local police station's cells. Glen, notoriously, is dragged through a hole in his bed which then spews a geyser of blood. And final girl, Nancy, naturally survives. Effects are a little hokey by modern standards but they're all practical and there is a truly impressive full-body burn towards the end

Well, until the final scene anyway. There is a truly strange final scene in which Nancy wakes up and all the events of the film have been an elaborate nightmare. She climbs into a convertible car with her friends, seemingly happy as her mother waves them off. But then her mother is dragged back into the house and a red and green striped soft roof slams down on the car, which screams off as Fred laughs. It's a weird scene which doesn't really make sense. Unless it's one final nightmare. But now, we're into Inception-style layers of reality.

Anyway, that was A Nightmare On Elm Street. It's a cracking film, one of the original slasher masterpieces and, to my mind, the best of them. If you're on this page, you've likely seen it but if you haven't, it's widely available in any format you like. So go watch it.

  

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