Ha ha and hello! It’s Burl with an olde-tyme favourite,
which I watched the night before Halloween, thinking “It’s time to revisit this
old bean, now that Wes “Deadly Friend”
Craven has departed us! Too early, it seems!” Of course the picture I’m talking
about is the original, home-grown A
Nightmare on Elm Street!
Now I was never a big huge fan of the Fredster, though I
certainly enjoyed seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 at the cinema, and I
guess A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 had
some laughs sprinkled like cheap birdseed throughout! A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 is another picture I saw in the cinema,
though now I can’t remember the first thing about it, except that it was pretty
silly! Ha ha, and I always thought this one, the original, was a pretty good
movie!
And I still think so, though one of its lapses in logic
seemed to me now such a cromite that I found myself puzzling over it for a
while! Now, I’m not here to pick apart the film’s logic, it’s only this one
thing I’m going to mention! But really, a maniacal janitor killed twenty kids
in the neighbourhood within fairly recent memory, and none of these teens has
ever heard about it? I call faddle!
Anyway, the rest of it is perfectly logical, ha ha! The
murderer in question, Fred Krueger, was released on a technicality, and the
neighbourhood parents tracked him down and had a little fry-party! Then, some
years later, Fred gets up the mojo to start appearing in the dreams of the
neighbourhood’s surviving kids, and proves himself able to administer fatal
pokings from beyond the veil of Phobetor! Yikes! Watch out, kids!
Well, poor Nancy is the hero of the piece, and I say poor
Nancy not only because she’s run through the wringer in the course of the
photoplay, but because she’s played by Heather Langenkamp from Star Trek Into Darkness, who, I’m sorry
to say, has never struck me as a very good actress! Luckily her dad is an
iron-nosed cop played by John Saxon from Fast Company and Blood Beach and Welcome to Spring Break and Black Christmas, and that makes up for a
lot! Ha ha! And her mom is Ronee Blakely from A Return to Salem’s Lot, which is kind of an odd casting choice if
you ask me, but it works out reasonably well!
Nancy’s pals are Tina, played by Amanda Wyss from This House Possessed, Rod, essayed by Nick
Corri from Gotcha, and Johnny Depp
from Private Resort! They’re all
fairly doomed, and it’s up to Nancy to take the fight to Fred, and to make a
series of elaborate booby traps in about two minutes! Ha ha, she has exploding
lightbulbs and swinging sledgehammers – the works! And it all seems to do the
trick, except for the producer-mandated nonsense-shock ending! Ha ha, you can almost hear that producer whispering "Remember Carrie?" in poor Wes's ear!
I like to watch these things as though I’m just seeing them
for the first time, and Fred Krueger was not the Catskills boogeyman he later
became, and it’s just another low-budget 80s horror picture! That’s easier said
than done of course, but the upshot this time around is that I was impressed
with the movie, and found it imaginative and effective! It’s still goofy and
not really that scary, but beneath all that the movie has a seriousness of
purpose that endeared me to it! There are some fine moments throughout, like
Nancy’s schoolroom dream and the death of her pal Tina! The trick effects are
superb, and it’s altogether very well put together! Ha ha, I give A Nightmare on Elm Street three
telephone tongues!
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