“The only way to stop him is to make another movie.”

And here we are, the end of our little odyssey into Elm Street. There’s been good, there’s been bad, but all of its been surreal. 1994 brought about another final sendoff for Freddy Krueger, this time with Wes Craven returning to the help of the Good Ship Elm Street. The result was Wes Craven's New Nightmare, the real finale of original ideas for the character (since after that, the series only begat crossovers and reboots).

Plot
We open, as always, with a nightmare sequence. This time its of an updated version of Freddy’s glove being made by special effects guys on the set of a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie, then the glove goes on a rampage and Heather Langenkamp wakes up during an earthquake (since this is LA) and sees her son has got some scratches that are suspiciously similar to those he got in the dream. She’s also been getting harassing phone calls from someone who sounds like Freddy.

Anyway, the 10th Anniversary of the Nightmare on Elm Street series is coming up and Heather & Robert Englund are both really popular on the interview circuit and she also learns that Wes Craven is in the middle of pre-production for a new Nightmare movie. And then her husband dies in a car wreck falling asleep at the wheel. She goes to Craven to hear more about the project, and Wes gives her an explanation that the entity now known as Freddy Krueger is a spirit of pure evil that has been (temporarily) trapped within works of art (namely the Nightmare movies) and sees Heather’s character Nancy as his greatest obstacle to getting free. So Freddy is attacking Heather’s emotional weak spots, i.e. her family, and has his sights set on her young son. Ok, now this is getting a touch complicated.

Long story short, Heather has to save her son (and the world) from Freddy while the line between Heather and Nancy blurs.

Characters
Heather Langenkamp/Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp playing herself playing Nancy for one last go around. The southern accent is gone again.

Chase Porter: David Newsom plays Heather’s husband, an effects tech working on pre-production for the new film. He doesn’t get much characterization before he gets offed in a manner that reminded me of The Dream Child, and I don’t know if I want to be reminded of The Dream Child.

Dylan Porter: Miko Hughes plays Heather’s son, an innocent little kid who starts to hear Freddy in his head and starts getting a bit Freddy-like in some of the things he says. He’s not happy about it either, and connects to his stuffed dinosaur as a shield against the evil. It sort of works.

Wes Craven: Wes Craven plays himself (and lives in a nice house). He’s having fresh nightmares about Freddy and using them to work on the script for the new film, though of late he’s been having writer’s block. Its as though Freddy doesn’t want the movie to be made.

Robert Englund: Robert Englund as himself (and also lives in a nice house), and he’s a close family friend of Heather’s. Nice guy and not at all murderous like his screen counterpart.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund plays his own screen counterpart, only this time (aside from one early scene in the real world) Freddy is his own separate entity and lacks most of the charm that made him such an interesting antagonist for most of the series. In terms of malevolence, he’s up there with Freddy’s Dead, but he’s also considerably less funny this time around. It seems like they tried to make him a completely serious threat, which…kind of takes away the characteristic that made him such a standout movie monster in the first place, doesn’t it? He still makes lame jokes, but there’s a twinkle in his eyes missing.

John Saxon/Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon in a smaller role as both himself and Nancy’s father, showing that reality is starting to blur around the edges for Heather.

Julie: Tracy Middendorf plays Dylan’s babysitter. She’s somewhat competent (for a horror movie character) and tries her hardest to work with Heather to keep Dylan from falling asleep at critical moments. She gets a death pretty much identical to Tina’s, bookending the series.


Visuals/Effects
Wes Craven directed, and the film definitely has more in common with Nightmare 1 and 3 than the others. The dream sequences area as always a high point, but a few of them seem more like mundane life. Likely to blur the line between dream and reality, but the dream sequences that go back to the boiler room and so on are much more memorable. There are a surprisingly few kills in this movie, and the ones that there are either direct callbacks or reminiscent of previous movies.

Now, here’s the thing that actually kind of did bug me about the movie. Freddy’s look goes through a serious overhaul. Yes he still wears the sweater and fedora and yes his body is still burnt. HOWEVER, the sweater isn’t as ratty and the fedora looks like a new felt hat they pulled from the costume department. Worse, the makeup effects for Freddy’s face seem more…plastic this time around. Before his face looked like hamburger and had a wet quality to it, now it looks like a latex mask with more clearly defined bits of flesh and muscle. The claws being part of his hand I can understand as a different type of character, and I actually quite liked the trench coat they added, but man, visually Freddy took a step down.

Writing
Written by Wes Craven, I certainly have to give the movie points for doing something new and different. But here’s the thing, it seems like its more interested in exploring themes and concepts and being…meta than it is in presenting interesting characters. Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund are both interesting to watch since they’re playing themselves, but all the other characters, like Chase and Julie (and…uh, I’m sure there’s other wholly fictional characters with speaking parts) aren’t particularly interesting or memorable. The concepts are interesting, as is the meta-commentary, but the execution feels a little flat. Child characters in horror movies generally annoy me as well, and this is no different (but that’s just me).

Sound
J. Peter Robinson on score duties. The music is certainly a product of the mid-90s, eschewing the series’ previous use of heavy use of electronic effects. It works.

Conclusion
New Nightmare is problematic for me, because its not bad, its just a gigantic lateral move from the series in general. I get that its intentional and not a part of the "continuity" of the series. It’s not as cheesy as the previous movies, not as funny, and not quite as interesting as 1 and 3. It’s an adequate movie, sure, and plays with interesting ideas, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to really recommend it.



Scorecard time! Here’s the rundown from best to worst, in my own arrogant opinion:
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare ( I Make No Apologies)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Nightmare on Elm Street 4; The Dream Master
Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge

“Every town has an Elm Street!”

By 1991, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise decided to put out a final movie in the series, and why not? The last couple were adequate at best. So the series decided to go out big, with lots more effects and lots more of Freddy on screen before killing the horror icon off, presumably for good. The result was Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and it is CRAZY.

Plot
So ten years have passed since The Dream Child, making it 1999. After Alice and her boy Jacob moved away, Freddy came back and went on a massacre in Springwood, Calif--, oh right, “Ohio.” The movie starts with the last surviving kid in the entire city confronted by Freddy in a dream but he gets knocked past the Springwood city limits, which acts as a barrier that Freddy can’t cross. But what about when he?…never mind. The kid gets amnesia from the close call and ends up at a shelter for troubled youth. There, we meet a few said troubled youths and their counselor, who decides it would help jog John Doe’s memory with a road trip back to Springwood. A trip to the orphanage reveals that Freddy had a child of his own, so the race is on to find out who that kid is and if they’re still alive and somehow try to find a way to stop Freddy for real this time.

Oh, and all of the Springwood adults have gone completely insane from the previous massacre of Freddy.

Characters
John Doe: Shon Greenblatt is our first protagonist who gets amnesia and is essentially sent out into the rest of the world to find whatever it is Freddy wants. He becomes convinced that he’s Krueger’s long lost scion, so its kind of funny when that backfires on him.

Spencer: Breckin Meyer plays a kid who’s a stoner who doesn’t want to be like his father. He gets the most surreal death scene in which he gets transported into a television and, well…just watch.


And yes, that's Johnny Depp at the beginning of the clip

Carlos: Ricky Dean Logan plays a kid with a hearing aid because his parents physically abused him as a kid. He gets a very ironic death.

Tracy: Lezlie Deane plays an angry, violent girl who was sexually abused by her father as a kid.

Dr. Maggie Burroughs: Lisa Zane plays a psychiatrist in her late 20s who is trying to help these kids but doesn’t really understand the whole dream stuff. Though she starts to, which is good, because the movie telegraphs her as Freddy’s lost child. She’s also pretty hot, so, uh, good job, Freddy?

Doc: Yaphet Kotto (who was the Bond Villain in Live And Let Die and one of the supporting characters in The Running Man) plays a dream therapist working with the kids. He’s a source of information and facts that ends up helping the protagonists quite a lot actually. Sympathetic and competent, he gives one of the better performances of the film.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund goes into full-blown camp territory here, hamming and cheesing his way from movie references all the way to pop culture gags to, I shit you not, a joke about Nintendo’s infamous Power Glove. Freddy’s played for laughs more than horror in this installment, but he still manages to get a few choice bits of true devilry out of the movie as well.

With a bunch of odd cameos, like Tom & Rosanne Arnold (as Springwood parents driven over the edge) Johnny Depp (in the above dream sequence), and Alice Cooper as Freddy’s abusive dad (in a flashback).

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Rachel Talalay, the movie doesn’t lack for spectacle. Digital effects were starting to be more prominent so those get used quite a bit. The dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream concept gets used for some nice surprises and as always, Freddy’s dream attacks are a true visual highlight. Pacing is another strength of the movie; despite a lot happening, the flick really does breeze by hitting all the classic Elm Street beats. Some of the effects for the video game based attack on Spencer though are very obviously not game graphics, which I can understand, because in 1991 most graphics were only 8-bit anyway. Still, they go through all the trouble of blue screening Breckin Meyer onto what is essentially a cartoon and they don’t even pixilate it. Bit of a shame that.

It should also be mentioned that the movie also features a climax IN 3-D!!! You can tell that’s the part where the 3-D glasses should be put on because Maggie puts them on. Yeah. It’s pure cheese, and since the video release wasn’t in 3-D, pretty obviously nothing more than a gimmick. I have no idea if the 3-D was well done or not.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by Rachel Talalay, Screenplay by Michael De Luca. Aside from a few “wha-huh?” elements like telegraphing the “twist” insanely early in the movie (and reducing its impact), the script seems to be self-aware that this is an incredibly cheesy horror-comedy and capitalizes on it. After the last two movies, that’s a refreshing thing.

The flick also adds a bunch of backstory flashbacks to Freddy’s origin, showing him as a messed up kid who murdered small animals and Alice Cooper, and I don’t think any of that stuff was necessary at all to bring any kind of “deeper understanding” of Freddy Krueger’s character. Freddy works because he’s a bogeyman, and bogeymen tend to be simply motivated, which, amusingly, is what the flashbacks show. Freddy is a devilish figure because he was always a devilish figure, even before undeath.

Sound
Original music by Brian May (not the guy from Queen). More of an orchestral feel to things this time while still retaining the synthesized elements of the series. There’s also Iron Butterfly, Iggy Pop and…the Goo Goo Dolls? Wow. Did not expect them.

Conclusion
You know what? I really liked Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. It’s not as creepy as the original Nightmare on Elm Street and not as thoughtful and polished as Dream Warriors, but it IS a lot of fun. In a lot of ways, it’s a mirror of Dream Warriors. A new entrant to a group of troubled teens is mentored by a sympathetic adult with a past history with Freddy. And much like Dream Warriors was a culmination of the first 3 movies’ heady concepts and extended metaphors, Final Nightmare is a distillation of the latter 3 movies in the series, with the ridiculously over-the-top violence and evil jokester persona of Freddy (lame jokes and all). Dream Warriors made me go “that’s really interesting.” Final Nightmare made me laugh my ass off with childish enjoyment. It’s the funniest in the series, and really shows the flexibility of the Freddy character and I think that’s part of what makes him an iconic film monster; the ability to be serious and clownish at the same time and provide a knowing wink to the audience that there is something inherently weird and goofy about all this bizarre dream imagery.

So yeah. I liked it and recommend Final Nightmare as a cheesy horror-comedy. Haters gonna hate. But this movie was anything but genuinely “final.”

“Faster than a bastard maniac! More powerful than a loco-madman! It's... Super Freddy!”

The Dream Master wasn’t a very good movie, but it was enjoyable enough and made crazy amounts of money for a horror film, so that pretty much guaranteed a sequel. A sequel that builds on what the previous movie did, good and bad. It’s 1989’s A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

Plot
A year after the last movie, Alice and Dan are a couple and seemingly free of Freddy. Alice starts dreaming of a nun, Freddy’s mom Amanda Krueger. Alice and Dan graduate high school and party with their new friends. Alice also starts having dreams about a baby turning into Freddy. After Freddy causes her boyfriend to fall asleep at the wheel and die in a collision, Alice finds out she’s pregnant with Dan’s baby and starts seeing a kid named Jacob. There’s a bunch of stuff about trying to find Amanda Krueger’s body and something about how Freddy is using the dreams of Alice’s unborn baby to enter the dreams of other people and…yeah, this movie actually makes no sense whatsoever and a lot of time is spent on characters trying to explain the incomprehensible plot.

Characters
Alice Johnson: Lisa Wilcox, only now much more blonde. And pregnant. While not nearly as irksome this time around, there’s also not a lot of character development going on. Her boyfriend dies a horrible death and that doesn’t really seem to bother her as much later on as it should. She gets a lot of weird scenes with Freddy and Jacob (her unborn son) and there’s a whole motherhood angle touched upon and how it’s a scary thing. She’s oddly not as competent or heroic as she was at the end of the last movie. And Jacob’s kind of goofy by the end.

Dan Jordan: Danny Hassel is not in this movie much. He’s still a jock and still with Alice, and manages to fall asleep at the wheel. That’s about it.

Greta Gibson: Erika Anderson plays a would-be model. The series has a weird undercurrent of mothers who are either complete bitches or negligent in some other way. Kind of weird. Anyway, she gets force-fed to death because of Freddy’s blunt sense of irony.

Yvonne: Kelly Jo Minter wants to be an Olympic level diver and she’s the resident skeptic. She thinks Alice’s dream thing is crazy.

Mark Gray: Joe Seely is a comic book nerd who’s actually surprisingly helpful at researching information on how to fight Freddy. Sadly, he gets offed in a really weird dream sequence where he confronts Freddy as his dream-powered alter-ego the Phantom Prowler (kind of evocative of the Wizard Master in 3)

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is seriously the really only good thing throughout the movie. He continues to be great in this, with some moments of awesome dickery that hammers home the one constant thread throughout these movies: Freddy Krueger is a complete and total asshole with no redeeming qualities other than mugging for the audience watching at home. That’s the simple truth of the character. There is absolutely no subtlety to the character at all. He is evil for the fun of it, unrepentant, and unstoppable and he loves every minute of it. Being a hideously scarred undead creature that can only prowl inside people’s dreams has the tradeoff of giving him nigh-limitless reality warping powers within dreams. He’s essentially a god within his area of expertise. That right there’s the core dichotomy of Freddy Krueger. He’s a destructive, vengeful being with godlike power and a childish sense of humor that can be defeated (temporarily) by waking up. No wonder he’s associated with kids so much, because he’s like the ultimate personification of childish mischief without any limits or controls.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Stephen Hopkins, the movie continues to be extremely 80s in its style and seems to know that what the audience is here for is the bizarre dream scenes. The movie delivers these in great detail. The effects are nice, and the major Freddy kills are actually pretty damn memorable. Set design for the dreams continues to be pretty cool, including one M.C. Escher-like area where the geometry is all kinds of improbable.

And then Freddy skateboards because skateboards were cool in 1989.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by John Skipp, Craig Spector, & Leslie Bohem with Screenplay by Leslie Bohem. Here, the script is definitely a mess when it doesn’t involve Freddy murdering people in their dreams. The teens are fairly uninteresting, the dialogue is boring and a lot of scenes are spent on exposition. The plot itself is a horribly convoluted thing that just doesn’t make sense. Freddy wants to be a father so he can give birth to himself so he can do what…? He’s using Jacob’s dreams to attack other people. I get that. But from there it just gets confusing. And kind of goes in a weird Freudian direction.

Sound
Original music by Jay Ferguson, which continues the fine tradition of a very 80s style horror score. Other music includes tracks from MAMMOTH, WASP (their capitalization, not mine), Schoolly D and Kool Moe Dee, because rap/hip-hop was just newly discovered by white people in 1989 (see Ghostbusters II) The soundtrack works and there’s nothing bad or wrong about it.

Conclusion
The Dream Child is probably the lowest point for the Nightmare On Elm Street series by virtue of being really, really boring when Freddy’s not around. Freddy’s Revenge might be harder to sit through because it goes completely off the reservation, but The Dream Child is just plain forgettable. If you’re going through the series like I did, then yeah, its worth a watch, but for a standalone experience, avoid it.

“Tell ‘em Freddy sent ya.”

1988, A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Direct sequel of the story of the previous movie. Made a lot of money. Let’s just get into it.

Plot
So the three kids who survived the last movie have been released from Westin Hills and move out of Elm Street to a new high school where they live normal lives and develop a new circle of friends one year later. Naturally, this idyllic life comes to a crashing end as Freddy returns to haunt teens in their dreams. He wants to tie up loose ends, so he goes after the Elm Street survivors, finally finishing off Kristen, but not before she passes some of her dream power off onto new protagonist Alice, who tries to find a way to stop Freddy as he starts killing off all of HER friends.

Characters
The Three Survivors of the last movie:

Kristen Parker: Tuesday Knight instead of a pregnant Patricia Arquette this time. Kristen starts off as our main character and a gateway to the next set of characters. She still has the power to suck her friends into her dreams and I have to admit, I didn’t see the switch coming with Kristen’s death. It kind of works, but on the other hand, I don’t think Alice is a better protagonist than Kristen. Oh, and I guess she smokes now too.

Roland Kincaid: Ken Sagoes again, and he’s still got super strength in his dreams. Remember how he’s a black character who survived the previous horror movie? This time he’s the first to die, but at least he goes down swinging.

Joey Crusel: Rodney Eastman again, and since the events of the last movie, he can speak again. His dream power is a powerful voice/sonic thingy. He’s kind of a perv now, being a horny teenage boy, and gets drowned in a waterbed.

Alice Johnson: Lisa Wilcox plays our new protagonist. Her dad’s a drunk and she’s a meek girl who is a compulsive daydreamer. Alice tries to advise Kristen that when she dreams, to make happy dreams. Naturally this doesn’t work. After she gets Kristen’s powers, this turns out to be a bad thing, since someone who involuntarily daydreams is able to pull friends into said dreams (yeah, they lump daydreams in with regular dreams here). This isn’t so bad by itself, but its compounded by the fact that A) Alice isn’t exactly guilt-ridden or even realizes that her being able to bring people into her dreams is exactly what Freddy wants, and B) she continuously gains new powers from her friends that die, so that in essence, she gets more powerful and less useless the more people around her die. I find that…problematic in a hero.

Sheila Kopecky: Toy Newkirk plays a glasses nerd with asthma. Could they have made a more vulnerable character? Anyway, she gets dragged into one of Alice’s daydreams and Alice uselessly watches Sheila get asphixiated.

Debbie Stevens: Brooke Theiss plays a somewhat bitchy girl who’s into fitness, big hair and a fear of bugs. She dies the most Kafkaesque death in the series.

Rick Johnson: Andras Jones plays Kristen’s boyfriend & Alice’s sister. He likes martial arts. Alice ends up pulling him into a dream and again, Freddy slaughters him too. But Alice ends up getting his leet kung-fu, so its okay!

Dan Jordan: Danny Hassel plays the tall jock that Alice has the hots for. He’s loosely connected to the circle of friends at first, but progressively gets more involved as Alice starts to absorb the positive traits of her friends.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is the best part of this movie. The puns are ramped up a bit further in this film, but I think that works here because the stereotypes and cheesiness of everything else is also broadened. Here’s also the point in the series where Freddy’s personality completely outshines the heroes, who become broadly realized archetypes who only serve as symbolic humans and are therefore much more difficult to feel bad for. Freddy’s plot, that of using Alice as a fishing lure to draw fresh souls for him to feed on and torment is kind of neat, but nothing spectacular. And its just funny seeing Freddy burst out of a sand castle on a sunny beach and put on shades.

Visuals/Effects
Renny Harlin? The man who would go on to direct Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Cliffhanger, and Cutthroat Island? Yes, he directed The Dream Master early in his career. Sure, it would be easy to make jokes, but honestly, the cinematography is fine in this and the pacing works reasonably well. The movie does swap protagonists, essentially splitting it in two parts, which is a bit odd, but nothing horrid. Moreover, the effects remain impressive and the dreamscapes continue to be highly imaginative. Despite its flaws, several of the sequences are really iconic, like the roach motel and the waterbed. My favorite scene has to be the part where Alice and Dan try to rush to Debbie’s rescue but are caught up in a dream that loops over and over until if slowly dawns on them. That's actually really inventive. And I will admit, the final showdown between Alice and Freddy is actually kind of kickass in a music video sort of way. Oh, and Freddy gets resurrected in a dream when Kincaid’s dog Jason pisses fire on his grave. Don’t see that every day.

Writing
Characters by Wes Craven, Story by William Kotzwinkle & Brian Helgeland, and Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, and Scott Pierce. I think its here that the movie really suffers. From inconsistencies with the previous movie to ill-defined characters and really vague plot elements like some kind of a spell to stop Freddy and turning him and Alice into guardians of the gates of bad and good dreams respectively. It makes The Dream Warriors’ super powered institutionalized teens seem restrained and plausible in comparison.

Sound
Original music by Craig Safan, which continues the whole “it’s the 80’s” thing quite well. There’s also a significant licensed soundtrack, featuring the Divinyls, Dramarama, the Fat Boys, Blondie, Sinead O’Connor and a bunch of bands I hadn’t heard of. The theme song “Nightmare” is actually kind of nice, and its sung by Tuesday Knight.

Conclusion
If there’s a slippery slope for the Nightmare series, its definitely The Dream Master. Freddy remains as entertaining as always, but you can tell that various ideas were thrown around to see what stuck. Despite the marked downturn in quality from Dream Warriors, this one’s still fairly entertaining and really maintains the quality of the dream sequences, which are the bread and butter of the series at this point. It’s just that anything outside of Freddy and the dreams doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.

“In my dreams I am the Wizard Master.”

So despite the horrid mess of a movie that Freddy‘s Revenge was, the Nightmare series survived and even brought Wes Craven back. The results are a marked improvement in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

Plot
So now it’s 6 years after the first film (the events of the second being quietly swept under the rug) and a teen girl is so haunted by a strange house in her dreams that she makes a replica house of it. It’s the Thompson house on Elm Street and after a dream attack that leaves her wrists slashed, she gets institutionalized at Westin Hills Hospital. In said institution, she meets a bunch of other kids similarly plagued by nightmares. These are the “last of the Elm Street children” and Freddy wants to finish cleaning house, so to speak. Despite opposition from the chief of the hospital, Nancy and Neil start working with the kids to be able to control their actions in their dreams (essentially lucid dreaming), and they all kind of develop specific “dream powers” that will hopefully help them combat Freddy and stop him from coming back to the real world.

Characters
Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp returns a bit later in the movie. She’s an adult now and after her previous experiences, she’s gone into psychiatry to help other kids tortured by bad dreams and whatever. She’s the shock of white hair she‘s got has somehow migrated to the other side of her face and for some reason has picked up a southern accent OUT OF NOWHERE.

Kristen Parker: Patricia Arquette plays our protagonist. She’s an average teen who’s misunderstood, but she’s also got moxie and initiative. Her dream power is the ability to pull other people into her own dreams.

Jennifer Caulfield: Penelope Sudrow plays one of the kids at the institute who’s offed fairly early on. She’s a wannabe TV actress and a couch potato and probably gets one of the most memorable deaths in the movie. Welcome to prime time, indeed.

Taryn White: Jennifer Rubin is a former junkie who’s feisty and sarcastic nature hides a very damaged girl. Her dream power is two switchblades. …Yeah.

Will Stanton: Ira Heiden plays kid who was paralyzed in a previous suicide attempt to escape his nightmares. He’s a fan of a generic equivalent to D&D and his dream power is that he’s got wizard powers. Yeah, sure, okay.

Roland Kincaid: Ken Sagoes is actually quite likable as the aggressive, mouthy black kid who picks super strength as his dream power, which is an entirely sensible choice.

Joey Crusel: Rodney Eastman plays a kid so traumatized by nightmares that he can’t even speak. He kind of becomes a Macguffin, getting captured by Freddy and used as bait for the other kids to try and rescue him.

Philip: Bradley Gregg plays Freddy’s first victim in the movie and as such he’s a bit vague of character. He’s got a penchant for sleepwalking though, and that ends…badly.

Dr. Neil Gordon: Craig Wasson plays the lead psychiatrist in charge of the kids’ cases. He’s a well-meaning chap and does his best to try and figure things out. He gets a subplot where he starts seeing the ghost of a nun providing him with clues to Freddy’s backstory and origins.

Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon! He’s back, though somewhat estranged from his daughter Nancy. He’s needed because to stop Freddy, they need to bury his bones

Max: Laurence Fishburne. Yes! Really! He plays a kindly orderly who follows orders but stays charitable to the kids.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund really starts getting into the swing of things. Freddy’s personality solidifies as a wicked punster with a dark sense of poetic villainy, and things really take off whenever he’s on screen. We also get backstory. Apparently, his mother, a nun working at the hospital, was somehow locked up in the psych ward and all the inmates got out and assaulted and raped her, making him, in effect, the bastard son of 100 maniacs.

I think everyone's obligated to post this pic when discussing Dream Warriors.

Visuals/Effects
Chuck Russell directed the film. Keeping most of it in a psych ward in a hospital helps to lend a claustrophobic atmosphere to it. However, that’s not where the movie shines. The movie’s absolute strength is found in the truly imaginative special effects. There are a lot of dream sequences in this movie. Some obviously so, other not so much. It allows for a wide range of special effects going from several stop motion puppets (a skeletal Freddy with his glove is a highlight), a bit of early CGI in some places, and a cornucopia of practical effects which are fantastically done. The dream sequences are a real highlight and the Freddy kills start to get really imaginative. You can tell this movie had a budget and it made effective use of it.

Writing
Story by Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner, Screenplay by Wes Craven, Bruce Wagner, Frank Darabont, & Chuck Russell. The story is actually quite complicated. It has to juggle a lot of characters, at least two major plotlines, the introduction of major backstory elements, and has an underlying theme that touches upon mental illness and a little bit of teen suicide. This movie has a lot going on, plot-wise, and manages to pull it off very well. There’s also a high degree of camp in the movie, what with Freddy’s numerous one-liners, several goofy (but imaginative) dream sequences, and the fact that the teens all have highly specialized “dream powers” by the end of the movie. There’s no two ways around it: a group of misfit teens use their super powers to fight Freddy Krueger. That’s GOOFY. And I like it that way.

Sound
Original score by Angelo Badalmenti, which is again, fully atmospheric and fully enmeshed in 1987.

Oh yes, and the theme song was written by Dokken. Dokken! Not only does “Dream Warriors” rock out as only 80’s hair metal can, the music video for it is amazing.


So much hair, GLORIOUS HAIR!



Conclusion
Dream Warriors is a great entry in the Nightmare series. It’s got outstanding effects, a capable cast and I think Englund’s straddling the line between menacing and cheesiness is at its height in the series. Entertaining and thoroughly satisfying.



Probably the best trailer for the Nightmare series.

“Hello, dirtballs.”

1985 ushered in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and brother, let me tell you, it goes off the rails in a hurry.

Plot
Five years after the first movie, a new family moves into the Thompson residence in Springwood. They’re the Walshes, and their oldest son, Jesse, is in high school; he gets Nancy’s old room (and finds her diary). Jesse starts to experience nightmares of a similar nature and starts getting both freaked out and sleep deprived. Slightly a social outsider, he’s got a hot girlfriend and an athletic buddy, so he’s not THAT much of an outcast. About the only real problem he’s got is the gym coach doesn’t like him. Anyway, Jesse starts getting possessed by Freddy and Freddy starts murdering people in the real world. This is a problem. It culminates in an abandoned factory that bears a resemblance to the traditional Freddy Boiler Room (there's always a boiler room).

Characters
Jesse Walsh: Mark Patton is our rather whiny protagonist. Compared to the very proactive Nancy, he’s just kind of blah. He’s sympathetic enough and you get that he’s tortured by all this, but he is also pretty much a puppet for Freddy to screw around with. Oh, and he screams like a girl.

Lisa Webber: Kim Myers is our hero’s girlfriend, and she’s watching him with those eyes, and she’d LIKE to love him with that body, but lately something’s changed that ain’t hard to define. Her boyfriend is somehow possessed by an undead murderer. Lisa is actually the proactive character, digging for information on how to stop Freddy and so on.

Ron Grady: Robert Rusler is first Jesse’s rival, then closest friend. Jesse’s also more interested in hanging out with him than the cute girl that wants to get up on him. For his part, Ron doesn’t seem as invested in the friendship between him and Jesse as Jesse is. Draw your own conclusions.

Coach Schneider: Marshall Bell is the school gym coach. He’s a jerk and fond of using “Dirtballs” as an insult. He’s also into dressing as a leather boy and going to gay bars. For some weird reason Jesse finds him in one on a night when he wanders into one such place. It’s a bit bizarre and leads to Freddy killing a very much awake adult in the gym’s shower room.

Freddy Krueger: Robert Englund is easily the best part of the movie. Possibly a bit more vicious than the last time around, he’s definitely more manipulative and also more random in his attacks. The whole possession thing and killing people in the real world really doesn’t jive with anything Freddy’s ever done in anything else before or since.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Jack Sholder, the movie looks fine and shows a little more polish than the first one. The effects are actually quite good and when Freddy does his thing people die in reasonably imaginative ways.

The acting is rather blah and Jesse’s rather annoying. The characters aren’t very interesting and as such, the pacing suffers a lot, since Freddy’s not on screen for most of the time. Jesse, Lisa and Ron are all rather boring people with little in the way of personality. There is a nice little detail of a message board in the Walsh’s kitchen that changes from day to day, helping to emphasize the passage of time. But it makes me want to follow that storyline as opposed to the one we got. Also, Ohio apparently has not only palm trees but a desert too. As a resident of the state, this is news to me.

On the other hand, a budgie goes berserk and then explodes. I can honestly say I’ve never seen that before.

Writing
Based on characters created by Wes Craven and written by David Chaskin, the script is kind of a mess. Sequentially, yes it is a direct sequel to the first movie. Functionally, Freddy is completely different in his entire modus operandi. Possessing a teen and killing people who are wide awake? That’s just not Freddy. Now, considering that this was only the 2nd movie of the series, I guess you could argue that if it was just these two movies it might be “valid” but even that’s a stretch for Freddy’s nature. Freddy being defeated by the power of love? Weird.

Also, the homoerotic subtext is more than just present, it’s pretty obvious. The basic metaphor of it makes sense. A teen is tortured by feelings that are frowned upon in his suburban, middle-class culture. It explains why he doesn’t take advantage of a girl that totally wants him and he would rather spend time with a male friend who doesn’t reciprocate the same way. The sympathetic metaphor falls apart rather quickly when said tortured teen becomes “possessed” by the thing inside him and he starts killing innocent people, including the same friend who’s friendship he values a lot. And then he’s redeemed by reconciling with the girlfriend he’s kind of discarded earlier in the movie. So if that IS the metaphor the filmmakers were going for, what’s the actual message here...?

Sound
Original music by Christopher Young, and the story repeats itself for the music: Atmospherically appropriate and extremely 80’s.

Conclusion
Yeah. I can see why Freddy’s Revenge is considered the black sheep of the family. It really doesn’t have much in common at all with its predecessor. Its also not a very good movie with dull characters and extremely muddled symbolism. Englund as Freddy is really the only true virtue for the film, as he still does a great job as the villain. But yeah, its not a very good movie. At all.

“Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.”

So I’ve written a lot of words about various classic monster franchises, but haven’t really gone into more recent categories. THAT CHANGES NOW with one of the biggest names in 80s horror, as we begin a long, nightmarish journey to Springwood, Ohio. That’s right, its 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Plot
Nancy Thompson is a normal teenager with normal (if archetypal) teenage friends, who are all having similar dreams of a horrifically burned man stalking them in a boiler room and attacking them. When they awake they have actual wounds like those they got in their dreams. At first, this is just weird, but when one friend is horrifically killed by the guy in her sleep during a sleepover, Nancy starts to freak out and wants answers, and it becomes clear that the parents of Elm Street are hiding something.

Characters
Nancy Thompson: Heather Langenkamp is our hero, an everygirl type of character who just wants the nightmares to end. She’s bright though, and starts working out some ideas on how to confront the murderer who stalks her dreams. She picks up a white shock of hair after one close call.

Glen Lantz: Introducing Johnny Depp! He’s Nancy’s boyfriend. Questionable taste in midriff exposing t-shirts aside, he’s a decent fellow but a fairly bland character.

Tina Gray: Amanda Wyss is Freddy’s very first victim. Like most 80s horror victims, she’s a promiscuous teen. The results are messy.

Rod Lane: Jsu Garcia as Nick Corri as Tina’s greaser boyfriend. He’s a crude, rebellious youth and the prime suspect for Tina’s death. Freddy makes short work of him.

Marge Thompson: Ronee Blakley is Nancy’s mom and denies up and down that anything could possibly be wrong and that Nancy is just imagining things and should really get some sleep. Marge is in deep denial. Marge also likes booze. A lot.

Lt. Donald Thompson: John Saxon! He’s Nancy’s father and a police lieutenant. Like all movie cop dad’s he’s a good man but busy and overworked and doesn’t have much time for his daughter.

Fred Krueger: Robert Englund is one hell of a creepy monster in this. I should point out that Freddy’s look is extremely effective. Trousers, a tattered red and green sweater, horribly scarred face, a weird clawed glove and a dapper fedora. Freddy’s backstory is that he was a child murderer back in the day and the parents of Elm Street banded together to take him down in a fit of vigilante justice, locking him in a basement/boiler room and burning him up. But he’s apparently too evil and too pissed off to let that stop him, so he’s bided his time and now starts taking revenge on the children of those who killed him.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Wes Craven, the movie certainly shows its modest beginnings with a modest budget. Elm Street itself certainly looks generic-suburban enough but other locations for Springwood look nothing like any Ohio location I’ve ever seen. In fact, they look suspiciously like Southern California. The Ohio setting makes sense, since Craven himself is a native Ohioan, but yeah…palm trees. In Ohio.

Now, obviously the dream sequences get the lion’s share of effects work, and the practical effects are actually pretty good. Tina’s death near the beginning is a particularly effective scene, along with some of Freddy’s menacing approaches (backlit in an alley and pushing through a wall over a sleeping Nancy, for example).

Writing
Written by Wes Craven, the storyline is fairly interesting and nicely self-contained. The pacing works very well and by the end of the movie, the line between awake and asleep is blurred as the tone gets increasingly desperate for a solution. As far as “flaws,” Nancy’s plan to confront Freddy in the real world with assorted homemade traps is a little hard to take seriously in a post-Home Alone world, though it does work to show Nancy showing initiative. The other nit to pick is that its interesting to see Freddy being deadly serious in this one. He really only cracks a few jokes (like the infamous ‘I’m your boyfriend now” line) and most of the rest of the time he’s just a sadistic monster with no redeeming qualities. Which, considering that’s what he is, works just fine. It just stands in contrast with the heavy merchandising of the brand that occurred later when Freddy’s personality solidified (or perhaps congealed).

Sound
Original music by Charles Bernstein and, well…it’s the early 1980s. Yes it is atmospheric and suitably creepy at times, but there’s a lot of electronic effects. A LOT. What’s aged better is the children’s nursery rhyme that herald’s Freddy’s approach.

Conclusion
A Nightmare on Elm Street is actually a rather intelligent movie that gives the viewer a sympathetic heroine and a mysterious and effective villain. There’s also subtext you can look into, like a critique of suburban culture and the theme of teen sexuality and the loss of innocence of growing up, and so on. There’s stuff open to interpretation. Obviously the movie’s got stuff for the blood seekers out there, and that stuff’s imaginatively done. Its just nice to have some brains hiding behind the slaughter as well. Recommended.