Burl reviews Wes Craven's New Nightmare! (1994)

 

Ha ha and high concepts, it’s Burl, here to review the most po-mo of the Freddy pictures! Freddy became self-aware sometime around February of 1987, at about the time A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 came out, but it wasn’t until this picture appeared seven years later that the circle fully closed! That was when Mr. Wes Craven returned to the director’s chair in old Krugerville and made Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, which is the picture under discussion today!

It was clearly intended as a final hoop-de-doo, with the grand return of not just Wes Craven but also Heather Langenkamp, whom we well recall from Star Trek Into Darkness and other photoplays; and John Saxon from Black Christmas and Blood Beach; and background appearances made by a few other people from the first instalment! Robert Englund, of course, never went away, ha ha! And all of these folks play themselves, at least at first; or in Englund’s case, part of the time!

Langenkamp is herself, married to a special effects man (as she is in real, real life), and has a little son, Dylan, played by little Miko Hughes from Pet Sematary and Apollo 13! She’s plagued by dreams and discovers, to her disquiet, that Craven is planning to make another chapter in the Freddy saga in which she, Langenkamp, will play herself! And the ouroboros continues with the introduction of Robert Shaye and other New Line Cinema executives, all playing themselves too!

Langenkamp’s dreams persist, and soon she’s spooked by every little thing; her son is going kwazoo; her husband dies in an accident involving a mechanical Freddy arm, a speeding van, a croscharea, and a concrete wall; and ha ha, won’t anybody do something about all these darn earthquakes! Her pal Saxon provides what comfort he can, but pretty soon he’s calling her “Nancy” and treating her like the daughter she was in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street! And Englund is no help – we see him in his palatial home sans putty, where he looks nearly as fresh-faced as he did in Galaxy of Terror, but he’s too wrapped up in his goofy paintings to offer more than token comfort! (I’m not sure if Robert Englund in real, real life is a painter, but if so, as a painter he makes a fine actor! Ha ha!)

The explanation for Freddy’s presence in the “real” world is quite goofball, but acceptably so – it’s clear Craven gave it some thought so it wouldn’t just come off merely as stupid! Some work is required on the part of the viewer: they must accept the premise as quickly and completely as possible in order to wring maximum enjoyment from the movie! Once they do, they’ll find a picture not replete so much with affrights, but one that functions nevertheless an unexpectedly rich thought-piece! Ha ha, it’s still pretty goofy, but overcoming that is the price of admission!

For a Nightmare on Elm Street picture it’s a real longuebönes (112 minutes!), and this running time excess comes from an inflated opening act and then too many scenes of Dylan acting weird! It’s as though he’s possessed by Freddy, but when it turns out that isn’t actually the case, the moments where he screams or talks in a duck voice come off retroactively as filler! He’s mostly a charming little guy though, especially when he talks about his dinosaur friend Rex!

The second half of the movie has more action and standard-issue genre interest, but by then we’ve accepted Heather Langenkamp not as Heather Langenkamp, but as a fictional character who happens to be named Heather Langenkamp – in other words, ha ha, the meta effect has worn off, to the picture’s detriment! Langenkamp’s acting is a lot better in this one than it was in Nightmare 3 however, and even a step up from the first picture, in which she was mostly just fine but no better!

This picture doesn’t turn bad in the second half though, just less interesting! There’s a well-done scene of young Dylan trying to cross a busy freeway, and his mom trying to save him – ha ha, it gets a little silly when a giant Freddy appears in the sky, but this at least has precedent in Nightmare 3! A frowny doctor becomes the main human antagonist without ever becoming bad or evil, and she’s forgotten about once the standard-issue ANOES climax – meaning a lot of scampering around in downtown Freddytown with its hot pipes and steaming boilers and flaming furnaces – asserts itself!

This came before Craven’s Scream or any of the other meta-horror of the 90s, so it had the exciting flavour of the new at the time, and a lot of that residual goodwill persists for me to this day! I enjoyed it in the theatre back then and enjoyed it again more recently, if a little bit less and without the novelty! It could stand to be gorier and scarier and to have better follow-through, but I still had a fine time watching it! I give Wes Craven’s New Nightmare two and a half sloshing pools!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child! (1989)

 

One, two, Burl’s coming for you! Ha ha, and by “you,” I mean Freddy Krueger of course, the laughing scarface in the stripèd sweater, the fellow who appeared in a few enjoyable pictures and then, having transformed into a jokester in a knife-glove, foisted upon the world such pictures as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master! Ha ha, I didn’t like that one much, and I remembered its direct sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Child, as being even worse! Well, I watched that one again the other night, and you know what? It’s not worse!

It’s not a whole lot better either, but it is better, and, as with its two immediate predecessors, I saw it in the theatre with a gang of pals, so it’s possible the agreeability of that experience will bleed into my opinion of the picture! I’ll try to avoid that! What I will say is that Wes Craven never came within a mile of this film - ha ha, he was too busy making Shocker, which I guess was his attempt to make a new Freddy type of fellow! Luckily for all, I think, Horace Pinker didn’t make it!

Maybe you’re wondering why I’ve omitted the number 5 from the title - ha ha, well, that’s how they do it on the title card in the movie itself, and so that’s how I’ll say it too! I guess they were trying to downplay how far along in the series they were! In any case, this one is a direct continuation from number 4, with Lisa Wilcox from Gimme an ‘F’ once again styled as a forty year-old lady to play the character of Alice, yet another Elm Street kid who’s become the target of the fedora-topped dreamaniac!

Alice has a boyfriend called Handsome Dan, and pals like Yvonne, played by Kelly Jo Minter from Summer School; Mark, essayed by a pretty bad actor called Joe Seely from Armed and Dangerous; and Zandalee herself, pretty Erika Anderson, as Greta! Yvonne’s dad looks like an amiable oaf, but Mark, Greta, and Dan have parents who oppress them in one way or another, though this never comes to much either narratively or thematically! Alice herself has an AA dad played by Nicholas Mele from The Lonely Guy, and another parent (Dan’s, I think?) is played by Burr De Benning from Armed Response, but we never find out if these parents too were part of the original John Saxon mob that burned up Freddy back when he was just a creepy, handsy janitor!

Of course the dream murders are the engine that powers these vehicles, and again, for the most part, they just come off as little skits in which Freddy can perform homicidal charades in the guise of a chef or a surgeon or a motorcycle! One fellow turns into a cartoon or something, and finds a new definition of “paper cut,” ha ha! The idea is that Alice is pregnant and Freddy is somehow funneling himself through the dreams of the fetus and thereby able to pick off Alice’s friends! Ha ha, even internally, the logic is a mess - I mean, the fetus is not even a fetus, being only days old over the period of the story! It would be a little, undreaming clump of cells! Some of you evangelicals may disagree with me on that, but it’s true!

The movies try to be fun lite-horror, but I’ve always felt the more unsavory aspects of Freddy, like his repeated use of the word “bitch,” his origin story as the child of a gang-raped nun (an event dramatized in this movie, unfortunately), and of course his pre-conflagration career as a child molester, sit ill with his status as a comic-bookish anti-hero firing off catch phrases! But in the last act this picture suddenly decides to try harder and show off a little imagination! Ha ha, the dream world becomes an Escher-like maze of staircases unmoored to conventional planimetrics or everyday physics, and indeed reminiscent, unusually for this series, of an actual dream! Another noteworthy moment has fake heads on tendons popping out of Freddy’s back like riot balloons! Ha ha!

But most of the picture is saddled with poor dialogue, so-so acting, and rote dream sequences, so it’s no great glahoonick in the end - not a patch on the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, nor the enjoyable Dream Warriors! And every single special effect seems to have been done by a different artist or company, and that lends the thing a real patchwork quality! I wasn’t sorry I watched it, but nor was I transported back to August 31, 1989, when I saw it at the downtown mall multiplex! I give A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child one and a half ugly baby carriages!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master! (1988)

Weaving through your dreams like a wisp of blackened smoke, it’s Burl, here to review the first of the worst of the Freddy Krueger pictures! It was one of the Late Summer Horrors I religiously attended in my teens, but had the misfortune of being released around the same time as The Blob, a far better movie! I’m talking about A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master! Ha ha!

Yes, this is where the series turned stank! A Nightmare on Elm Street was of course a very solid genre picture with a villain no one had seen before! A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 was not a very good movie, but with its exploding parakeet, gay subtext and S & M angle, it was at least trying something unusual! A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was more conventional but still weird and compelling, and was among the peak achievements in the 1980s makeup effects parade!

By the fourth one, the special effects had taken over, and Freddy Krueger himself had turned into a sort of Ronald McDonald of the subconscious! The young characters are there simply to dream and die, and while there’s some imagination shown in the oneiric sequences, more often they’re either recycled from past entries (the waterbed scene is too dedicated a callback to the Johnny Depp demise in the first movie) or, like the knife-glove shark fin, just too darn silly! And won’t Freddy ever shut up with his gags and puns?

No, he will not! And here’s what’s a little bizarre about the script, which is such a very bad script: it was put together by people like William Kotzwinkle, a novelist of whose work I’m fond - he wrote The Fan Man, Doctor Rat and Jack in the Box! Another writer on the project was Brian Helgeland, who later wrote the L.A. Confidential screenplay! And of course those Wheat brothers put a hand in, just as they did with The Fly II! And all this to create a screenplay of paper cutout people being sliced by a fedora-wearing dreamaniac!

The direction by Renny Harlin, who later brought us Cliffhanger, does the material no favours! Ha ha, it’s inexplicable to me that this somehow led directly to the big-budget shenanigans of Die Hard 2! Or maybe it led directly to The Adventures of Ford Fairlane; who knows? That it led to anything other than a career in direct-to-video horror sequels is extraordinary! There’s nothing frightening in the movie at all, nothing memorable (save maybe the bug arms), nothing transgressive or startling! And there’s nothing to distinguish it from A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, except that the fifth one might be even worse! (I haven’t seen The Dream Child since 1989 or whenever it was released, and after rewatching The Dream Master am in no great hurry to reacquaint myself with it!)

Ha ha, it’s not like me to be so negative about a picture, but this one rubbed me the wrong way somehow! I hate to see things squandered, I guess, and Wes Craven’s original conception is potentially a marvelous mine of horror gemstones! Renny Harlin and his motley band of scriptwriters leave those gems in the ground, and so I find myself in the unhappy position of giving A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master only one half of a tumbling tricycle!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street! (1984)

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!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors! (1987)

Ha, and again I say ha! It’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review another picture for you, and this time I thought it ought to be A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors! This was the first of the Freddy pictures I saw in the theatre – I had to sneak in, of course, because after all I was too young! – and I really had a spectacular time at the movies that night!

For that reason, and not so much because the movie is actually all that great, I think very fondly of the third Elm Street installment! It’s certainly better than A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, ha ha! It has a slick look, courtesy of DP Roy H. Wagner, that I consider the quintessential 80s horror cinematography! And it’s full to bursting with superb trick effects!

The story is pretty nonsensical though! It seems there is a group of youngsters living in a Bughouse For Troubled Teens because they’re all suffering from terrible nightmares of a hideous man in a striped sweater! Their doctor is Craig Wasson, from Ghost Story and Body Double, and, unsurprisingly, he’s no help at all! But with the arrival of a new psychiatrist, none other than Nancy from the first movie, there is finally some hope! They discover that Patricia Arquette, one of the troubled teens, has the special power of pulling people into her dreams when things get hairy! Ha ha, shades of Dreamscape, which Chuck Russell, the co-writer and director of this one, also had a hand in!

But in dreamsville this sorry lot all get superpowers for some reason, and that’s where the movie starts to get really silly! Ha ha, you expect a certain level of silly in these pictures, but there are subbasements of silly below that, grand levels of bushwa, that no grown man should have to tolerate! I’ll quote one line of dialogue, just to give you an idea: “In my dreams, I am the wizard master!” Yikes, ha ha!

But despite these magical dream warriors being part of the movie’s title, they actually don’t occupy much screen time, o blessed relief! It seems as though the filmmakers started to feel maybe a bit abashed at the nonsensicality of their motion picture, so pulled back from it a bit! Ha ha! But I’ll tell you this: they spared no effort in their trick effects! There some marvelous stop motion stuff – ha ha, they should still use that technique, because it looks great! – and of course plenty of tricky makeup! Some of the optical stuff is a bit fakey, but that’s okay!

The cast is an interesting one! Laurence Fishburne plays the orderly, and he’s solid as always; Jennifer Rubin, whom I’ve always liked, is one of the teens; and the guy who plays the big burly black teen, Kincaid, has the most non-threatening air about him you could imagine, though he’s supposed to be a tough young man! John Saxon returns, which is always nice to see! Craig Wasson is a strange case, because I’ve always felt there was a weird air about him! I know nothing about the man, but I have to say I just get a strange vibe! Maybe that just means he’s a really good actor, ha ha!

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think Nancy is a very good actor! She was a lot better in the first one, I thought! In this one – well, best not to look at it too closely! Ha ha, she was given a tough part to play (Doogie Howser meets Oliver Sacks, essentially!) and a lot of unspeakable dialogue, so it’s not all her fault! Anyway, she doesn’t ruin the movie, which is not scary or anything, but still sort of an enjoyable romp! I’m going to award it two popsicle stick houses!

Burl reviews A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge! (1985)

Hi, it’s Burl talking to you once again, and happy to be doing it! I’m here to take a look at another installment in a famous horror movie series, which is to say the Freddy Krueger pictures! This is the second of them, and most people you ask will tell you it’s the worst of the bunch!

Well, I’m not sure about that, but it’s probably the weirdest, and that in itself has value! Ha ha, they also say it’s the most homosexual of them all, and I guess that’s probably correct! Some people seem to think this is a bad thing, but I think there are surely enough gay horror movie lovers out there that it’s only right and proper that this constituency be recognized much better than they have been! Ha ha, probably all the horror franchises should have at least one overtly queer episode just to be fair about things! The Leprechaun one would be a particular gem, I’m sure!

The main character in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2 is Jesse, who has the double misfortune of having moved into Nancy’s house from the first picture, and having an unsympathetic dad played by the great Clu Gulager! We’re introduced to Jesse in a schoolbus sequence at the beginning of the movie, which we can immediately tell is a nightmare because in his own subconscious mind, Jesse is apparently a cringing geek!

When Jesse wakes up from this dream, and whenever he wakes up from any dream, and just at random moments throughout the movie, he lets out a piercing, girlish scream that seems dubbed in from one of Fay Wray’s more hysterical scenes! It seems that Freddy is trying to possess Jesse into committing his murders for him; left unexplained is why Freddy (who is referred to in this movie simply as Fred) wants to do the murders at all! In the first picture he had some fairly specific revenge in mind; in this one his mayhem is pretty random, despite the movie’s subtitle!

Everything in this movie is just slightly off, which you might think is because the filmmakers were so clever as to give their entire production an unreal, dreamlike atmosphere, but is actually because the script is simply nonsense! Freddy makes a parakeet explode in flames! Why? He attacks a pool party, revealing himself in an apparently corporeal form to dozens of people! How come? He is apparently able to be defeated by the love of a young Meryl Streep lookalike! Qhé?!?!

I also wonder how Robert Downey Jr.’s pal from Weird Science, once again playing a bullying sportsjock, becomes Jesse’s good friend all of a sudden! I guess it’s because they’re both subjected to the homoerotic attentions of Mr. Kuato, their coach! (And speaking of Mr. Kuato, there’s one shot in this movie where Freddy looks for all the world like that psychic homunculus of sci-fi fame!)

I realize logic is not what you look for in a movie like this, but consistency, along with excitement and scariness, would be nice! But ha ha, we get none of that! However, we do get the aforementioned Meryl Streep lookalike, who was pretty good in her role and reminded me not only of a young Meryl Streep, but of the female lead from The Outing! Ha ha, it would have been nice to get to know both those gals back in the day!

Anyway, some of the weirdness in this picture is enjoyable, like the exploding parakeet and the fact that Clu Gulager thinks it exploded because it was fed cheap birdseed! I give this sophomore stumble in the Freddy Krueger saga one and a half piercing shrieks!