Month: October 2015

Every Town Has an Elm Street Part 3 (A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors, 1987)

nightmare_on_elm_street_3_posterNow let us take a look at the third Elm Street Film.  The Dream Warriors is easily one of the best of the series and one of the best loved.  Dream Warriors deftly handles horror, fantasy, action and comedy in one solid package.  Not entirely surprising, the cooks include Wes Craven, Frank Darabont  (writer of Shawshank Redemption, Green Mile) and Chuck Russell (who also directed, he is primarily known for directing the Jim Carrey film the Mask).

It’s a pretty effective story.  The last remaining Elm Street kids have been institutionalized, suffering from horrific nightmares.  No one seems to know what to do, because, again, in horror movies?  Adults are dumb and do not listen to anyone.  They presume the kids are really just, you know, suicidal.  Because suicidal people always claim a guy is stalking them in thei9r dreams and trying to kill them.  And they tend to do so en mass.

But these kids are lucky, you see, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) is back to save the franch-uh-  I mean, the kids.  She, with help from Dr. Neil (Craig Wasson, of Ghost Story, Body Double and most recently, Sasquatch Mountain), work against an uncaring world to save the kids.   They do not of course, because frankly, that would be a boring horror movie.  Instead, Freddy kills a few of the kids rather creatively.  Nancy discovers that young Kristen (played by young Patricia Arquette) can pull people into her dreams.  This manages to give the surviving kids an edge.

Nancy and the kids manage to fight back against Freddy, while Dr. Neil meets a mysterious nun who conveniently knows a lot about Fred Krueger.  We also see the return of Nancy’s pop, Donald (John Saxon).

At Nancy’s funeral, a heartbroken Dr. Neil receives another visit from mysterious old nun woman.  Dr. Neil follows her through the cemetary, where she disappears…but then Doctor Neil sees a headstone…the nun was the ghost of Amanda Krueger-FREDDY’S MOTHER!!!!

This film is notable for many reasons.  For instance, this film introduced the concept of the “dream power”, in which kids have a unique power-usually based in their self image- which they can use to fight Freddy.  The fourth and fifth films fail to put this to good use though.  It also introduces the back story for Freddy that he was the “Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs”.  His mother was a young nun who worked in an asylum and was locked up for a weekend with 100 depraved maniacs who raped her.

The film also introduced far more elaborate dream sequences.  The first two films had dream sequences that challenged you to figure out whether the character was asleep or awake.  In the Dream Warriors, the dreams are more fantasy adventures.  This is easily one of the top three films of the franchise, and worth watching, it is not scary, but it is full of adventure, fun, solid effects ( a very nice stop motion fight is reminiscent of Harryhausen) and pretty nicely played.

However, the film is also guilty of starting the film down the path the series took that bothered so many fans, specifically, Freddy the Comedian.  This is the film that gave us the line, “Welcome to Prime Time, Bitch!!!”  And while it works in this film, it clearly took the character down a road of self mockery.  So, in spite of the snark, I really do recommend this as a entertaining film to watch.

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Every Town Has an Elm Street Part 2 (A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge, 1985)

Okay, from here on out, spoilers fly with no regards as to whether you have seen the movies or not.  These will mostly be…well, not so much reviews, as observations.  And probably more than a bit snarky.

nightmare_on_elm_street_2_poster_01So, Nightmare On Elm Street was a huge hit.  Not all that surprisingly, New Line rushed out a sequel.  A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2:Freddy’s Revenge.  Revenge on who?  Don’t really know.  It is not Nancy, because she is not in this one.  Luckily for the story, her diary is though.  When young Jesse’s (Mark Patton) family moves into Nancy’s old house, he starts getting tormented by horrific dreams involving Freddy.

Turns out Freddy has a plan, and that plan includes using Mark to maybe kill people.  Like his creepy leather loving gym teacher.  But Mark, see, he is a good kid.  Oh, a little wimpy.  And his parakeet is prone to bursting into flames.  But Mark doesn’t want to help Freddy.  Instead he just wants to hang out with his friends and meet girls.  He starts to hang out with Lisa (Kim Myers), and spends much of the film struggling with his teachers and parents (Clu Gulager and Hope Lang), because frankly, Parents (and teachers) just do not get what it is like to be a teenager haunted by the death of a child killer.  By the way, in life Freddy killed little kids, why did he switch to teens after death?  Anyways, Freddy is using Jesse to try and get back into the real world.  His friend Grady laughs it all off, but thankfully; new girlfriend Lisa takes him seriously.

When you get right down to it, this film is a real mess that makes almost no sense at all in the context of the other sequels.  For example, the film establishes Freddy’s boiler room is in the factory he used to work at.  This factory never comes up in later sequels.  This is the only film where Freddy is trying to break out and live in the real world, a motive he lacks in other all other incarnations, which makes sense; he is more powerful in the dream world.  It also does not help the film that, as a lead, Jesse is pretty unsympathetic.  At best he is whiny and annoying, which is not good for your protagonist.  I am not sure if the main problem lies with the actor or the script. Though, one wonders how different the film would have been if Jesse were played by Christian Slater or Brad Pitt (both auditioned).  Craven avoided the sequel partly because he did not, actually, intend to create a Franchise with Elm Street and also because he felt they were going to far astray of his original concept, especially with having Freddy make Jesse kill people.  And it shows.  This film just feels entirely out of place in the series.

It is interesting that the least loved* of the films has a central lead that is male.  The strongest films of the series feature female protagonists.  As I noted, Jesse is not a sympathetic character, and honestly comes across as very weak and easy to manipulate.

But in the end, what makes it really stand out?  Basically, this is the most homo-erotic horror film ever.  In fact, comically so.  I don’t mean this in a denigrating way towards the gay community, or even homo-eroticism in films.  But in the Elm Street series, it just feels…well, out of place, mainly because the film plays everything straight.  It is not like it is a wink and a nudge.  I am not even sure that they realized at the time (Jack Sholder, the director states they did not, however, he sees it now).  And it is this unintentional aspect just makes it oddly humorous.  I mean you have lines like, “Something is trying to get inside of me” and “He’s inside me… and he wants to take me again!”  You just cannot miss the subtext.  And we all know unintended subtext is comedic gold, people.

When it comes down to it, this is a terrible film, not worth watching on your own.  However, it is a hysterical comedy when watched with a group of friends.

*Oddly, for as much as it is derided, it is one of the highest grossing of the series.

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Every Town Has an Elm Street Part 1 (A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984)

In 1972, college professor turned aspiring film maker Wes Craven produced the low budget horror film Last House on the Left to some small success, in 1977, he got more horror cred with the survival flick the Hills Have Eyes.  After that it was a string of mostly forgettable TV movies and the like.  But in 1983 or so, Craven hit paydirt.

a-nightmare-on-elm-street-posterHe met with Bob Shaye of the indie studio New Line Cinema.  There he pitched the idea that would put New Line on the map.  Craven told Shaye about the idea of a killer who hunts kids in their dreams…and if you die in your dream, you die in real life.  Based on a series of news stories Craven had read, in which people had told loved ones of terrifying nightmare they were having, and then died in their sleep (all involved young people, in at least one case, the kid secretly went days without sleep, hiding coffee in his room).

Shaye saw the potential there and green lit the project.  What came about is one of the most memorable icons of 80’s horror.  Named after a childhood bully, Craven created Fred Krueger, a child murderer who got freed on a technicality and then was killed by the parents of Elm Street.

Years later, high school student Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and her friends find their dreams haunted by a creepy man in a green and red sweater, oblivious to the fact that their parents murdered Kruger years before.  And, of course,  the parents would prefer to keep it that way.  Nancy’s mother (Ronee Blakely) is a fall down drunk, estranged from Nancy’s police lieutenant father (John Saxon) who is determined to keep the truth from coming out.  But the sins of the parents are threatening the lives of the youth in this story.  And the parents do not want to face the truth (hey, it is a horror film, parents never believe the kids).

As Nancy’s friends start dying, the police right them off as murders and suicides, but Nancy knows better.  She starts trying to fight the need for sleep, and manages to avoid Freddy’s claws.  But her mother is certain her daughter is just going crazy, while her father sticks to what he can see and is unwilling to accept his daughter’s claims.

In fact, truthfully, the greatest threat to Nancy is her parent’s unwillingness to listen to her.  In that regard, the film becomes, at times, unbearably preachy.  But ultimately, Nancy stands up to Freddy, apparently defeating him at his own game.

Overall, the original Nightmare On Elm Street holds up quite well.  Freddy was not yet as campy, and Robert Englund plays him with a real grim vibe.  Freddy’s voice is a guttural, throaty growl that is immensely threatening.  The first reveal of Freddy walking down an alley with distended arms, scraping his claws along garages is hauntingly creepy.  The practical effects and make up still are effective.  The music is one of the few things that really does not hold up over the years.  Those synthesizer based soundtracks rarely do.  One exception is that the main theme is pretty creepy.  The thing that truly risks ruining the movie though? The final scene is clearly tacked on for sequel possibilities and it really makes no sense.  Wes Craven has disowned that ending that was forcd on his work.  Producers should trust their directors.

But overall, this remains a solid effort, even if it is somewhat tainted by a slew of much lesser sequels (though there are a couple worth catching).

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