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:

"Up Yours With A Twirling Lawnmower!"

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET:

Image from nisahukor.blogspot.com

In honor of getting into the Halloween spirit, I went all out. I decided to do an epic marathon for a first time watch of the movie franchise which taught us that children never, EVER miss a day of school, fathers are always hardassed and mothers are usually sleeping with the neighborhood, and every household must keep a bottle of the famed Stay Awake pills. That's right. A Nightmare on Elm Street, the 80s phenomenon directed by Wes Craven, made me scream, made me laugh, made me cry, and made me wear pants that swallowed my bellybutton. On to the real stuff. I've broken the franchise up into two parts: the good half (A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2) and the bad half (more or less everything else). For now, here are the good parts:

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)

The only way this movie could've been more 80s is if Wes Craven Rickrolled me at the end. At yet, despite the fact that I was so into the fact that it was an hour and a half of pure 80s, I was actually surprised by how scary and creative some of the scenes were. Wes Craven introduces us to Elm Street, populated by the doe-eyed and doe-faced Tina Gray, her badboy boyfriend Nick, the plain "best friend" Nancy Thompson, and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen, the extraordinarily young, sweet, and even slightly nerdy Johnny Depp. That's right, Johnny Depp gets his first role in A Nightmare on Elm Street, possibly the only time he's every played the completely and utterly normal "good kid". 

Image from Post-Mortem Depression.

The movie starts with Tina Gray, plagued with dreams of some creepy man with a hand of knife fingers. She wakes up with a start once he rips into her nightgown and finds that back in reality, her nightgown is slashed (to which her mother responds with a bit of comforting parental wisdom: "either cut your nails or stop having bad dreams. One of the other."). It's soon discovered that she's not the only one--all her friends seem to be having similar nightmares, and they shack up at her place for the night to comfort her. But the nightmare becomes real when Nancy falls asleep next to her boyfriend and ends up writhing on the ceiling poltergeist style and falls back into the bed, slashed to ribbons. Naturally, her creepy boyfriend Nick gets tossed in the pen since he inexplicably carries a switchblade in the middle of Stepford Suburbia. Here, the movie takes a turn I appreciate and the "sidekick" characters--Nancy and Glen--are suddenly at the forefront, taking the reigns of the movie.

Once you get passed the fact that Nancy can't act her way out of a paper bag, her character is actually pretty kickass. If there's one thing the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise gets right, it's that the women are always the ones who save the day. And Nancy is the first teenage girl to make some real proactive moves against Freddy Kruger, even at the risk of seeming insane. Speaking of, I didn't quite expect Freddy to be as frightening as he was. I mean, he's a pedophile who works in a boiler room and murders children. It doesn't get much worse than that. His weird elongated arms in his first introduction were definitely eerie, to the point where I wouldn't have minded them coming back later. But one of the best parts about this movie was the fact that it actually seemed like a nightmare. It had all the reoccurring elements of bad dreams, throwing in images that weren't so much in your face scary as they were just off and twisted. The scene in which Tina visits Nancy at school in a body bag and then is dragged down the hall by an invisible figure gave me chills (it's all in the arm flop). Another great touch was Nancy running up the stairs which kept breaking under her, dropping her feet into thick goo. Again, something very familiar about the dream quality of it. I half expected Cobb to jump in and steal Freddy's hat. 

80s phone sex. 

Speaking of children. About the parents. I don't think Nancy's plea for her dad to come next door simply to make sure a psychopath isn't murdering her after three of her friends have died within the span of a few days is such a lofty request. Nancy's dad considers it attention seeking behavior. Nancy's mom was an alcoholic and certifiably insane. I mean, she put bars on the windows, which immediately set Nancy off into an hysterical teenager fit ("You did what to my subscription of WOW?"). However, she has one of the best lines of the movie, after she's told Nancy that Freddy Kruger the man was actually discovered to be a pedophile and torched by the parents. Some Stepford, right? Mommy reassures with: "He's dead, honey, because Mommy killed him...so it's okay now. You can sleep." Right. Because knowing that my parents are capable of burning a man alive is my kind of bed time story. No doubt it would put Glen, Nancy's boyfriend and apparent narcoleptic, to sleep. Sure, Nancy hasn't slept in a whole week, but tell Glen to stay away for more than fifteen minutes because your life depends on it and you might as well dig your own grave now.

Despite the many people who failed her, Nancy put up a pretty epic battle against Freddy. And sure, there's a sequel. Clearly, she didn't sent the man to hell where he belongs. But she got out with her life, and that's more than most of the teenagers on Elm street can say. (Or did she...?)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

The original of anything is always everyone's favorite. Episodes 4-6 of Star Wars, the first Matrix, the Coen brothers' "early stuff". However, I was surprised by how legitimately good the sequel was. Unlike most horror movie sequels, this was NOT simply a rehashing of the first movie with new (and less awesome) characters. This movie took a very different approach and brought Freddy to a new level of scary. In the first one, we followed the children who were plagued with nightmares of Freddy and who tried to literally outrun him. In this one, our hero didn't have quite so easy a task.

Photo taken from http://www.b-movies.gr

Jesse Walsh (played by Mark Patton, who, considering the tight pants and the amount of crotch-shots we get, I think it's safe to assume was hired solely because of his ass) is your average football playing dweeb. Alright, that's a bit of an oxymoron, but let's roll with it. He's the new kid in town, who's just moved into a house that his parents (the dad who barks instead of talking and the surprisingly caring mom) forgot to mention was previously inhabited by some crazy Nancy chick. Whoops. Jesse unfortunately reaps the unpleasant rewards of this choice of real estate. He wakes up every morning from a nightmare, coated in an obnoxious amount of sweat. But Jesse doesn't get the run-of-the-mill Freddy Kruger nightmares. Instead, Freddy has decided to run with a different tactic--he's slowly taking over Jesse's mind and body, essentially possessing him. Jesse spends the entire movie struggling with "this thing inside me", this tugging need to kill everyone around him. And, in my opinion, being afraid of yourself is much scarier than being afraid of a psycho child killer. The second one's logical, the first one's uncontrollable.

Thus begins the second installation of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, as we see Jesse struggle to warn friends about his quickly dissolving sanity. His girlfriend, Lisa, while pretty in a Meryl Streep kind of way, is ultimately pretty annoying. She falls for Jesse, who's really given her no reason to love him, and she's really into his whole spiritual conquering-your-dreams thing. I don't know. If some crush comes up to me and says "Hey, I'm probably going to kill you", I don't know that I'd say, "You can fight it!" I'd most probably run in the other direction. But props to her.

Clearly didn't read the side-effects label on the Stay Awake pills.

Don't get me wrong. This movie, like the first one, has many lulz. For example, the BDSM-loving gay gym teacher who got his rocks off making the boys do an excessive amount of push ups? Yeah. My point exactly. If you think it's cracked up enough to be a dream sequence, it probably isn't. Spoiler alert. Freddy tans his ass with gym towels. Okay, I just had to say it. Moving on. We also had a pretty epic moment with a killer love bird. I kid you not. That sweet little thing that tweets in it's cage? Actually a rabid destroyer of lives. The scene in which the couple inches of bird chases Jesse's entire family through the house is pretty cracked out in it's own right. But I don't know about you, but more than the 80s explosions and the crack subplots, I watch these movies for the epic Freddy Kruger deaths. And in the spirit of the first one, this one served. One of my favorite moments was when Freddy was quite literally bursting through Jesse's body right before he killed Jesse's good friend. Aliens comes out a year after this, apparently 'tis the season.

All in all, if you want a good, surprisingly creepy, always campy, 80s horror movie, look no further. A Nightmare on Elm Street delivers two times over. Just...you know. Stop after the second one. Seriously. Not kidding. Put the remote down. Do NOT press the Ondemand button. No...I'm warning you..it's not worth $1.99! NO--!

[Tune in next time for reviews of the rest of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series! That's all, folks!]