Smokin' Crack.

SMOKIN' ACES 2: ASSASSINS' BALL (2010)

How did it get so bad?

Forget smoking aces, someone was smoking crack when they pitched this script. I'm not going to pretend to be a big fan of the original Smokin' Aces (2006), though after watching this pile of crap, I'm probably going to write a stellar fucking review for its predecessor. I wish I could come up with some flowery, creative and humorous way to say that this movie was a waste of my time, but considering the fact that they put such little effort into the movie itself, I'm having a hard time putting too much effort into berating it. It's not so much of an intentionally bad movie as it is simply a lazy as hell script, which is in many ways, almost worse. I'd rather be able to say "well, at least they tried" instead of "wow, bastard didn't even bother to take out his gum before he spit in my mouth".

Vinnie Jones is just happy for a paycheck.

The general premise runs the same as the last one. A bunch of elite hitmen are contracted to kill one man in a tight window of time. Great. How can this go wrong? The target is none other than Walter Weed (played by Tom Berenger...or "that dude from Inception"), who has a mysteriously similar addiction to playing cards and magic as the last target did. I'm really hoping I just missed the reference, because either Weed has some distracting connection to Buddy Israel, or they just knew the gag worked well the first time so, hey, why not? Slap on some sob story about his wife and kid, and you've almost completed your character paint-by-numbers, good for you!

The other cast of characters ran from bad to worse. The first film was disjointed, sure, but if anything could be said about it, it was that somewhere between the violence, gore, and chainsaws, there was something likable about every character. You cared about what happened to them, even if you knew they were more likely than not going to die in some gruesome and painful way. These characters? I didn't give two shits about. They were cool, sure. For the most part. But there was nothing consistent about them. There was nothing to latch on and make me want to pine for their survival. Rather, I found myself praying they'd die quicker so I wouldn't have to suffer their presence on the screen.

Neo-Nazi hillbilly scum was never so bad.

The Tremor family was not the same without the Tremor brothers, Baby Boy Tremor was repulsive, Daddy Tremor was boring (reason #214 Michael Parks should always be a sheriff), and even the reoccurring Lester Tremor was way too moody. The only one I actually cared about was Kaitlyn "AK-47" Tremor. Her presence was fantastic and she stole every scene was in, slugging the weight of the entire late Tremor brothers manic energy around on her shoulders and wearing it well. Lazlo Soot (Tommy Flanagan) was one of my favorite assassins in the first film, yet in this one you got the feeling he was just fulfilling some obligation in his contract, shuffling his feet the entire film. 

Smokin'.

The final two assassins come out to Finbar McTeague (Vinnie Jones) and Ariella Martinez (Martha Higareda). Now, I love me some Vinnie Jones, and he'll come up as my BAMF of the week at some point in time. And he did good, I'll give him that, his character was definitely one of the most interesting of the bunch as the psychotic brain surgeon. Same goes to the lovely Ariella Martinez, whose tits starred in all of the best moments of the film. Her character was badass, she had a shit ton of potential, and she had a great rack to hang a costume on. Great. So where did they go wrong? I'd say it was somewhere between a halfbaked romance, an Evanescence theme song for Martinez, and the way two cold-blooded killers suddenly went soft for...no apparent reason. Yeah. One of those. As for the "good guys", I don't remember a single one of them. Clayne Crawford deserves a mention for his most beautifully convincing portrayal of a cardboard cutout. 

As for everything else, there's not much to say. The budget was clearly cut in half. This new director is sucky. The movie lost a lot of its lighthearted, campy fun and was replaced with boring, sterile government top-secret shite. The gore was...eh. Not very inspiring. There was plenty gore in the last movie, but at least there was some meaning to it. Either it was done for the sake of comedy, or high emotion, or just to show how fucking psycho the Tremor brothers are. This just felt...empty and boarding on callous. We want the characters to be vicious psychopaths, not the director. 

Since I highly encourage everyone not to see this movie, I will give you it's one and only good moment. Shooting clowns strapped with C4 out of a canon and into a club. There. You have it all. You've officially missed nothing. Resume your lives. 

God, Deliver Us From This Disappointing Shit.

PRIEST (2011)

Priest Does Ikea: Slot A, meet Slot fucking B.

Just once this year, I want to walk out of a movie theater and not feel like I paid $13 to get sodomized by a chainsaw. I thought Priest would be the movie to bring an end to this disappointing string of bullshit that the movie industry has been peddling like rainbow unicorn flavored acid. The trailer was promising, the concept was epic, the actors were all names I know and love. So what went wrong? I showed up in time. I paid for my ticket. I stubbornly opted for the 2D version of the film rather than the arm-and-a-leg priced 3D version, firstly because I'm a cheap bastard, and secondly because I'm sick and tired of movies that think they can replace any sort of logical plot with a waste basket of special effects. I'm not asking for a lot here. I named my blog "The Smoking Pen", I call my movies "badass", I eat poorly crafted action movies for breakfast and thoroughly enjoy them. I'm really, really not asking for a lot. Give me a couple good explosions, a couple well choreographed fights, a pair of tits and a band of morally ambiguous character I can care about and I'm good to go. I'm not asking for an epic Lord Of The Rings style plot. I'm not asking for characters with back stories that stretch all the way to their slippery push into this world. I'm not even asking for solid, airtight logic. I'm the kind of person that looks forward to the cheap crap summer movies churn out. I'm just asking for a good fucking movie. That's it. That's all I want. Something I can walk away from with a satisfied feeling in my uterus. Is that so much to ask for?

Yes. Apparently it really, really is. And, funny enough, it's a movie called Priest that made me lose all faith in 2011 cinema. Priest isn't simply a bad movie. A bad movie I could live with. Priest was a dick slap in the face. It promised so much--the premise, the action scenes, the way the trailers pushed this as the epic movie of the year. The concept is good: John Wayne meets vampires. Despite the fact that the Church, the Big Brother of this world, has claimed vampires no longer exist, there's a vampire kidnapping in which a little Lucy is whisked away. A little Lucy who happens to be the daughter of a wayward warrior Priest (Paul Bettany), the man who has to now go against the heavy hand of the Church to recover the lost girl. He's joined on his quest by Lucy's lover Hick (Cam Gigandet) and his Priestess companion (Maggie Q). Together, they set out to recover the lost Lucy before it's too late and vanquish the evil ex-Priest now-vampire (Karl Urban). Sounds cool, right? Right. And then this happens:

I. Do Not Explaineth Thine Universe.

Just because the most compelling part of your movie is the fact that it takes place in a dystopian hyper-religious world under threat of vampires, doesn't mean you actually have to expand on that dystopian hyper-religious world under threat of vampires. At all. Apparently, it's okay to throw a bunch of words around like familiars and hope the audience figure it out from context. And it's okay to say that vampires can't go out in the sunlight, and then have these half-human half-vampire things roaming around in the day time. And it's okay to have this vast, sprawling landscape of various settlements that don't quite make sense, but you included a five minute cartoon of vague exposition in the beginning, so you know what? Audiences can suck it. Literally.

In truthfulness, I blame the laziness of this movie on the myth of the ADD Generation. The fact that kids can't sit still long enough for a movie to start. It's said that in the first 15-20 minutes of your movie, the introductions should be over and the movie should really take off. Anything longer than that, more often than not, drags. However, filmmakers these days seem to have ditched those introductory 15-20 minutes all together. Instead of taking their time to flesh out a world, give our characters a little history, breath some life into that dull script, the movie give us a quick expositional cartoon blip and cuts straight into the action. Anything that might slow the movie down--flashbacks about the order of the Priests, a deeper relationship between Hicks and Lucy, a little internal battle of faith for the Priest--has to go. All of that shit that might, god forbid, make the audience care. Nah. Stuff a couple gooey vampires in their face and they'll be happy. Honestly? We will wait for a good movie to develop. I have a lot more patience for a drawn out beginning and a good couple hours than 90 minutes of eye vomit.  

II. Ditch Actors, Go With Cardboard.

"I watch sand...it hurts my eyes."

Cam Gigandet plays the Sheriff Hicks, who comes from the middle of buttfuck nowhere in this uninspiring landscape. Hicks spends his time chasing off lowlives and looking at the white sand "and stuff" (literal quote from movie). He complains that it hurts his eyes. Gee, dipshit, I wonder what happens when you stare at white desert sand for hours on end? Who wrote this, Prequel George Lucas My love is softer than sand which is rough and I don't like sand but I like you? The most depressing part? Hicks is the most compelling character of the entire movie. And he's a fucking Twilight actor, so he will forever have to try harder to impress me than most actors.

The acting gets worse, the script writing gets worse, and the names vanish. Our main character is simply "Priest". His chick friend is Priestess. The villain is Black Hat, clearly named by the writer's one year old son who's eager to show off the few words of vocabulary he knows. And how could anyone forget Brave Priest, Strong Priest, Bold Priest, and my favorite, Flashback Priest. They weren't even trying to get us to relate to these characters.

And there's the Priest himself. Didn't he just pop nicely out of that microwavable character container? He's already lost his faith in the Church, so we don't have to deal with anything messy like a character conflict. Instead, he seems to have been suspended in time, glaring at everyone in the city, waiting for some random kid to come around and tell him his daughter's been stolen. Because, you know. It's not like he can actually take the time to go out and visit her, what with his busy glaring schedule. What do we know about Priest? He's lost his faith in the Church, he seems a little shaky on the whole God thing too, in fact, he doesn't have much of a reason at all to be a Priest except that he's really fucking good at killing things. And he does it all instinctually, so he has no qualms with the fact that he's a lean, mean, killing machine. He feels bad for letting go of his friend's hand when he should've held on, but that's really the only thing that plagues him. We have no idea why he feels so bad about it anyway, it's not like we have any reason to believe they were particularly friendly with one another. All we really know is that he adheres to some abstract samurai code, but doesn't really care about anything except killing vampires, and Lucy is just a convenient way to kill some more. Note to self: you can pay tribute to The Searchers all you want, but only John Wayne can get away with that shit. 

III. Put Thine Bitches In Their Place.

Let's face it. The trailers made the chick look badass. But empowering women is really, really boring. So here's what we're going to do instead. We're going to take the Priestess, who, by the way, has willingly submitted herself to be a Priestess and fully accepted the fact that she's taken a vow of chastity. Great. So this woman with full command over her sexuality has decided that God is overrated, and what she really wants out of this life is to fuck our protagonist, hard. Paul Bettany is not a bad looking dude, and neither is a cardboard cutout of Kate Moennig, yet still I am somehow not inspired to make passionate love with hard papery material. Fine. You know what. We're an action movie, we need someone to moon over our hero, I get it. I'm on board with you. I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt for your lame ass courting scenes, which go something like this...

Sometimes, I have bad dreams....

But sometimes, I have GOOD DREAMS. WINK.

But then it goes a step further. This movie wants her to be the sex pot AND the badass woman hero. Which is fine, except for the fact that they refuse to let her be badass. Oh, she's got the moves. She's got the gadgets. She's a warrior woman dance of death. So let's throw the Special Education School Of Vampires at her. While the hero is busy dealing death to millions of deadly vampires, she's watching the car and pushing away the retard half-vampire things (can someone please explain what the fuck a familiar is anyway?). Why do I feel like I'm repeating myself...?

IV. There Is Fast....And Then There Is NITRO.

So you think your horsepower is impressive? You think that you're a badass because you went a couple miles over the speed limit in Italy? Well. You clearly haven't ridden a battery powered motorcycle...thing. It does speed. Climbs up the MPH meter like a beast. But when you're trying to outrun a speeding train filled with blind vampires, you need more than 200 MPH. You need NITRO. Nitro does not have a miles per hour because nitro IS it's own unit of measure. Nitro is tearing up the road, bitches fast. Nitro is your motorcycle on powerthirst. It's like the speed of lightspeed, but like...it bends light...and...um...it's like...BETTER. Than you. And your mom. 

V. Foreshadowing Is For Thou Pussies.

Remember when Indiana Jones told everyone his one greatest weakness was snakes, and then ended up forced in a small room covered in them? Remember when the Narrator from Fight Club went to a doctor for his insomnia, and then his lack of sleep ended up being one of the main origins of his issues? Remember every single time Q told James Bond "whatever you do, don't push the red button"?

Well. Priest has decided that it's completely okay with having the gun on the mantle the first act, and leaving it untouched for the rest of the movie. Literally half the film is spent on this single dilemma: what are they going to do if they find Lucy has already become infected? The Priest vows he'll kill her, yet Hicks in turn vows he'll kill the Priest before he has the chance. Good, healthy character tension, right? So we've established their relationship, we've established the tension, we've built it up to it's final climax, and...absolutely nothing happened. Lucy never got bitten. Which means all those arguments and all the effort they put into the conflict was purely hypothetical and ultimately meaningless. 

Verdict? There's campy, and then there's we just couldn't give a crap. I left the movie theatre and on my way out, I ran down the up escalator. Those 30 seconds were more thrilling and entertaining than the last 90 minutes I spent feeling my brain drip out of my ears. So save yourself the money and run down the up escalator for a couple hours instead. 

7, 8, 9, 10, The Nightmare's Back...Again.

A Nightmare On Elm Street

I tried to warn you. I did. Honest. But Freddy pulled out your veins and danced you like a puppet all the way to the remote. And so begins the A Nightmare on Elm Street version of the Star Wars Prequels. They're ridiculous, occasionally painful, and undermine the brilliance of the rest of the series. Not to mention, it's an origins story about a badass villain who we didn't really care about where he came from. It's not quite as bad as the epicness of Darth Vader turned into a pansy little "sand is soft" Anakin. But it still gives Wes Craven good reason to stay up at night. 

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

Stop. Go back. Read the title again. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dream Warriors. The title really says it all. No, I'm sorry. The title image really says it all. 

That's right. If you thought the first two were cheesy, you're about to become lactose intolerant. It's like a Freddy Kruger/Charlie the Unicorn crossover. They might as well have Care Bears dance across the screen in rainbow colored kneesocks and fit the letters together. 

The premise is already overdone. A group of Elm Street mental patients are in the hospital for sleeping disorders. Nevermind that they all claim to see the exact same man in their dreams. Since the children are basically parentless for the extent of the movie (except for Kristen's mom. Andele!), we have the evil director lady, who doesn't miss a beat to put the kids in harm's way. And another surprising cameo--Lawrence Fishburne (Morpheus) plays Max, a caretaker with a heart and a protective eye on the children. 

Speaking of surprises. Nancy returns! That's right, Heather Langenkamp reprises her role as Nancy Thompson from the first movie, the initial Freddy surviver. Three years later and she still hasn't taken acting classes. But Nancy has her life under control. She's a dream psychiatrist, she takes pills to push her so far under she can't dream, and has a strand of white hair to age her or something. She invites herself to one of the therapy circles, lead by good ol' Dr. Neil Gordon. He plays "the good guy", attentive to the needs of the children, and ultimately to the needs of Nancy. Nancy gets the kids to talk, revealing their Kuger traumas. 

That night, one of the girls from the group, Kristen dreams about Nancy. No. Not one of those dreams, unfortunately. Instead, she somehow manages to pull Nancy into her Freddy dream, and Nancy and Freddy confront each other once more. In which Nancy offers the wise, comforting advice of someone who's spent her entire life fighting Freddy: "RUN!" Nancy and Kristen reconvene with the best of the group where Nancy spills the beans to them, telling them all about her past history with Freddy. After working to convince the Doctor that she's not completely batshit (which, for Nancy, is always hard, especially since she spends a good portion of the movie trying to feed the kids experimental drugs), the group try to come together and use their powers to stop Freddy. 

Image from nightmareonelmstreetfilms.com 

Oh, wait. I didn't mention they have powers, did I? That's right. They have motherfucking dream powers. Which, in non-retarded terms, means they have "special abilities" they can use in their dreams. Okay. Let me make some comparisons. In Inception, they have a woman who can shape the world, a shapeshifter, and a man who can beat up basically anybody. Those are special abilities. In Dream Warriors, we have Kristen, who can do handstands, Joey, who can pick up hot women, Kincaid, who has super strength, Taryn, who can become (in her words) "beautiful...and bad",  and Will, who is--and I wish I was kidding on this one--the Wizard Master.  These are "special" abilities. Together, how could they not defeat Freddy Kruger? 

For all the flack I give this movie, there is one thing that...I have to admit...it does well. And that is, of course, the Freddy deaths. I was a little skeptical at first. Freddy was badass when he was simply...Freddy. When he had those creepy fucking hands and slashed people to ribbons. This Freddy isn't so much about the slashing. Instead, he animates inanimate objects, morphs into giant worms, that sort of thing. However, there were some pretty badass deaths. Especially the puppet scene, in which he rips out a kids veins and works him like a puppet, making him walk straight out the window. Yeah. That was morbid, disgusting, and just straight brilliant. Then there was the burner girl, who finally got her spot on TV, just not quite the spot she'd hoped for. And then, there's this, which speaks for itself:

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

The nightmare continues. All the awful kids we met in the third movie? Yeah. They're back. Only this time, we at least get the treat of watching them all die in the first 30 minutes or so. Rock on. Well, almost all of them. We're still stuck with Alice, for god knows what reason. Yes, okay. She can drag other people into her dreams. Fine, her power is important for the premise of the movie. But the character herself is still boring as hell. She's slightly ethereal, beautiful, but all in all, flat and pointless.

No, Harry, it's not a gay thing.

The movie picks up from where the last one dropped off. Sort of. Freddy's bones, which had been finally put to rest, are dragged back up out of the ground and he's revived. At least, that's the easy answer. The other answer is the token black kid had a dream in which his dog peed fire on Freddy's bones and opened up a portal to hell through which Freddy resurfaced. Yeah. We're not even going to try to dissect that one. The thing is, there's little in this movie that does make sense. The second movie in a trilogy is usually awkward, the first being the initial one to set us up, the third being that conclusive and satisfying bang we finish on, and the second being...that unfortunate middle child. Here, however, we have an awkward second movie quadrilogy. Yeah. I had to look that word up. If wikipedia says it's true, than it must be, right?  Anyway. The point is, this movie has very little to do with the third movie or the fifth movie. It's just Alice, going crazy, going through some more shit, and watching her friends die. We don't find much more about Freddy's past than we already know, but if you're like me, frankly you don't really want to know much more about a man who was terrifying because he wasn't quite human, because he didn't have a past.

Nevertheless. In the spirit of the movie before it, this addition offs the really kickass characters way too early on. We have--finally!--a nerdy character. Sheila, the short girl with glasses who's not afraid to be a dork and let everyone else know that's she's better than them because she reads books. Which would be obnoxious, except for the fact that she actually is better than them. It's nice, after an entire four movies of the popular girl/jock/Jesus nut as the hero to have an actual outcast, an...dare I say it...interesting character. She's an electronics specialist, she wears cool glasses, and she has down to earth advice about killing Freddy. She so has this in the bag. Well. Except for the fact that she doesn't, at all, and the second Freddy comes to get her, he destroys her. Hmm. Then there's Alice's boyfriend. He's entirely uninteresting, except for the fact that he knows kung fu. I...wonder...if...that's...going...to...come...back. But I have an official grudge against her boyfriend for the fact that they had one couple minute scene that repeated itself literally about four or five times. Seriously. I got the point after the third time. Hell, they could've stopped after the second time. But that many times? It's enough to make you crazy. Last in our cast of characters is a Alice's other BFF, a woman body builder who hates bugs. Let's just say that...well. You are what you hate? Some kind of message there.

The Fly sequel?

My biggest problem with this movie? Was that despite the fact that it was ridiculous and absurd and made very little sense at all, the ending was actually...pretty badass. All in all, the best of the Freddy demises, in my opinion. I mean, the souls of the kids literally burst out of his body. He's got hands coming from his stomach, his legs, the back of his head. It's horrifying, brilliant, and an actual fit end for such an awesome villain. Most of the Freddy movies that ended with his "death" left me with a "Oh, come on. He's better that that." But this time...It actually felt like a just end to the nightmare creeper. And it could've ended there. It really could have.

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

Yep. It's exactly what you're thinking. Dumb Alice returns and gets herself "a little pregnant." And apparently babies in the womb can dream. And this baby is dreaming about a pedophile who wants to use him to destroy his mother and...rebith...and etc. We're introduced to little baby Jacob, Alice's future son who appears to her in her dreams. He's a creepy little child. And somehow that convinces her not to abort him. Because if I was holding a demon child in my womb, I'd keep it too. Well, to be on the fair side, this child can be saved. She just has to...you know. Destroy Freddy for the third time. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Riiiight. 

"It's a boy!"

As in the last one, this Nightmare has it's own cast of quirky characters. There's the professional swimmer, the model who's constantly harassed by her mother (back to these kind of parents again), and a comic book fanatic. I left the comic book kid for last because, while they each how their own genre-themed battles to fight with Freddy, his is definitely the most amusing. Return of the Wizard Master? Something like that. It's stupid, it's ridiculous, but after marathoning five Nightmare movies and finally giving myself over to them, I'll throw in the white towel and say it: it's fun. In the list of cool character deaths, lastly, we have a boyfriend who becomes one with his motorcycle. You would think that after his car literally animated itself and tried to kill him, he would stay off the road. Find another means of transportation. Something. But he took the jumping right back on the horse metaphor a little too literally and hops on his motorcycle. You've got to give the boy credit, even as the motorcycle starts to rip through his skin and dig it's wires into his muscles, he takes it like a champ and hangs on. 

On the flip side, we're getting more Freddy history. This is a little more interesting that the others, even if it doesn't quite jive. We're transported back to Freddy's mother's conception--aka, getting raped by a mob of insane asylum patients. Skip jump to Freddy's birth to find he's a literal creature. Not even human. This little evil alien baby. Birth, rebirth, all themes this movies plays around with. Whether it's dream or reality, we kind of stop caring. It doesn't make much sense as it is, might as well just run with it. Freddy, it turns out, does have a similar pattern as all the Elm Street kids--he hates his mother. Can't even stand to be in the same room with her. Really, what IS it with these writers and their parents? 

I think everyone can agree with me when I say that adding a baby to a series almost always ends in pain. I can't really think up a single baby addition that was a good idea. In this case, it's one of those things where the series itself is so ridiculous, you might as well throw a baby in there. No one's really going to notice. So long as Freddy's not raising it, I'm happy. 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

So...remember when I said the only thing worse than Freddy possessing a kid was Freddy having a kid? Yeah...about that. Freddy's Dead kicks off with an entirely different feel from the other movies. And by that I mean it's a lot more nineties than eighties, even though it's only three years after of the last movie. Well. Time flies. This movie is a bit of a "grand finale" piece, taking bits and pieces from all the movies that came before it and mashing them all together in a gelatinous pile of mediocrity. 

The cure to any nightmare villain. Duh.

We have the return of the mental hospital, the dream doctors...our cast of characters splits up into two sections. First, there's John Doe, a kid with amnesia who has severe falling dreams, and his therapist Maggie, who has a reoccurring dream of a moment in her childhood her brain is trying to forget. John Doe is just ridiculous, which becomes clear after ten minutes of watching him fall down a hill and say "Wow!" in 100 different ways. They go on a trek to leave the hospital and go to Springwood (the town in which Elm Street resides) in order to pick up clues about John Doe's past. They find out that everyone is crazy. Literally. There are no children in the town and the entire town is a madhouse for old people stuck in some sort of Stepford dream like state. I wish I was exaggerating. To make things better, they have stowaways--three mental patients from the hospital escaped in the back seat of their van. There's Tracy, the tough girl with anger (and screeching) issues, Carlos, the deaf kid, and Spencer, the stoner who I recognized as Breckin Meyer from Rat Race. 

To be honest, there's nothing that remarkable about most of the deaths in this movie. Which is a pity considering watching one of the poorly written characters die a gruesome death really makes it worth the 90 minutes sometimes. However, we do get an anti-drug campaign in which Spencer gets high and everyone freaks out on him. Even Johnny Depp, who makes a brief cameo just to tell Spencer "This is your brain...this is your brain on drugs" (What'd I say about bringing it all back?). 

Despite all the bullshit this movie drags us though, it does give us an interesting little twist. Alright, so I bitched about Freddy having a kid. But this movie actually pulls it off. Don't ask me how. The thing is, we dig deeper into Freddy's past. Not the crap with the weird disfigured baby popping out of his mom and scrambling across the floor. We actually delve into what Freddy was like...before the burns and the nightmares. A glimpse of child!Freddy, doing sadistic things to hamsters. A glimpse of his caretaker being an evil crazy bastard (wow, TOTALLY didn't see that coming. It's not as though authority has been evil this entire series). And finally, a glimpse of Freddy, with a wife and a child. Now. That is interesting. Not only do we see Robert Englund without the scars, which is exciting as fuck for some reason, but we see Freddy...as a normal, sadistic, child killing father. Thank you. To see him unravel, trying to hide the secret of his "special projects"...that's what I find interesting. It doesn't undermine him as a villain, in fact, it makes him a better, creepier villain. To see that he is human, yet still capable of these gruesome acts. I could've done without the whole "they took my child and that drove me to kill" bit, but beggars can't be choosers. I think he's sadistic enough without trying to squeeze extra motivation in. 

All in all, it's been a long, exhausting ride. My suggestion would be to watch the series with friends: first so you can hold them during A Nightmare On Elm Street 1 and 2, and then so you can laugh with them throughout the rest of the series. And, just because I really can't get enough of this kid, I leave you with this humble summation of A Nightmare On Elm Street 3-6: