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Friday in Gautham Part XI: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Look, I already wrote this essay, but this one is going to be a little different. When I originally wrote about Freddy vs. Jason, it was from the viewpoint of a Freddy Krueger fan who’d hardly seen any of the Friday the 13th movies. At this point, I’ve seen them all and feel a little more comfortable going into my thoughts on this movie in regards to Jason. If you haven’t already read my original (and I’ll say, for now, definitive) take on Freddy vs. Jason, click on the link and read it. It all still applies.
The Day
I like this version of Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) probably more than any other. I know that Friday the 13th fans (those poor souls who will admit to it) were outraged that Kane Hodder was not cast as Jason in this movie, even after it had looked like he would be. I know there are still people upset by this. Get over it. Ken Kirzinger’s Jason actually performs in this movie. One gets a sense of vulnerability even though Jason is still the cold-blooded, mindless killer who has been through ten (should I even count Jason X?) movies. And his size is quite imposing.
Not Kane Hodder, yet effective.
The movie has a silly basis and is fun. There are a few creepy parts (belonging to Freddy) but it’s really not scary. It’s gory, silly fun. Anyone going into a movie called Freddy vs. Jason wouldn’t want it any other way. In this movie, Jason is his normal force to be reckoned with. He stabs, crushes, beheads, impales, and slashes his way through the victims in this movie in the way he always had. If anything, this movie’s silliness allows it to be the goriest of all the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
There’s an attempt by the screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, and director Ronny Yu, to give both characters a little more background, and make them more human. In this case, it’s mostly Jason who gets the real winning treatment. Because Freddy is portrayed as a manipulative monster who is more than willing to torture any- and everyone, it falls on cold-blooded, murdering, mindless Jason to be the more “sympathetic” one. In some ways, it actually works.
Katharine Isabelle. All right, I mentioned her in the first Freddy vs. Jason essay I wrote for A Nightmare in Gautham. I think she’s beautiful.
Katharine… Yeah, I’m pretending that’s me.
The Night
The silliness is a cliché and wouldn’t it have been interesting if the filmmakers actually tried to make a genuinely scary movie? With the brute freight-train of Jason, and the psychological menace that is Freddy, the filmmakers could’ve really gone for the jugular with a movie in which no one is safe anywhere and in the end, the monsters fight for more than just survival (or the audience’s amusement). Just a thought.
That’s one way to lose…half the weight!
Jason’s wardrobe doesn’t match anything he’s worn before. That said, I like this outfit better than all the rest. Freddy’s wardrobe has also changed in its details, and that bothers me.
Jason is afraid of water. I understand that the filmmakers wanted to do something that would mess him up, to give Freddy an advantage over him, but a fear of water? This same character who has, time and again, walked willingly into Crystal Lake? Who boarded a ship going to New York City? Really? But…yeah…he’s afraid of water in this.
They might go a little too far…
Saturday the 14th
As I said in the other essay, Freddy vs. Jason is really Freddy’s movie. Jason has about as much screen time (and way more kills) but it’s really Jason in Freddy’s world. The last act of the movie takes place at Crystal Lake, but by then, Jason has terrorized Springwood and all the locales Nightmare on Elm Street fans know. While Jason is placed in a fairly sympathetic light, Freddy owns the movie. Maybe it’s because this was done by New Line Cinema but I think it boils down to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies show far more imagination than the Friday the 13th movies. In 10 movies, nearly every story involves Jason coming back and butchering people in various ways and in various locales. In seven movies, Freddy Krueger doesn’t kill as many people, but the deaths are far more memorable, as are the victims. By using the dreams and secrets of the teenagers Freddy haunts, he gives them a life that their waking interactions don’t in the weakest of the movies. With Jason, it’s just killing. This movie highlights those differences.
A sequel was proposed as New Line Cinema was looking into acquiring the Evil Dead franchise. Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash would’ve had the stars of this movie square off against Ash, presumably played by Bruce Campbell. The deal with the Evil Dead people fell through and New Line decided that remakes would be the best thing to utilize these characters.
I’m not opposed to remakes in general, especially if really good filmmakers are behind it….
Ooofah!
Ouch!
Oh! Pwned!
A Nightmare in Gautham: An Epilogue
Some of my Freddy collection.
I look at A Nightmare on Elm Street and its follow-ups as a huge piece of my childhood. You know my feelings on the movies, I spent enough time and energy on them, but I felt compelled to say a few more words on the Nightmare series before moving on.
New Line Cinema had a chance to create a horror film franchise that could actually maintain its scariness, in much the same way Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson would later do with Scream. They had a great villain and a great premise, all they needed was to understand what the nine-year-old in me, and those who have followed me this far along (and all the children in all the adults who are fans of series like this): You can’t do it for the money. Yes, you should be paid for it but the pay should be the frosting when it comes to art. Wes Craven made A Nightmare on Elm Street (and, I suspect, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) out of the compulsion/obsession to tell the story, and the love of storytelling and filmmaking, not out of the desire to get rich and famous. By focusing on telling a really good story, by hiring people who understood the possibilities of the horror story (someone like Frank Darabont, for example), the Nightmare movies could have been scary as hell and still would have made New Line Cinema money.
Still, Freddy Krueger haunts me. At least once a year since I saw the first movie I have a bad Freddy Krueger nightmare. Love it or hate it, these movies turned me onto horror, which led me to Stephen King, which led me to reading and writing, which led me to…you. The imagination was there and Star Wars and superheroes and action figures helped cultivate it, but Wes Craven’s child is what led me to the realization that I could do something with all these fears and anxieties I have. Sure, it was Stephen King’s prose and storytelling that turned me to the typewriter (and, eventually, the computer), but….
And I’m not the only one. A group of fans made a great documentary in 2010 called Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. It’s a huge documentary on the entire series, weighing in at about 4 hours, with lots of bonus stuff on disc 2. I highly recommend it. Anothe documentary I recommend is Heather Langenkamp’s own documentary I Am Nancy, in which she looks at fandom, the power of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, as well as the importance of the character she originated, Nancy Thompson. There’s a lot of heart in this documentary and it brought tears to my eyes, especially when a young woman in a wheelchair explains to Langenkamp how the character of Nancy has inspired her to keep going. Another highlight is an excellent interview with Wes Craven about the symbolism of Freddy and Nancy.
I feel like the guest who stays at the party too long, the person at the hair place who will not drop the topic even though it was over before it began. I hope that’s not the case. I also hope that if you’ve read this far, you’ve been entertained and perhaps have felt the desire to re-watch those movies. For those who give a damn about such things, here’s my Nightmare ranking list:
9. Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991, dir. Rachel Talalay)
8. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985, dir. Jack Sholder)
7. Freddy Vs. Jason (2003, dir. Ronny Yu)
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010, dir. Samuel Bayer)
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989, dir. Stephen Hopkins)
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988, dir. Renny Harlin)
3. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, dir. Chuck Russell)
2. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994, dir. Wes Craven)
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven)
Goodnight.
And, as my Dad used to say, happy dreams.
A Nightmare in Gautham 9: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010)
I believe I was still living in Boston–or about to move to Boston, anyway–when the news hit that Michael Bay’s production company was going to try its hand at remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street. I want to note right here at the beginning that I am not totally against remakes. There have been fine remakes over time. The Wizard of Oz (1939) was a remake from the original silent version (Pamela disagrees with me on this, since one had sound and one didn’t; but back then it probably didn’t matter to the person bitching about it). Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston was a remake. The Man Who Knew Too Much with James Stewart, directed by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, was a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much by a young British director named Alfred Hitchcock. David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly. The most recent version of Dawn of the Dead. Stephen King said that the a few years ago remake of The Last House on the Left was one of the ten best films of 2009 (I haven’t seen it, but will). No, I wasn’t against anyone remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street, I was against Michael Bay, Brad Fuller, and Andrew Form doing so.
They’d produced the remake of The Amityville Horror, which I thought was horrendous. I didn’t see any of their other remakes because they just looked…well…bad. I respect Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it’s not a favorite movie. Friday the 13th has never done much for me. But A Nightmare on Elm Street…well, that was another story. If you’ve been following my Nightmare in Gautham series, you know why. I had always sort of fantasized about someone who got the possibilities of the mythology of Nightmare, who understood that Freddy Krueger was as much metaphor as slasher monster, someone who knew how to get under people’s skins and create a beautiful shot would step up to the plate and take it over. Better than that, I would have loved for Warner Bros. through New Line to return to Wes Craven and see if he wanted to try to redo it with a larger budget and better effects. Even better than that, I fantasized that my writing would become huge, that the movie studios would call and ask, “What do you want to do?” and my answer would be, “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
But Platinum Dunes with Michael Bay, the creative genius who directed the crapfest known as The Transformers, was the guy who got the glove. I was nervous.
Then came news that Samuel Bayer, who’d directed Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (which always reminded me of a horror movie), had been tapped to make his feature film directorial debut with this movie. Interesting choice, but maybe….
Then came news that Jackie Earle Haley had signed on to play Freddy. Now my interest was piqued. I hadn’t seen him in anything but had heard enough about his performances. As time passed, I saw two of his most recent big roles. First I saw The Watchmen on DVD. Haley is the best part of the movie. Then I saw Little Children, where his performance was great. Yeah, I got jazzed for the new Nightmare.
As I saw more and more about it in the months leading up to the 2010 release, my interest grew more and more. That was when I originally wrote the Nightmare in Gautham series, fueled mainly by anticipation (not to mention ideas that had run through my head for decades).
So the Sunday morning of May 5th, 2010, Pamela and I went to a local movie theater for a private screening. Actually, it wasn’t meant to be a private screening, but Pamela and I were the only two people in the theater. I guess no one wants to go to see a horror movie at 10:20 on a Sunday morning. Yeah, my wife loves me. The movie was done by noon and we went for pizza afterward. That night, I wrote the first version of the following essay.
I have seen the remake/reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) only one other time. I think that tells you something.
This is as creepy as Freddy gets in this movie, and I’m pretty sure this is cut.
The Dreams
Some of the actors playing the central characters. Rooney Mara as Nancy Holbrook. She had a strong personality and isn’t too bad as Nancy. My biggest complaint about her character is that it takes the audience too long to get to know her and then doesn’t give her as much to do as she deserves. In the years since, Mara was in The Social Network and was the titular character in the U.S. version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She brings a frankness and intensity to Nancy that the other characters lack. The same could be said about Kyle Gallner as Quentin and Katie Cassidy as Kris. I thought both were pretty good in the movie but neither were given much to do. The stand-out performances came from the adults, Connie Britton (though this didn’t show her range like Nashville does), Clancy Brown, and even Jackie Earle Haley as pre-burn Freddy.
Do something already.
Some of Samuel Bayer’s visuals. This movie is miles above some of the visual styles in the later Nightmare sequels, though with all the talk in the interviews about how “beautiful” the movie is, there could have been more from him. There have been some internet reports that there were clashes between Bayer and the producers and I wonder how much that had to do with it. Still, the film was pretty solid visually.
Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger. I write this with some reservations. He was, physically, a good match for Freddy. Also, the dude is creepy without makeup, so in the makeup he was able to go a little further. Freddy’s anger and rage came through quite clearly and it was Haley’s performance more than anything that helped with that. Of course, the strongest part of his performance had been seen last year in the teaser trailer, which features Freddy running from the Elm Street parents and eventually getting burned alive.
Again with the jacket…
The feeling of the movie. I was actually pretty tense during most of the movie the first time I saw it in 2010 (for the record, Pamela didn’t feel the same way; she disagreed with me, “I was never scared or even startled, mostly because they showed it all in the promotional stuff and because the movie was just not scary”). Upon watching it again, the tension that the film brings has little to do with the story but more to do with the anticipation that something is going to happen, some sort of boo! More on this later.
The final battle between Nancy and Freddy. The creepiness of Freddy tormenting Nancy on her bed with her unable to move was a nice touch. The rage that Haley brought to Freddy and Mara’s perseverance in battling him gave the movie a harder edge. Rooney Mara nearly matches Heather Langenkamp’s resolve, but without the silly Wile E. Coyote gimmickry. It’s not perfect, and has some terrible missteps, but overall in enjoyable.
The Nightmares
Freddy’s new personality is a little stale. Haley wasn’t bad with the lines (“Talk about a wet dream,” for instance) and some of the other Freddy things he did; licking Nancy’s face when they are outside the preschool; the scene at the end when Nancy is in the little girl dress on her bed and Freddy is taunting her; these are some of the good things about the new Freddy, but he doesn’t have the bad-ass strut he once did or that defiant stance that fucked with his victim. In other words, some of the things that made Freddy what he was is missing. It would’ve been a bad idea for Haley try to mimic Robert Englund’s performance, but you’ve got one of the coolest weapons in cinema history on your hand, and all you do is scrape pipes and the walls with it, and sometimes flicker the fingers? Sometimes Freddy limps. Sometimes not. Also, he just doesn’t fuck with the victims enough, and he barely takes joy in it when he does. In the attempt to take Freddy away from the clown he had become, they made him a little too serious.
The Freddy makeup. The decision to go with more realistic burns was an error. What made Freddy’s burns scary in the original series was that they were kind of fantastic, not all that realistic. They were creepy in the dark, they were creepy in the light, they were creepy from afar, and they were creepy up close. The makeup in 2010 Nightmare looks too similar to that of real-life burn victims and becomes unsettling in a way that the filmmakers probably didn’t intend. And unless the camera is close-up, you really can’t tell what’s going on with Freddy’s face. He looks like a strange meatball with a body. Haley also wore contact lenses, one that was milky-gray, again, like a real burn victim might have. Robert Englund (mostly) didn’t wear lenses which helped give Freddy character. You never see the glee Freddy has taunting his victims because the eyes are hollow.
The soulless look doesn’t work for me.
The CGI wall. It didn’t work in the commercials or in the movie. The $1.98 version in the original still creeps me out. This one made me roll my eyes and shake my fist at the screen.
The plot holes. The Elm Street parents never had any evidence that Freddy hurt their children, yet they track him down and burn him alive. The thing that made Wes Craven’s original so chilling was that the justice system failed the parents, so they then took the law into their own hands. I would think that with the Tea Party out there saying that people need to take their government back, with people like O.J. Simpson getting off a murder rap, that the twenty-first century Nightmare would eat that shit up. But no, the parents take the five-year-olds’ word that Freddy the gardener had done something bad to them and then go cook the guy. Quentin was shocked at this, and so was I. It doesn’t make sense.
Then when Nancy and Quentin go to the old preschool where Freddy had done some bad stuff to them as children, it’s pretty apparent the place has been closed down for a while. They break in, see how it has been vandalized over the years, go into the basement…and find Freddy’s little home, dusty, filled with cobwebs, but still there. How do they know? Why, because of the fingerknives lying on the workshop table. Yeah, so, all the parents pull their kids out of the preschool, the gardener disappears, the place closes down, and no one cleans the fucker out? I would understand if Freddy’s secret room were still there, untouched, with the pictures of Nancy and his Dark Knight clown mask on the wall, but the living quarters? Really? Which leads me to:
The past. Freddy Krueger was the gardener living in the basement of the preschool. Yeah. In the early 1990s, after Adam Walsh and all those other happenings in the world, would a preschool allow a gardener to live in its basement? And if it did, would a good parent send their child there? And even if one parent did, would others? It doesn’t make sense. There is no logic, which is scarce in this movie (remember, Michael Bay’s name is attached).
So in the past, the kids go home with cuts on them and tell their parents about going into “the special cave” where, it’s hinted at, Freddy molests the kids. However, he doesn’t seem to kill any of the kids. So when Craven was making the original, they dropped the molester part and for this one, they drop the killing part. All right…when Marge Thompson tells Nancy in the original that Freddy was “a filthy child murderer,” the audience understands what filthy means. But if this Freddy isn’t a killer, why fashion the glove? Because of all the things wrong with Krueger’s mind, he isn’t stupid. So he’s going to do bad things to the kids and cut them and expect the parents to never find out?
Nancy Holbrook had repressed memories. All right, I diggit. Nancy Thompson and all their friends do, too. Huh? That was always a plot point that stuck in my craw, from Craven’s masterpiece to this movie. Now, I have a very good memory. I remember being five years old in kindergarten, and four years old before it. Like the guy who knocked me into the snow as he was walking by carrying a shotgun after an argument with his girlfriend. I can remember that day very well. I also remember at two years old stepping on a large, black thumbtack-thing that lodged itself into the center of my foot. I still hate going barefoot. But Nancy, Nancy, Tina, Kris, Glen, Quentin, Rod, and Jesse can’t remember their peers either disappearing or themselves being molested by someone they seemed to love? One of them repressing the memory, sure, but all of them? I don’t know.
Another story issue concerns the Elm Street kids. Nancy, Kris, Jesse, Quentin, and Dean are all aware of each other and are all friendly, but they aren’t friends. The movie opens with Dean, who’s been having nightmares. We even see a bit of one. Kris comes to the diner where Nancy works (only for this scene) and Quentin and Jesse are eating. Jesse and Kris have recently broken up and Quentin and Nancy eye each other. This is pretty much what this version of A Nightmare on Elm Street does to introduce and build characters. By the end of the scene, Dean is dead. Kris believes in Freddy right away, and tells Jesse this at Dean’s funeral. Jesse tells her that nothing is going on when Nancy approaches them and tells Kris she believes her. Jesse tells Nancy to fuck off. We then spend more time following Kris, who seems like an over-privileged girl than her 1984 counterpart, Tina. Kris is the Janet Leigh of this film, just as Tina was in her version, only Kris is devoid of any real character. Even the sadness inherent to Tina’s life with her mother who went away for the night with her boyfriend is gone: Kris’s mother is a flight attendant who’s leaving for a bit. By the time Nancy becomes the star, we still don’t know her, because no one is really talking to her. Still, Jesse goes to see her after Kris’s death. After Jesse dies, Quentin informs her that he died in his sleep, though anyone in the jail who found his mangled body would believe otherwise. Again, there is no logic, and there certainly isn’t any characterization.
Because these Elm Street kids aren’t friends, we never learn who they are, and we never care who they are. The second half of the movie, which focuses on Nancy and Quentin in their search to uncover the truth about Freddy, almost reach a level where one may care about them. Almost.
Who are you? Who cares? And Rod Lane never wore guyliner.
The use of the quick extreme close-up and Freddy turning his head. It’s used too much. In a promotional video for this movie that is on the DVD of The Final Destination, they show Kris in her attic with a flashlight. The beam goes over some boxes, one of which has an old fedora on it, and when the beam slips back, the hat is an inch higher and Freddy is peeking at her. She screams and I screamed when I saw it on YouTube. They replaced this creepy moment with Freddy’s face coming at the screen quickly, like those internet videos meant to scare people. A genuinely creepy moment replaced with an internet scare. Nice.
Lack of internal logic. I know I’ve mentioned this several times already, but it’s really bad. Nothing really makes sense, and not in a nightmare-come-to-life kind of way, either. By making this new Freddy not kill the children, they remove the need for the glove. By making him a gardener that lives on the premises of a daycare/preschool, they remove the very real fact that parents would not have allowed that by the 1990s. By having the kids not be friends, they remove any pathos or empathy from the viewer. The story falls flat because the characters are as bad as some from the worst sequels.
The Morning After
In the grand scheme of Nightmare movies, I rank the remake between Dream Warriors and The Dream Master in terms of direction and feel and between The Dream Master and The Dream Child for Freddy, but overall, it’s just above Freddy’s Revenge and Freddy’s Dead. During the pre-movie press, Platinum Dunes and New Line kept forcing every person who had anything to do with this movie to say the movie was a re-imagining but it feels more like a lame sequel. Also, the movie just isn’t scary. Well, not in the way I thought the original was.
Overall, this Nightmare doesn’t do it for me. When I first saw it, I liked it well enough, but time and a second viewing have changed my mind. I don’t like it, because it feels devoid of the very things that made me love the original and its sequels. I’m not against remaking Freddy or the Nightmare on Elm Street series (I even have a great idea for a reboot…one that people I’ve told it to have actually been surprised by), but this one is weak at best, and flimsy the rest of the time.
Freddy vs. Freddy. Why isn’t that glove out and an odd angle? Dude, you’re Freddy-fuckin’-KRUEGER!
A Nightmare in Gautham 8: FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)
If you’re reading this (especially if you’ve read all the essays I’ve written about Freddy Krueger) then you are probably well schooled on the Nightmare movies. You’re also probably well aware of how New Line Cinema and Sean S. Cunningham wanted to put Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees together since about 1985 or so. First, Paramount Pictures had the rights to Friday the 13th and Jason and was willing to pay to “rent” Freddy Krueger for a team-up. New Line said no. Then, after Freddy’s Dead came and went, New Line got the rights to Jason and was finally ready to do the team-up. They even hinted at the idea in 1993 when Cunningham and New Line Cinema put out Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. The movie ends with Jason’s hockey mask lying on the dirt, the monster having finally been destroyed, when all of a sudden–Boo!–Freddy-fucking-Krueger’s gloved hand erupts from the ground, grabs Jason’s mask, and pulls it underground with a poor attempt at the famous Freddy laugh (upon rewatching this clip on YouTube, it doesn’t appear the filmmakers used a soundclip of Robert Englund’s laugh). This time it was Wes Craven who stopped the project with a better idea: New Nightmare.
Hell is so hot that Freddy’s knives become soft, note how they bend.
Time passed, scripts were written, passed on, written and rewritten, and passed on, et cetera and so on until, somehow, the final script for Freddy Vs. Jason by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift was agreed upon and director Ronny Yu was hired to direct.
For me, 2003 was an interesting year. I made my first professional sale to Borderlands 5 (which features a story by David J. Schow, who wrote one of the early scripts for this movie) along with some smaller press stuff. My first marriage also hit the skids this year. The summer of 2003 was a soul-searching one for me, trying to figure out what to do with the marriage, my heart no longer in it, worrying about my five-year-old daughter, worrying about how I was going to move on. I had gone back to college to finish my degree and life was rapidly moving and I was terrified. On August 15th, nine days before I would turn twenty-six, I went to the local movie theater alone, sat in the middle of the back row, and awaited for one of my childhood “friends” to return after a too-long (and yet not long enough) absence.
There was almost no one in the theater with me when three people came in, two guys and a young woman. Of all the empty seats in the theater, they chose to sit next to me. I pegged the young woman to be in her early-twenties, only a few years younger than me, and the guys in their mid-to-late-teens. My guess was older sister bringing younger brother to the R-rated movie, but I’m probably wrong.
I’m a pretty quiet person when I’m with people I don’t know. I’m extremely shy and suffer from social anxiety (whee!) so I didn’t make any small talk with the young woman or the guys, just moved my legs so they could get by me. The young woman turned to me, though, and said how she loved the “Freddy movies” (a term I hate) and the “Jason movies” (another despised term). I said that I was a Freddy fan (sans “movie” after “Freddy” you should note) as well but had never really gotten into the Friday the 13th movies.
“So,” she said as the lights dimmed for the previews. “Do you think this movie will be a good movie?”
I gave her my best Harrison Ford half-smile and said, “Silence of the Lambs was a good horror movie. I’ll be happy if this is fun.”
She nodded and the previews began, and then the movie. I believe she said goodbye on the way out. I was just happy that the movie was fun.
The movie got bad reviews and good box office, which is no surprise.
Before we go any further, I feel that I should mention my knowledge on the Friday the 13th movies, or rather, my lack of knowledge. I have seen almost all of them, except Jason X and the Platinum Dunes remake from a year or two ago, only one time each. I can remember that Mom is the killer in the first, Jason wears a potato sack in the second, then the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth run together. I know that Corey Feldman is in one of them, and another has an older version of his character played by another actor. I faintly recall watching one called The New Blood, about a psychic girl, and then watching Jason Takes Manhattan (one of them had a girl who wanted to be a writer and her mother or father gave her a nice pen that was once used, they tell her, by Stephen King). I remember watching Jason Goes To Hell because Fangoria had reported the shot of Freddy’s hand grabbing the hockey mask (I also seem to remember enjoying it in the way one enjoys a bad horror flick). As I said, though, I’m more of a Freddy guy. Be warned that before going the rest of the way.¹
Yeah! Fuck you, Jason!
The Dreams
Freddy’s back. Robert Englund’s return as Freddy Krueger was, despite the clown he had become in the last few movies before New Nightmare, good. In the opening scenes of Freddy Vs. Jason, you know that Freddy is being brought back a bit to his darker roots. The makeup job is reminiscent of the makeup for The Dream Master. His sweater is darker, the glove looks different, and I daresay this version of Freddy looks the most like Robert Englund, but it’s fun to watch him again. Englund is able to channel Freddy’s darker ways in this movie, while still being able to deliver the one-liners and silliness he had also become known for. Perhaps the nine-year rest was helpful for him. Perhaps the very situation was helpful for this audience member.
I daresay the sweater is too dark and the glove looks yellow instead of brown.
Anytime two horror icons meet onscreen, there is a sense that the movie involving them doesn’t need to be serious. The idea of one of them existing is silly but we accept it for the sake of the movie, that whole willing suspension of disbelief thing. The idea of two of them existing in the same world and ready to fight each other is preposterous yet we anxiously pay our money down and go in to watch the fight. Robert Englund–who had made a second career being the burlesque Freddy on talk shows, at conventions, and on MTV–is able to do his shtick while not offending moviegoers expecting the horror movie to be scary.
This movie’s version of pre-burn Freddy is also the best version caught on film. The version shown on the premiere episode of Freddy’s Nightmares–A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series (the episode is called “No More Mr. Nice Guy” and was written by Michael DeLuca, the hack who co-wrote the screenplay for Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare) and the version shown in Freddy’s Dead are not really that interesting or scary. This time, he is creepy and Englund relishes the role. Also, it seems director Yu seems to know how to use Freddy in an interesting way, though not always greatly.
With the exception of “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” all the other Freddy death scenes have him wearing a jacket but no hat. If he’s wearing a jacket, why doesn’t the jacket appear when he comes back as a ghost to haunt his victims?
Ignoring Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was a wise choice. This movie takes place within the continuity of the Nightmare series pre-New Nightmare, even taking into account the THE WORST NIGHTMARE MOVIE Freddy’s Dead. (I suppose it also takes place within the Friday the 13th universe, though I don’t know it well enough to say for sure). It doesn’t make for a better movie, but one that is easier to digest. You know, for a bad horror movie.
Katharine Isabelle. All right, I just like her. She was Ginger in Ginger Snaps, one of the best horror movies of the last decade. I wish she’d been given a better part, but I was happy to see her in this movie.
I wonder if the red baseball cap is homage to the girl with the red baseball cap in DePalma’s Carrie or if they were just afraid no one would tell the difference between Isabelle and Monica Keene.
The Freddy versus Jason fights. There are several fights between the two headliners. The first happens in Jason’s dream and Freddy kicks his ass. It turns silly when Freddy uses the Force to throw Jason all around, yet it’s entertaining enough. I mean, if you’ve paid to see a movie called Freddy Vs. Jason, then you have to expect some silliness. The second–and final–fight happens for most of the end of the movie at Camp Crystal Lake. Lori (Monica Keena) and Will (Jason Ritter, son of the late John Ritter, one of my favorite actors, who died less than a month after this movie’s opening) have figured out that they can pull Freddy out of the nightmare (sort of like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy’s Dead) and then maybe Freddy and Jason will kill each other. They fight at a construction site, in an old cabin, and on a dock. In other words, they’re fighting for a good portion of the movie and it’s worth every penny of the too-high movie ticket. It is stupid, mindless, andgory cartoon violence…and it is exactly what the audience paid to see.
Freddy discovers Jason’s deepest fear is…water, thereby ignoring all the times Jason was in water without issue during his series of movies.
The Nightmares
The teens/victims in this are all right but aren’t very interesting. As a matter of fact, none of the characters in this movie are interesting. While the attempt to give the audience a story that is more than just two monsters beating the shit out of each other is welcome, and the story is okay–a typical slasher movie at best–the actors just aren’t that interesting. Monica Keena, Jason Ritter, Kelly Rowland, Katharine Isabelle, and all the rest do their best with what they’re given (and with what talent they have), but they’re boring. Maybe a better script or a better director could have helped them, but the characters leave a lot to be desired.
The slow-motion in this movie is fucking annoying. I don’t remember either series having many slow-motion shots, but Ronny Yu seems to love them. I didn’t remember there being that many slo-mo shots until watching the movie again a few years ago. It detracted from the movie for me. Slo-mo is a handy effect when used properly but Yu uses the effect like a kid who has just hit puberty and has discovered his dad’s dirty magazines, he can’t stop doing it. One time, okay. Twice? Well… But by the third time (and there are more than three times slow-motion is used in Freddy Vs. Jason), give it a rest or you’ll hurt yourself.
The character of Bill. He’s so bad, that I gave him his own category. Played by Kyle Labine, Bill is a rip-off (homage?) to Jay (Jason Mewes) from Jay and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith). It’s a blatant rip-off and stops the movie dead in its tracks. Even the character’s death is lame, which leads us to–
The CGI worm. I’m not against CGI like some people seem to be. Practical effects are great, but CGI is fine when used wisely. While the character Bill (Kyle Labine) gets high in Westin Hills (see Dream Warriors and The Dream Child) Freddy comes to him as some sort of caterpillar monster thing (with red-and-green stripes, of course) with a hookah/bong á la Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The caterpillar takes a toke as Bill is doing the typical “Yeeah, duude,” thing, then blows the smoke in Bill’s face. Now, the merging of Freddy with Alice² and naming a character Bill all in one scene should be a wet dream for me, right?
Drug use, bad acting, and bad CGI combine to deliver another classic Freddy moment.
Wrong. See, there’s one element to the scene that baffles me: the drug use. It baffles me on several levels. One, you and your friends are in mortal danger, you have all broken into this institution to steal an experimental dream suppressant (again, from Dream Warriors…it’s been experimental since 1987…say, wha–?) and, for reasons of plot convenience, have all separated. You are alone and to curb your anxiety, you decide to toke up a spliff. Huh? I mean, I know addiction can be a bitch, but really? Two, I’ve never been high. Or drunk, for that matter. I have no interest in getting high so drug humor sometimes escapes me. Now, I know that I’m the Odd Man Out on that count, but I really have to question the rationale behind having a character getting high in the middle of a covert operation that could land him in jail, not to mention the dude in the hockey mask trying to kill everyone who’s awake and the burned hombre in the Christmas sweater trying to get you in your sleep. But there the character is, getting high, and seeing a poorly animated Freddy caterpillar.
The Freddy caterpillar blows the smoke into Bill’s face which makes Bill see weird shit that makes him throw out the experimental drug. Then he looks up and there’s the Freddy caterpillar on the ceiling. It then drops down onto Bill and pushes itself down his throat. And now Freddy has possessed him. Wow, bad CGI and bad writing! Will wonders ever cease…?
The overall use of CGI in this movie is annoying. There’s just too much for no real reason, and it’s all bad. At least try to make it look as good as a movie by George Lucas or James Cameron.
1428 Elm Street is a totally different house. The first two Nightmare movies as well as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare used the same house in L.A., 1428 North Genesee Avenue. From Dream Warriors through Freddy’s Dead, a set was constructed for the haunted house version. This movie was shot in Canada (mostly British Columbia) and used a house that almost looks like the original, but not quite. It’s a small thing, but….
The Morning After
The filmmakers and the studio put just enough thought into Freddy Vs. Jason to make it sustainable for a 97 minute runtime. Even at just over an hour and a half, it’s too long by about fifteen minutes. This is a modern version of the classic monster duo movies and, like the 1980s movies that inspire it, it’s silly, gory, and devoid of any social merit. It works by combining some of the best elements of the Nightmare films and adding Jason. And that’s the thing with this movie, despite sharing the billing, Freddy is the star, outshining the other monster in this film in every way.
Freddy versus whom?
This makes sense. The Nightmare movies, for all their unnecessary killings, at least have imagination. The Friday movies (not the ones with Ice Cube) never did. While the first movie is a mystery filled with gory deaths and no characters that one can truly care about, the movies that followed didn’t even have a mystery element to it. They were all movies about a zombie killing teenagers with a machete and other tools. Freddy is the dominant personality. He’s interesting. He’s imaginative even if the end result isn’t.
Freddy is also more of the villain of the movie. While Jason definitely has some kills and isn’t someone these fresh-faced kids would have over for tea, Jason’s story is far more tragic. Jason is a victim seeking revenge for what happened to him and his mother. Freddy was a perverted murderer who pretty much got what he would’ve received had he not been let out of jail on that technicality. Jason is evil because of his own stupidity. Freddy is evil because it’s fun for him.
Essentially, Freddy Vs. Jason is a waste of time and money. Yes, it is the culmination of many schoolyard arguments over twenty years. Yes, I had fun when I saw it. Yes, I own a copy on DVD. But it’s a waste. The horror story they attempt to tell is only there to justify the movie’s runtime and ultimately fails because you never care about the possible victims thereby subtracting any horror. The reason you don’t care is because you didn’t pay to see Monica Keena or Jason Ritter or the chick from Destiny’s Child (one of the ones who isn’t Beyoncé), you paid to see Freddy and Jason beat the piss out of each other, and on that level, the movie delivers. In the end, though, Freddy Vs. Jason is the bastard of a hundred maniacs. It is a 97-minute essay on why the 1980s horror balloon popped. Too much focus on the dollar, not enough on imagination.
Jason and Freddy holding each other’s junk.
___________________________________________
¹ I wrote this paragraph in 2010 and decided to leave it. My experience with the Friday the 13th movies has grown some. Last year, I began to watch them back-to-back. Unfortunately, I only got to the fourth one when Netflix suddenly stopped shipping them. It’s my intention to finish watching them this year and do a series of essays, like this series, either later this year or sometime next year.
² My novella, Alice on the Shelf, was first written in November/December 2003 based on a dream I had September 12, 2003–the day that I learned of John Ritter’s death. After many rewrites over the seven years, Alice on the Shelf was released in 2011. At one time, I would have casted Katharine Isabelle in the role of Miranda/Alice. Weird how it all comes together, huh?
A Nightmare in Gautham 7: WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994)
I was probably a junior in high school when I first read that New Line Cinema was going to not only bring Freddy back from the dead but that none other than Wes Craven would return to rebirth Freddy. I was excited, albeit skeptical. I hadn’t been a huge fan of Craven’s post-A Nightmare on Elm Street movies Shocker and The People Under the Stairs but was hopeful that he would be able to rejuvenate Freddy. I was a senior by the time the movie was released.
I loved it.
I left the theater with a bounce in my step. Not only had Craven rethought Freddy and Nightmare but he made a movie that was more than a sequel. It was a film on its own; one didn’t need to have seen any of the Nightmare movies in order to understand and enjoy this movie, yet, knowing at least the first movie helped this one. Also understanding where Freddy went wrong enhanced the telling.
Unfortunately, despite some of the best reviews that any of the previous Nightmares received, New Nightmare hardly found an audience (if memory serves, I was the only person in the theater; or perhaps one of two or three people). The film was released amid very little fanfare and disappeared quickly. Except for the horror magazines like Fangoria and the Fred-heads (again with that silly term!), New Nightmare may as well not have happened. Except…in the years since its release, it seems to have found its audience.
The Dreams
Wes Craven’s return. For real this time. The legend is, this was the first idea Craven pitched in 1985/6 for Nightmare 3, a sort of behind-the-scenes/Freddy comes to haunt the filmmakers story and New Line Cinema passed. I can’t say that I blame them and while I’m sure it would have been an interesting movie, it probably wouldn’t have had the power that the movie did in 1994, ten years after Freddy’s debut. Craven, who’d had some ups (The Serpent and the Rainbow) and some downs (the aforementioned movies) after the original Nightmare, seemed to be ready to explore the idea of Freddy Krueger and what his (Krueger’s) success meant more than to make another Nightmare. He also seems to be as interested in the storytelling process and what the horror film means as he is to scare the shit out of you. So his script and his direction bring us a Nightmare like no other. This is a master at work, folks.
Heather Langenkamp shows Wes Craven some love. Or she’s thankful for the work after Just the Ten of Us.
Craven’s story for this movie is one of my favorites. By moving outside of the continuity (ha!) of the previous movies, he is able to dissect 1) Why the hell is Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare movies so popular? 2) Do horror movies affect their audience and if so, how? 3) For the filmmakers of such movies, where does the line between fantasy and reality lie or is it blurry? 4) Do horror stories serve a purpose other than a) making a quick buck for their producers, b) to scare people, c) giving a hard-on to immature assholes who think it’s cool to watch people die gruesomely in movies? These are questions I believe all creators must ask themselves if they write scary stories. And like other creative people, Craven uses his art to look at these things. Stephen King has surely done it in almost every story he’s written that has a writer as the main character, though the most successful King writers are Paul Sheldon from Misery, Thad Beaumont from The Dark Half, Mike Noonan from Bag of Bones, and Stephen King from The Dark Tower. With New Nightmare, Craven has done the cinematic version of this.
Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and Robert Englund. These three returning to the Nightmare playing themselves is great fun. Only an idiot would believe that the lives of these three are so intertwined that they are all so buddy-buddy, yet their acting is so good you do believe it. I’m sure that these three actors truly do have admiration for each other as well as a friendly relationship, but I don’t know that I buy Langenkamp and Saxon chilling in the park, talking about life while Langenkamp’s son is playing. The performances have me buy it for the movie, though, each time I see it. Langenkamp’s performance trumps either of her earlier Elm Street efforts. The decade between the first movie and this one (and a better director than the third movie’s) brings out a performance that should have gotten her more parts in good movies. Saxon plays himself restrained and understanding, the fatherly friend we all hope to know. Englund’s turn as the uber-celebrity of the series is both hilarious and understated. I should note that the acting by the New Line execs as themselves, as well as Wes Craven as himself, are all pretty good (although Robert Shaye is pretty bad, but in a good way, this time).
Heather talks to Robert Englund (note the Fred-heads in the background) after a Freddy talk show appearance. John Saxon and Langenkamp share a moment in the park as Saxon plays the father figure.
Robert Englund as “Freddy Krueger.” All right, he’s really not Freddy this time. He’s Freddy in one appearance at a talk show where Langenkamp is being interviewed, dancing around and doing the Freddy The Clown shtick. The demon that has taken the form of Freddy, though, is good. The new makeup is a streamlined, enhanced version of the burns that Freddy sported throughout the main series, though here is a more artistic rendering. The muscles underneath the broken flesh have lines coming from a center point and look unnatural and cool. The contacts that keep the entire eye white except for the tiny black pupils are creepy and work. The turtleneck sweater, leather pants, knee-high boots, and trench coat that are all tight around the Demon-Freddy’s more muscular body works. The muscular body, for that matter, works. And, of course, the claw fashioned after the claw on the poster of A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with a thumb knife gives the final touch. This is a Freddy who wants to kill you. He’ll have a smartass line (I don’t want to use one-liner), but he’s really more about chopping you up.
Freddy!
The funeral scene. After Heather’s husband Chase (David Newsom) dies in an “automobile accident” (he fell asleep at the wheel), there’s a funeral with Heather, her son (Miko Hughes), the babysitter Julie (Tracy Middendorf), John Saxon, and Robert Englund all in attendence. Also in attendance is Wes Craven, the people from New Line, and several cast members from the previous Nightmares. Again, it’s unrealistic that this would actually happen, yet it’s a great touch to the fantasy of the piece. Craven has given us in this scene (as well as the examples I wrote of before) what many people believe happens in Hollywood. Everyone knows each other and they’re all friends. The sweep of the mourners is so quick, you really have to be paying attention to see Jsu Garcia, Tuesday Knight, and others in the crowd.
The style of the movie. The real world scenes of the film are shot in a documentary style that compliments the story and the nightmares are more cinematic. The cinematography of the movie is strong and the special effects are good, utilizing everything that was available in 1994.
The ending. About halfway through the movie, Heather is reading Hansel & Gretel to her son Dylan (Miko Hughes) and she gets to the where the children throw the witch into her own oven. The story gets graphic and, considering the hellish few days the two have been through, Heather decides it’s too much and stops the story. Dylan grabs her arm and says, “No, Mommy. Keep reading.”
“But, Dylan, honey,” Heather says. “It’s too much right now and besides, you already know how it ends.”
“But, Mommy, I have to hear Hansel and Gretel get away.”
Heather might think Hansel & Gretel are scary but I need to ask: What about that Humpty Dumpty lamp?
I’m paraphrasing but it goes along those lines. This is brilliant. Most people who watch/read horror stories want the heroes to survive and the monster killed. When a book like Cujo comes along, or Darabont’s adaptation of The Mist, where tragedy seems to win (even though the monsters, for the most part, do not), they get upset. Yet, those same viewers will often be happy when Carrie’s hand pops from the grave for one last Boo!, as Brian DePalma and his screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen have happen in the film version of Carrie. This sort of Boo! has become a staple of the horror film and was forced upon Wes Craven during the shooting of A Nightmare on Elm Street. What this essentially tells the viewer is, “Yes, you’re safe for now, but this monster is still alive and is going to come back.” Perhaps it’s a means of saying that evil never dies and tragedy never ceases, or perhaps it’s a mistake because, essentially, there’s never any closure.
The ending of New Nightmare does no such thing. The ending has Hansel & Gretel get back home, so to speak. There is no Boo!, just a FADE OUT as Heather and Dylan read a screenplay they find on the bedroom floor after their final confrontation with Freddy. The screenplay is called Wes Craven’s New Nightmare by Wes Craven. Perhaps Craven has a point here.
A proper ending to a Nightmare.
The Nightmares
Miko Hughes as Dylan Porter, aka. Heather Langenkamp’s fake son. Miko Hughes started playing Creepy Kids pretty young, as the ill-fated Gage Creed in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Here he plays another Creepy Kid. I’m not against Hughes as a young actor–the boy was cute and seemed to have some talent–but I’m afraid Craven made a fundamental mistake that many movies make with their children in movies like this: the kid is creepy! It’s not because he’s taping knives to his fingers and swiping at his mother, or foaming at the mouth, or seemingly channeling Freddy, but that he looks doped most of the time.
The acceptable kind of creepy for a horror movie.
Well, he hasn’t had much sleep because of his nightmares, one can argue. True that (I’m so gangsta sometimes I gotta check myself befo’ I wreck myself), but I’ve dealt with a child who has had little sleep and catatonia isn’t in the cards, not in the few days this story takes place. The kid lost his father, though, Bill! I know, but the kid is four/five-years-old. I’m pretty sure that he wouldn’t be so out of it. I may be wrong (and I’m sure you’ll let me know), but that’s what I’m thinking. The Creepy Kid thing is something that bothers me in movies and someday perhaps I’ll write an essay about it, but I’ll leave poor Miko Hughes (whom I’ll still quote, “I played with Mo-ommy and I played with Ju-udd, now I wanna play with yoou!”) alone here and say that a better performance could have been gotten from him. He has some very good moments in New Nightmare, but the majority of his part bothers me.
The unacceptable kind of creepy.
Johnny Depp was never asked to appear in New Nightmare. As mentioned above, a slew of actors from the Nightmare movies were asked to come and take part in the funeral scene. Noticeably missing, though, is Johnny Depp. In the 1999 DVD commentary, Wes Craven reveals that he didn’t think that Depp would be interested in making a cameo. He reveals that when they ran into each other at a function after the movie was released, Depp told him he would have made the cameo with no hesitation. So now we will always be haunted by Freddy smashing Johnny Depp in the face with a frying pan in Freddy’s Dead and long for a somber look toward his first onscreen girlfriend in New Nightmare. Lesson to be learned, kids: Always ask.
The final battle. Again, Craven fumbles the ball in the final battle. I had originally written that Craven drops the ball, but that’s not quite true. The final battle in this movie is superior to the final battle in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven utilizes matte paintings, miniature sets, digital effects, and practical effects to pull off Freddy’s labyrinth in the nightmare world, all of which is great. Heather, who has become Nancy again, has gone to the nightmare to rescue Dylan. There’s some creepy stuff here. Unfortunately, a lot of it is silly. Again, I wonder if it’s the old Evil-Isn’t-As-Strong-As-It-Seems thing. Two of the silly sequences in the final battle are that Freddy tries to eat Dylan…alive–his mouth opens wide enough to fit the boy’s head–and the long, long, long tongue that wraps itself around Heather/Nancy until it’s stuck down with a knife, then it retracts like a vacuum cleaner’s cord, leaving a snake-like forked tongue. This rubbed me wrong back when I first saw the movie and it rubs me wrong now.
Why, Wes? Why?
The Morning After
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is really not a sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street. Had it been made twenty years later, it probably would have become an instant classic (of course, the story might have to change…maybe Heather would be the mother to a teenage girl haunted by Freddy…). Craven’s script and direction is superb. The film is a minor masterpiece in horror cinema and rivals the first Nightmare in many ways. The questions that Craven asks about the responsibility of the creator of horror stories are serious, important ones. His commentary on 1980s horror is also pretty important. By cheapening the monsters like Freddy Krueger, by diluting them and turning them from our worst enemies to the friends we can look forward to seeing once a year, the horror genre is cheapened. It becomes a sort of fun way to see terrible things happen to pretty people. The doctor Heather must answer to when Dylan is admitted to the hospital, played frustratingly well by Fran Bennett, is the voice of the censors and those who do not like and do not understand why some horror can actually be called art. She accuses Heather’s work in the Nightmare movies (and, in essence, Wes Craven, Robert Englund, et al) of being hazardous to children.
Besides, kids love Freddy.
A good horror movie, a good horror novel, doesn’t just scare us but also mixes a real idea into the ingredients, just like any good book or movie does. Freddy Krueger acted as a way for people to release the stress for people living in the late twentieth century. Why was there a horror boom from the late 1970s through till about 1991/92? Because people were scared. The Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear warfare, AIDS, the results of the 1960s/1970s social movements that had changed the way things were (most often for the better, but whenever anything changes–for good or for ill–new fears surface), high inflation without higher pay, the old ways slowly dying as newer, sleeker ways came in–it was a hectic, scary time. The horror movie/novel and characters like Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Chucky (consumerism gone mad, folks), the Cenobites from Hellraiser, Cujo, Christine, and, of course, Freddy Krueger helped encapsulate that. In 1994, under a President who wasn’t as scary (despite what the Right would have had you believe) as Ron Reagan, Wes Craven was willing to look back and willing to tell us why Freddy worked and why he stopped working.
The themes that carried Craven through New Nightmare would be revisited two years later when a young screenwriter by the name of Kevin Williamson sold a script called Scary Movie to Bob Weinstein at Dimension Films and they approached Wes Craven to direct. Over the course of shooting, the movie would be renamed Scream and helped rejuvenate the horror film for a bit, straight through one very good sequel, one good sequel, and one shitty “Why bother?” sequel. But it started here with Freddy, with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
It would have been a bad choice for him to revisit Freddy and try to do an in-continuity movie (shit, those who made in-continuity movies couldn’t get it right!). This settles the argument. Even though New Nightmare is often lumped together with the other sequels, it really is so much more than that. Yes, there are a few small blunders, but the movie is worth watching and studying. It’s a movie as much about storytelling as it is about dreaming, though one could argue that storytelling and dreaming aren’t all that different.
“We are the music makers, and We are the dreamers of dreams.”
A Nightmare in Gautham 6: FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
There were no new Nightmares for the two years I was in junior high school, which is probably all right, junior high was a bad enough nightmare. Still, the horror didn’t stop. A week before I began the eighth grade, the night before my thirteenth birthday, I saw a profile of Stephen King on ABC’s Primetime Live. It made me more curious about him than ever so the next day I bought his novel The Shining. By chapter 3, I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was 1990.
I don’t remember when I first learned of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 1991, but feel like it was in a movie poster. Either way, learning about a new Nightmare to open on September 13th (it was a Friday), just weeks after I began high school, was pretty cool. So there I was in the theater during the opening weekend, with my 3D glasses waiting for the right moment and….
Would it be hyperbolic to say that I knew it would be a turd before the movie’s title had even shown up? At the start of both Dream Warriors and The Dream Master, the writers/directors put quotes from Edgar Allan Poe and The Bible respectively. The Dream Child skipped this but director Rachel Talalay (who concocted this story and co-wrote the screenplay) and co-screenwriter Michael DeLuca (who had written episodes of Freddy’s Nightmares—A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series) put in a quote by Frederich Nietzsche.
Okay, says fourteen-year-old Billy. That’s a good quote. Then comes another quote:
And we’re off. I knew this would be garbage. At fourteen-friggin’-years-old I knew this movie would suck, but I hoped I was wrong. I could end the essay right here because there’s really no reason to go further. But I will, because I’m compulsive (and perhaps too self-indulgent) and because you’ve stuck with me to find out which Nightmare I deemed THE WORST NIGHTMARE EVER.
After that wonderful quote, the title comes falling down one letter at a time like boulders, a title that I hated when I first learned of it: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. It pretty much says everything right there. Why see it? Then a really horrible map that appears to be shot from a computer screen pops up, revealing that Springwood, the town that Freddy has haunted since 1984, is in…Ohio? But what about Tina’s reference to weird things happening before earthquakes in the first movie? And the palm trees that pop up in shots throughout the series? O-fuckin’-hio?
Then the shit really hit the fan, and with it in 3D, oh, what a mess was made.
I left the theater numb. (Well, I always leave a movie theater numb. I actually refuse to talk about a movie for a while after I see it and never speak of the movie while still in the theater…unless it’s so good or so bad that I cannot help myself). I left the theater with a hatred for Rachel Talalay and Michael DeLuca and Robert Shaye and New Line Cinema for ruining The Greatest Monster Of All Time.
So, let’s get our gloves on and dissect this muthafuggah, shall we?
The Dreams
Yaphet Kotto. He acts in this movie. He is one of two people who do. Like Dr. Neil Gordon (and one could argue Nancy was also an adult in Dream Warriors), he is an adult that believes in Freddy and is willing to help dispose of him. Unlike Dr. Neil Gordon, he didn’t have good writers like Frank Darabont to give him much to do. His talent is wasted.
Lezlie Deane plays Tracy. She’s also pretty good in this movie. Her portrayal of the damaged girl with anger management issues is pretty right on and she’s worth watching.
Lezlie Deane as Tracy and Yaphet Kotto as Doc.
The running time is 96 minutes. I used this same joke on Freddy’s Revenge. Deal with it.
Speaking of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, this movie makes the second of the series look like Citizen Kane. This is a dream for that movie.
The clips that run through the closing credits. They remind viewers that Freddy Krueger had some good moments before this movie.
The Nightmares
The story/script. The story was by Rachel Talalay and the screenplay by her and Michael DeLuca. Talalay had been working on the Nightmare movies since the first movie when she was an assistant of some kind. She worked her way up to producer and somehow convinced New Line to let her take control of this movie. In interviews on the 1999 DVD set, Talalay shows the same sort of stupid arrogance that Jack Sholder shows in his interview regarding Freddy’s Revenge. They blame this factor and that factor on why their movies sucked, and Talalay points that this was wrong and that was wrong with the predecessors and that her budget wasn’t good and the 3D gimmick was forced on her by New Line and….
Neither of the directors of the two failures of the series seems to want to shoulder the responsibility. Neither wants to cop to the fact that they are horrible storytellers, yet both have proven it with the movies they’ve done after Freddy’s Dead. Go to the IMDb and look. I’ll wait.
Back? Okay. The story gives us another revelation about Freddy: he was married and had a child! And it appeared that he lived in Nancy’s house at the time. And this house, which we’ve been following since 1984 (which seemed to have changed locations in 1988 when Kristen and her friends went to visit it), suddenly sprung a water tower behind it. Anyway, there’s a boy (Shon Greenblatt) who leaves Springwood and ends up in some city where the authorities place him in a home for troubled kids. In the hopes of fixing his amnesia, Dr. Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane) brings him back to Springwood, which we find has no children because Freddy got them all (although I think Roseanne Barr/Arnold/Barr and Tom Arnold ate them all), and…. Oh, it doesn’t matter. The story is a mess. And the math is off. Even when folks have tried to bring the timeline together in the expanded universe, it’s off and doesn’t make sense.
A Krueger family reunion.
“I wanted this movie to have a more gritty and urban feel and a distinct visual style to it. What I tried to bring to The Final Nightmare was a real story,” Rachel Talalay said in an article from Fangoria (thanks, again, to The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion for this quote). If it was “a more urban and gritty feel” she was after, she failed. First off, the idea of A Nightmare on Elm Street was, I would think, the horrifying acts of suburban parents and how it comes back to haunt their children. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Freddy kills suburban children, gets arrested, gets out of jail free. Suburban parents burn Freddy. Ten years later, Freddy comes back for the suburban kids–several of them coming from broken homes (most likely having something to do with roasting someone)–through nightmares. As far as her “distinct visual style,” Talalay’s direction is sloppy. There are hardly any transitions, neither in the story nor between clips. The camera seems to move when it should be still and is still when it should move. I think she wanted the 3D feel throughout the movie, even though it’s only at the end where the 3D comes in.
The acting is horrendous. It has, arguably, one of the best casts in the series when you look at it on paper. Lisa Zane had a name at this point in some independent movies and some B-movies, Brecken Meyer–who wasn’t known but was headed for an okay career, and the aforementioned Kotto. Yet, except for the two actors listed above in the Dreams section of this essay, none of the actors pulls it off. Shon Greenblatt, who plays John Doe, is the first person we’re introduced to and he’s terrible. He gets angry for no reason and overacts. His lines are given as naturally as pus being expelled from a pimple, with nastier results. And his character is stupid, and I use the term stupid, I don’t mean that I don’t like the character so he’s stupid, but that John Doe had the mental capacity of a sack of oats. I mentioned above that the math doesn’t make sense. John Doe is supposed to be a teenager and he believes that he’s Freddy’s child, but even a fourteen-year-old who was horrible at math (me) knew that he was too damn young to be Freddy’s child. Freddy was already toast by the time he was born. Meyer plays the spoiled pot-head with about as much skill as a rock. Luckily for him, Clueless and The Craft were coming up. Ricky Dean Logan as Carlos is okay, but isn’t great. He’s a deaf Hispanic kid who uses his disability to annoy those around him by removing his hearing aid to shut out their voices. And finally, Lisa Zane sleepwalks through the movie. Maybe she signed on before reading the script? I don’t know, but what a waste.
We look bad-ass, but we’re just bad.
Robert Englund as Freddy. Freddy is a comedian in this movie, except he’s not funny. The acting is overdone, most of Freddy’s lines are shouted, the lines are just terrible, and silly pantomimes are used too often. Don’t get me started on the makeup, which is the worst makeup of the series. Freddy Krueger is the star but this movie is crap and he’s crap in it. The best parts in the movie with Freddy, funny enough, are when Englund is out of makeup, and he’s almost good in then.
Freddy!
Now don’t think I’m a hater. (Yes, I wrote that). Robert Englund is a classically trained actor and his portrayal of Fred Krueger in the original Nightmare elevated the character to great heights. But as I said in my last essay, the character, and his portrayal of the character, is too diluted. And even if it’s the editor’s/director’s fault for choosing the humorous takes over the scary ones, Englund holds some responsibility–there’s only so much you can blame on the editor. The very first time we see Freddy in this movie is when John Doe’s house is in the air and Freddy comes by with a black cape, pointed witch hat, and riding a broom. He shouts, “I’ll get you, my pretty! And your little soul, too!” I would think at that point, he must have had at least a leetle veto power.
The cameos. Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold. Johnny Depp poking fun at the “This is your brain on drugs” PSAs that used to run and were already old when these culturally hip people put the movie together. Alice Cooper as Freddy’s adoptive father. Each one of these cameos cheapens the movie. They worked in The Muppet Movie but not in Freddy’s Dead.
The dream demons. These are horribly-done puppets/CG characters that float around and promise Freddy immortality and power in the dream world, answering the question: How did Freddy get his power? To me, he was scarier without us knowing. That’s the magic of the horror story: answers aren’t needed. The makers of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare disagreed and they give answers. As is so often the case, the answers are lame.
The dream demons.
The 3D effects. Now, folks, I like some of the recent results of the new 3D craze. I think that digital 3D can be great and is fun for some movies (though I did feel it detracted from Avatar, which needed all the help it could get). Freddy’s Dead‘s 3D was almost twenty years before digital 3D and it was bad. It made a bad movie even worse.
The clips running through the end credits. Yeah, they were great to see on the big screen, but they only pointed out how horrible this movie was.
The Morning After
I put off watching this movie on DVD and actually skipped it last summer when I did my Nightmare-a-thon, but decided I should watch it when this kakameme idea came to post these little write-ups. Maybe, I thought (hoped), like Freddy’s Revenge, Freddy’s Dead would have some charm. Nope. It didn’t. At least the makers of the second one had the excuse that they didn’t realize how big Freddy and A Nightmare on Elm Street would become.
The movie makes me sad. With a little bit of thought, with a little bit of understanding, with a little bit of caring, even this movie could have redeemed the issues with the prior two movies. Instead, it felt like a big ol’ Fuck you to the fans. It was as though New Line Cinema, aka “The House That Freddy Built”, were laughing at the people who’d made them the company they had become, a company that would be bought by Time-Warner a few years later and would go on to make The Lord of the Rings.
The movie still feels that way. Of course, as an adult, I know that nothing lasts forever. There can only be a finite number of stories before you have to rethink something. The comic books have been doing that for seventy-five years with Superman, Batman, etc. Still, a television series like Lost proves that quality storytelling can be done in far more time than it takes to watch the entire Nightmare movies, if the story is told by people who care about the story they’re telling, and the audience who is receiving it.
Yeah, Talalay, this looks urban and gritty.
A Nightmare in Gautham 5: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
There were several reasons to look forward to the summer following the sixth grade, the summer of 1989. It was the last summer before I began junior high school (which I didn’t know would be hell). I remember feeling a lot anticipation for that summer. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was coming to movie theaters. So was Batman. I had seen Lethal Weapon on video and while Mom and Dad didn’t take me to see Lethal Weapon 2, I knew it wouldn’t be too long before it came to video. Ghostbusters II was also coming out (though I missed seeing that movie until it came out on video; the first of only two times I’ve seen the whole movie, the most recent was last year). The last thing that really got me excited was the last movie I’d see in the theater before the nightmare known as junior high (and pre-adolescence): A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.
My mother, who wasn’t hip enough to have liked The Dream Master, left it up to my father to take me. Diggit: Dad doesn’t like horror movies. For that matter, my father doesn’t like most movies. Old westerns, The Horse Whisperer (which I have yet to see), and maybe a few early Clint Eastwood movies, otherwise Dad just isn’t interested. But he loved me (the old man still does) and he took me.
The Dream Master was a huge hit. The Dream Child was not. Was it Freddy fatigue? Was it that despite large numbers of people who went out to see the fourth Nightmare, far fewer actually liked it? Was it that teen pregnancy was a little too close to home for the Nightmare demographic? Perhaps it was all those things. Perhaps none. Another cause could be that the Horror Boom of the 1980s was about to crash. Stephen King was taking a short break to deal with some personal issues, and there were too many bad books on the shelves and even more bad movies in the theaters and on video rental shelves.
The Dream Child was directed by Stephen Hopkins, who, like the two previous Nightmare directors, went on to have a pretty active career once moving away from Elm Street. The story was by the horror novel writing team of John Skipp and Craig Spector, and Leslie Bohem, who wrote the screenplay. Somewhere in my memory, I link the writer David J. Schow to the film, too. New Line was tapping into the Horror Novel Boom for creative ideas. If I’m wrong that Mr. Schow (who appeared in Borderlands 5 with me, Stephen King, John Farris, and others…go find a copy on eBay) had anything to do with The Dream Child, I’m sure someone out there will correct me.
Stephen Hopkins sporting a mullet. Freddy Krueger sporting his guns.
My feelings on the movie, released a few weeks before my twelfth birthday, have changed little in the twenty-one years since it came out. As a matter of fact, those early thoughts have solidified and become more adult. I actually have reasons for some of those feelings.
The Dreams
More continuity! This movie continues the story of characters we met in the previous movie. Woo!
Lisa Wilcox returns as Alice Johnson. Her performance in The Dream Master needed a little oomph until the end, but as I said in the last essay, it was probably that the director was about cool camera angles and flashy effects more than he was about acting. Wilcox does a far better job in The Dream Child, though she no longer looks like a teenager, even one graduating from high school. Her performance is solid and helps the movie flow. The only other comment I have is her hair. Her hair was dyed red in The Dream Master so people wouldn’t get her confused with Tuesday Knight. For The Dream Child, she sports her natural blonde hair. I’m always for the red hair, though.
Maybe she could be graduating from high school…. Nah, I don’t buy it, either.
Some of the supporting cast is okay, too. Nick Mele’s return as Mr. Johnson, who is a recovering alcoholic (he wasn’t recovering in The Dream Master) plays a sympathetic role, a real character arc from his assholy tendencies in the prior movie. Danny Hassell returns as Dan, Alice’s boyfriend. His performance is all right, it’s just good to see a returning character. Of the new victims–er…um…teenagers–it’s really only Kelly Jo Minter as Yvonne who is worth watching. She was trapped in high school in the 1980s, stuck in Summer School, for instance.
Stephen Hopkins brings a gothic feel to this movie that is missing from The Dream Master and only hinted at in Dream Warriors. The sets are usually darker in this movie than in the previous and there are shots of the institution where Amanda Krueger (the writers have dropped the whole Sister Mary Helena name) worked that remind me of the best gothic movies. This is a man who could have made a really good Nightmare, given better material.
I’m a sucker for this shot, and those like it, in this movie. This is gothic.
Poor material or not, the idea of Freddy trying to use the dreams of an unborn baby is a good one. I know a lot of fans think it’s lame but I’m not one of them. Why not? If the execution is poor, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
The majority of the characters survive. This fact helps stop The Dream Child from bringing the Nightmare series too far into slasher movie territory.
The Nightmares
The weak cast. Erika Anderson as Greta, the bulimic/anorexic teen model, and Joe Seely as Mark, the skateboarding comic book geek, are both all right but weak. They have their roles to fill and both do so, but are (wait for it…) stereotypes. Kelly Jo Minter is able to make Yvonne rise over any stereotype she might be in. The people who play Greta’s, Mark’s, and Dan’s parents have all the depth of sitcom parents.
Joe Seeley as Mark and Erika Anderson as Greta are okay but flat. Danny Hassell as Dan is all right with what he’s given. It’s Kelly Jo Minter as Yvonne, though, that is watchable (and not because she spends so much time in a bathing suit).
The missed opportunities. Stephen Hopkins seems to be a director with talent. The movie isn’t too bad, except…well…I’ll get to that soon enough. It feels as though the screenwriter(s) could have taken the idea, the fear that all people have about being parents but especially a teenager with an unplanned pregnancy, and have gone further with it. Instead, we get a creepy kid with haunting blue eyes who keeps showing up, being creepy, and is calling Freddy his friend. We have a comic book geek taken out in a comic book dream, a bulimic/anorexic teen model killed by being fed to death (more on this later, too), and, well, other silly things that are supposed to be scary but are not. When Freddy comes back to “life” in the church from the last movie, he has a strangely long left arm and hunga-munga bare feet that last for only that scene. Why? Then Freddy’s face appears in an ultrasound nightmare. It’s scary only in that someone thought that would be scary. There was a lot more possibility with the material that seems to have just been put aside for the quick and easy. And if my two examples didn’t tip you off, then you’re gonna be shocked when I say that another nightmare is–
Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. When he is reborn, after the required lame one-liner (“It’s a boy!”), there’s actually a creepy, nearly horrifying moment, if one can get past the stupidly long arm with the equally stupidly large hand attached (his gloved arm and hand are normal)¹. There are a few moments toward the end, when Freddy is walking down a corridor and the overhead lights are swinging and he blinks in and out of existence that somewhat works. Even the strange staircases-everywhere-ending that is reminiscent of a German expressionist film and M.C. Escher more than A Nightmare on Elm Street movie works. These are, I believe, Stephen Hopkins’s touches. Freddy, though, ruins this movie. He has become a comedian in this movie, yelling gallows-humor one-liners and making us, the audience, co-conspirators to his deviant acts.
“It’s a boo-ooyyy!” No, it’s Freddy with stupid feet and a stupid hand.
I understand that Robert Englund is a working actor and will go where the money is to pay his bills–Freddy Krueger was a guaranteed paycheck–but I would have to think that if you have helped build a character as strong, as memorable, and as scary as Freddy Krueger, you wouldn’t help dilute him. In a recent interview with Rue Morgue, he says that he and whatever Nightmare director he was working with on the later movies would often shoot two versions of a scene: one rife with quips and one-liners and another that was darker, meaner, and scarier, and that the editors/studio would often choose the former over the latter. Perhaps that is the case. New Line Cinema, in my book, had made some pretty terrible choices regarding the Nightmare movies thus far and didn’t really see them as anything other than cash cows. The art and thought Wes Craven put into the initial idea and resulting movie had been discarded before they even finished principle photography of that same movie, when Robert Shaye and New Line forced him to shoot different endings for cheap scares (and possible sequels?). By turning Freddy into a punk-antihero-lounge-comedian, they could sell more tee shirts, posters, dolls, etc., with his likeness.
If The Dream Master is the movie where Freddy Krueger stops being scary, then The Dream Child is the movie where he becomes boring. The movie halts each time he comes onscreen with his wisecracks. Oh, and I’m not fond of the makeup on Freddy this time around, either. In certain lighting, from certain angles, it’s quite effective, but when well-lit, it looks horrible.
The censors. By the late 1980s, Middle Amurica had had enough, damnit! All these horror movies and heavy metal songs and MTV and titty magazines and the new Fox Network with their Married…With Children that actually had porn stars on, and that radio guy from New York, Howard Stern, with his filth and…well, their heads were ready to explode. It was bad enough when Freddy Krueger was playing in small theaters and drive-ins, but now he was everywhere! The Religious Right, Tipper Gore, and their ilk were determined to set America back on its righteous path by protesting Freddy Krueger. Matchbox’s talking Freddy Krueger doll, glimpsed in passing at the local Child World (I miss that place), was pulled off the shelf before it could make it under my Christmas tree. The Dream Child, which didn’t just feature a child murderer/molester come back for revenge as the hero, but also dealt with teenage sex/pregnancy, fetuses (we all know how much the R.R. loves fetuses), and any number of other things that could/would damage any unsuspecting child/teenager who could sneak into the theater to watch it. As a result, some of the effects were toned down. Dan’s death on motorcycle is edited down to be not as graphic, and Yvonne’s death is edited to that Freddy is no longer dipping into her innards to feed her (which leads to the question: Why does she have a bleeding belly? when we see her later on). Honestly, the cuts were minor, but one senses that the story may have suffered from the motivation of trying not to offend people who would never actually see the movie, anyway, but just stand outside the theater with their signs and damn those who did want to see it.
You didn’t see this in theaters. You might have seen it on video, but not the DVD, sucka. The funny (or rather sad) thing is that it doesn’t really matter, because “Bon appétit, bitch!” stopped the movie in its tracks.
The Morning After
My feeling when I saw it, weeks away from being 12, was: Not as bad as 2, not as good as 1, 3, or 4. I feel the same way twenty-four years later. The Dream Child shows signs of weariness. By churning out a movie a year, New Line Cinema exhausted the very people they wanted money from: the fans. Yes, the nine-to-twelve-year-olds were still excited by seeing Freddy in a new movie, but the older, more refined teenagers were growing tired. This is a shame because with A Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy Krueger, New Line Cinema had on its hands the potential to make a few movies that were all good, scary, and thoughtful. Instead, it kept Freddy in a sort of veal cage, changing writers and directors, hiring actors with less and less skill, adding more and more special effects, and generally not giving a damn about the series that had put the company on the map.
Stephen Hopkins does a good job in the scenes leading up to Freddy and after he’s gone, but while Freddy is onscreen, he’s a joke. Super Freddy. Puh-lease. Freddy on a skateboard. “Bon appétit…bitch!” Come on. Shut the fuck up and be scary.
How could audiences have grown tired after this?!
Still, The Dream Child isn’t the worst of the sequels. It has some inspired moments, an idea that I still rather like, and some decently creepy, if not horrifying or terrifying, moments.
Freddy’s Nightmares–A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series continued another season after this movie, with Freddy’s makeup matching what he wore in The Dream Child. But the series, not very good to begin with, lost even more viewers and was canceled. Such is the way. After all, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, and other horror anthology shows were also disappearing. Sales were beginning to drop on those horror novels and horror movies were beginning to sink at the box office.
New Line Cinema saw the writing on the wall and pulled Freddy out of the marketplace for a while. They were busy trying to acquire Jason Voorhees from Paramount Pictures. Just imagine what one could do with both Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger….
One of the few creepy Freddy scenes in The Dream Child.
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¹One can argue that the very fact that Freddy exists in dreams makes it okay for his left hand and his feet to be oddly large, and I can except that if they remained so throughout the movie or if strange morphs of his body–aside from gimmick nightmares–were part of the norm. The only physical thing that changed with Freddy, other than the hat and sweater, is his face. One could argue that as different teenagers dream about him, they add their own twist, I guess. But…I don’t think it completely works. Maybe if each person dreams a different look for him, but not in the larger sense.
A Nightmare In Gautham Addendum: Running From This Nightmare
So as I was revising my latest installment of my series of essays on the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I was interrupted by the sound of a crying baby that needed to be fed. As I fed the baby, I remembered that I’d always meant to write about the opening song of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, “Running From This Nightmare.”
This song has stuck with me ever since I rented the VHS when it came out. It is complete 1980s synth-pop, a la Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. The song was recorded by Tuesday Knight, who portrayed Kristen in the movie. I daresay that this song is her best contribution to the movie.
Here it is. Enjoy!
A Nightmare in Gautham 4: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
I was ten, I guess, when I first learned of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, though it came out days before my eleventh birthday. I wanted to go to the movies to see it as I had the third movie but didn’t have the chance to. My first viewing of the movie was on VHS, rented from a video store (a local chain, I believe). I liked it a lot. At eleven, I loved that Freddy said all these sarcastic one-liners and that the movie was visually fun to watch. I liked that he was just so big, larger-than-life. I also liked that this movie had so many special effects, effects that were all over the tv.
Again, its place in American culture is important. The Horror Boom was at its peak. There seemed to be shows on tv every other weekend about horror special effects, including a special that aired in syndication called Stephen King’s World of Horror, a special that gave me the first hint of who this Stephen King guy was as well as showed me how some of the effects that garnished The Dream Master came to be.
MTV was at its height. It had changed the culture and was, at this moment in time, the place kids went for entertainment, news, and information. Freddy Krueger’s ascension was as much a result of MTV as it was the Horror Boom. Freddy had a very rock n roll/punk persona. He didn’t care about social norms or what was appropriate. He was a big ol’ Fuck You to the establishment at the end of the Reagan era and the kids, damnit, were listening. I may have only been 10/11, but I was one of them.
Wes Craven was officially off the movie. For some reason, New Line didn’t go with Chuck Russell or Frank Darabont to write/direct. I suspect it was a financial decision. With Dream Warriors a success, it probably would have cost more to rehire them than it was to go with new talent. One problem, though, was a writers strike that made the screenplay difficult to pin down. They went with Finnish director Renny Harlin to direct. The movie was shot in early 1988 and released that August.
The Dreams
Character continuity. Freddy’s Revenge kept Nancy’s house (and diary) but bailed out on any other character (except Freddy) from the first movie. Dream Warriors bailed on its predecessor and returned to the first movie without any mention to the second movie. The Dream Master takes place sometime after the events of its predecessor and re-introduces us to the survivors of Dream Warriors: Kristen Parker (this time played by Tuesday Knight), Joey (Rodney Eastman), and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes) in all his stereotypical glory. Freddy even returns from the junkyard grave he was placed in by Dr. Neil Gordon and Donald Thompson.
Rodney Eastman as Joey, who’s speaking outside of the dream now. Ken Sagoes as Kincaid, mah fah.
And Not Patricia Arquette as Kristen Parker, survivors from the last Nightmare.
Lisa Wilcox as Alice. Her acting in this movie could be better, but the character isn’t supposed to have much personality in the beginning of the movie, so it sort of works. If she’d had a stronger script and a better director, her performance may have been better. She’s in the dream section because I find her purrrrty.
The overall acting. Look, there are no future Johnny Depps or Patricia Arquettes or Laurence Fishburnes in this movie, but for the third sequel to a low budget horror movie (and being a low budget horror movie in its own right), the cast is pretty good. The teenagers are believable enough. Nicholas Mele as Alice and Rick’s father is very good. I believe in the characters, which is all one could hope for. Another standout is Alice’s brother Rick, played by Andras Jones. Part wise-ass, part martial artist, part caring brother, he brings a certain level of realism to the part and helped make this movie a cut above the typical horror movie sequel.
Robert Englund as Freddy. By now, Freddy Krueger was more than just the bad guy in some horror movies, he was a genuine pop icon, up there with Lugosi’s Dracula and Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster. Englund is able to infuse Krueger with glee as he tortures and picks off the teenagers in this movie. Krueger looks like he’s having fun because Englund is having fun playing him. More on Freddy later on, though.
Ladies and gentleman, your 1980s horror icon.
The special effects and the visuals. Renny Harlin may have won more Razzies than just about any other director, but he brought a certain style to The Dream Master that some of the other movies didn’t have. With the success of the previous three Nightmares, there was also more budget for more effects, which were interesting and fun.
The late-1980s charm. Like Freddy’s Revenge, it’s pretty easy to see where in American culture this movie takes place. From the music (this is the second Nightmare to have a real soundtrack, but the first for it to have its soundtrack so entwined with the movie) to the hair styles to the clothes, this movie reeks of the late 1980s. And like Freddy’s Revenge, it’s taken twenty years for that charm to surface. Hardcore fitness? Check. A nerd like Revenge of the Nerds? Check. A karate kid like…well…. Check. MTV reference? Absofuckinglutely!
The ending. I like the ending. The church set is pretty cool. The idea of evil looking at itself and dying is a nice one. The souls on Freddy’s chest introduced in Dream Warriors coming out and getting their revenge is a nice touch.
Those are arms. I promise.
The Nightmares
Who’s that girl? Ooohh…it’s Kristen. Patricia Arquette, who so famously squealed her way into our hearts as Kristen Parker in Dream Warriors, is replaced by singer-actress Tuesday Knight. According to The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion, producer (and Freddy’s Dead director) Rachel Talalay said that Arquette was never approached to reprise the role. Since it wouldn’t really be until 1993’s True Romance that Arquette would become a star, the only reason I can think of is the same reason I figure for not bringing back Chuck Russell or Frank Darabont: money. Arquette would probably have wanted a lot more. The other reason, and even more likely, is that Arquette probably would have said no. Coming from a family in the business, she might not have wanted to have been pigeonholed as a scream queen. After all, Joey, Kincaid, and even Kristen’s mother (Brooke Bundy) all returned to Elm Street for this movie. And even though Talalay says New Line never approached Arquette, I’m not sure that I’m convinced.
Either way, Tuesday Knight’s turn as Kristen Parker is okay, but there is a certain disconnect between her and the audience. She was a strong character in Dream Warriors and while Knight’s portrayal of Kristen is definitely more hard-assed, the character doesn’t feel right.
Again, stereotypes. Kincaid is written exactly as he was in Dream Warriors. Sheila (Toy Newkirk) is supernerd. Brooke Theiss plays Debbie, the hot fitness girl. You get the idea. Alice longs for Dan (Danny Hassel), the popular jock. In other words, A Nightmare on Elm Street is heading down typical 1980s slasher movie territory. Luckily for us Fred-Heads (I swear I didn’t make that term up), it’s not there…yet. But it’s damn close. I’ll get to the reason below.
They may be mostly stereotypes, but they can show emotion. And, in stereotypical fashion, the Black Man has been cut from the second picture.
Who wrote this thing?! The Dream Master was worked on during a writers strike. As a result, the story is by William Kotzwinkle and Brian Helgeland, and the screenplay is by Brian Helgeland and Jim and Ken Wheat (under the pseudonym Scott Pierce). There are also rumors that other people worked on the script and added things as well. Post-Dream Master, Helgeland went on to be nominated and win Oscars for such movies as L.A. Confidential and Mystic River, has written the upcoming Ridley Scott-directed movie Robin Hood, and directed Payback and A Knight’s Tale. (He’s also from my hometown, which is pretty cool). I guess the fact that the movie is good at all is a surprise, but the story is definitely lacking. It’s the kind of movie that if you’re watching it and not thinking, just being entertained by the cool camera angles and flashy effects, you don’t notice the holes in plot and logic. There’s a blurring of the nightmare/waking world in this movie toward the end that is major. At eleven years old I thought certain tricks, like Alice and Dan repeating a scene several times, was cool. At thirty-five, it doesn’t make sense. Are they awake? Are they sleeping? If they’re sleeping, where are they sleeping? They’re in an accident from sleeping at the wheel, but would that happen if they’re running to go save Debbie? And how come Nancy’s house is now very much Freddy’s house? And how come none of the three survivors of Dream Warriors mentions Nancy or Dr. Gordon, two people I would think they’d believe to be nearly saintly? And how does Joey get stuck inside his waterbed? And how come Kristen’s mother doesn’t know her daughter’s bedroom is engulfed in flames until her daughter’s boyfriend and his weird, mousy sister show up? And if what happens in your dreams happen in the real world, does that mean that Debbie’s parents are going to find a giant squished cockroach in their attic or will it just be Debbie’s crushed body? And…. Get it?
Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. This is the first Nightmare that Robert Englund gets top billing, before the title no less. Not too shabby for the nerdy alien from V. By now, Freddy Krueger had become one of the 1980s answers to the Universal Monsters. Robert Englund had done interviews as Freddy, had hosted movies on HBO and music videos on MTV as Freddy. Freddy Krueger was on tee shirts, posters, yo-yos, albums, toys, pins, Halloween costumes…you name it. He was in music videos:
And where Freddy was, Robert Englund was. Freddy’s appearances became a sort of hammy, kitschy thing where Freddy would make quips at people, spin puns, and be a general friendly neighborhood child killer. I mentioned in my essay for Dream Warriors that Chuck Russell and his lighting people lit Freddy mainly outside of the shadows. In The Dream Master, Freddy is always lit very well. Not only that, but Freddy breaks the fourth wall!
Striking a pose. “Why don’t you…reach out and…
touch someone?”
You see, Freddy Krueger (and Robert Englund) is no longer just the bad guy in the Nightmare movies, he is the Nightmare movies. Teenagers are no longer paying to see whether or not the kids will escape Freddy, they’re paying to see how Freddy kills them, which makes The Dream Master different than the other movies of the series so far. However it’s the template created in Dream Warriors that starts it. More on this later. You see this in Kincaid’s nightmare where Freddy is reborn. The bones that were left in the junkyard at the end of Dream Warriors come together in The Dream Master (thanks to some flaming dog piss) and Freddy is born again. There’s a poorly dubbed moment when Freddy is posing, backlit, and says, “You shouldn’t have buried me…I’m not dead.” [Is this the best line they could come up with?!]. And then the camera, which means we, follow Freddy as he looks for Kincaid. We’re surprised when Kincaid, from nowhere, drops a car on Freddy. This isn’t the only time where it seems as though we’re following Freddy’s adventure. When Debbie becomes a cockroach stuck in a roach motel, we’re then outside the roach motel with a midshot on Freddy, who’s peeking into the small box with tiny screams coming from it. Freddy squishes it, ending the tiny screams and then says, “You can check in, but you can’t check out.”
Not only does Freddy become the star, but with all the zany camera angles, Freddy also becomes a model. Every line is accentuated with a flick of the finger-knives, or some pose that deals with the glove and knives. In other words, Englund’s performance as Freddy Krueger becomes too big. Though it’s still rather restrained compared to where it’s going (remember, I still have the worst of the movies to come), Freddy has officially stopped being the villain and has become the sarcastic 1980s antihero. Freddy becomes to the monster movie what Eddie Murphy became to cop movies around the same time.
The Morning After
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master opened on August 19, 1988 (almost a week before I turned eleven) and was a huge hit. It was the highest grossing of the original Nightmare series. That summer, Freddy was everywhere. Every entertainment magazine had a story about the movie or Freddy. He was on television and the radio. He had his own 900-number. Freddy was more than just the bad guy in a horror movie now; he was a star. The template had been set by the previous movie, Dream Warriors a year before. The anticipation for the third movie was pretty big and there were more photoshoots starring Freddy than previously done. With the success of that movie, the PR on The Dream Master worked overtime. Generally, the makeup job most people think of when they think of Freddy is the makeup job done for The Dream Master, even though this one is, again, different than its predecessors and successors. It’s very similar to the makeup used in Dream Warriors, only has more color to it. But I digress….
With Freddy the star, the teenagers are now automatic victims. Dream Warriors, trying to get away from Freddy’s Revenge, basically introduced us to teenagers whose purpose was to last only so long before Freddy picked them off. However, those teenagers were pretty well thought out and the audience could buy into them (though not as easily as Wes Craven’s original cast). With the fourth movie, even though we begin with three survivors from the previous installment, we get the sense very early on that most of these characters will not make it through. The reason: We never learn about them the way we learned about prior Elm Street characters. As a result, we have more stereotypes cast only for flashy death sequences and a villain who is now the hero.
This puts the Nightmare movies on track to become just another slasher series. Its saving grace is its imagination. Because Freddy haunts the dreams and nightmares of his victims, the audience is always given the treat of interesting and bizarre sets and imaginative terrors. Only, there are no terrors at this point in the series. There are no horrors. There’s some gross-out and a lot of eye candy, but nothing that really gets under the skin. The original Nightmare was full of horror and terror. Freddy’s Revenge has a few (albeit too brief) moments of horror and at least one of terror (again, Jesse fighting to keep the basement door closed but losing, only to turn around and find the monster right there). Dream Warriors had several creepy moments and, with Nancy and her father central characters, definitely had moments that qualify as horrifying/terrifying. The Dream Master has no real horrifying moments and certainly never terrifies us. It’s unsettling in a few minor moments, but mainly it’s fantastic (in the true sense of the word), gory, and over-the-top.
Yet, its popularity has cemented this movie’s version of Freddy Krueger into our minds.
It also helped get horror fans ready for Freddy on television. In the fall following the release of The Dream Master, an anthology television series called Freddy’s Nightmares — A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series came out. Freddy was a character in a few of the episodes but was mainly the host, a la Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The first season (which has Brad Pitt in an episode) was the more “popular” season and had Freddy in his Dream Master makeup.
At this time, between the movie (which I didn’t see until its home video debut), the press, and the tv series, I was in full horror mode, renting such gems as Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II and other classics (as an aside, give me the money and I’d happily write/direct a remake of Mary Lou). I watched some of the Friday the 13th movies if they came on HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime, and saw Halloween IV and V (the first one was difficult to come by, for some reason), but Freddy Krueger and the Nightmares he inhabited were the poison of choice in the monster category. I also became aware of the movies of Stephen King, Pet Sematary being the more recent of his movies released at that time.
“Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.” Random Lisa Wilcox picture, because she’s beautiful and wearing a cool leather jacket.
Today, I still hold The Dream Master in my heart, not for any reason of quality but because it was part of the building blocks of what made me who I am today. I wish that the filmmakers/studio had had the interest/ability to get Heather Langenkamp back as Nancy. With her death at the end of Dream Warriors, and Kristen’s promise to “dream her into a beautiful dream”, it would have been interesting to make Nancy the anti-Freddy. This idea was done in the early 1990s in a comic book series (Nightmares on Elm Street) written by Andy Mangels and published by Innovation. It would have gone with Craven’s symbolism of Freddy as evil incarnate and Nancy as good. Alas, it was not to be.
The Dream Master stands out for all the reasons above and for being Freddy’s swan song for a bit.
But not our swan song, for we still have four more movies to get to, including what I think is the worst Nightmare in the series, and the second best (and on some days, the best) Nightmare. So stay tuned, folks. This nightmare is nowhere near over.
And I thought I was a bad teacher…. Freddy schools us on how to take one of the scariest villains to ever hit the screen and make him not scary.
A Nightmare in Gautham 3: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (1987)
In the fall of 1986, just after seeing the double feature of A Nightmare on Elm Street and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge on HBO, my father took me to see the Sylvester Stallone movie Over the Top. Before you suggest that my father is horrible and should have been jailed for such a thing, I’ll remind you that in 1986, Sly Stallone was huge, and I don’t mean the growth hormones but as in a movie star. The best thing I remember from that day, though, is not Stallone’s trucking or arm wrestling, but the huge cardboard display in the lobby of the now-departed Cinema 140 for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. I was eager to see it, though I didn’t really think my Mom would take me. While she had begun letting me see some horror movies on HBO and on video, it was a whole other wall of pancakes to let your nine-year-old see a horror movie in a movie theater, right?
Yet, there we were in February 1987, Mom and me, sitting in the theater before the screen that would bring me to Elm Street. I wore my favorite red Raynor baseball cap with the brim in a position to protect me from the giant-ass Freddy Krueger on the screen. The brim would eventually be moved aside so I could actually see what was going on since Freddy is seen a whole lot onscreen at the end of the movie.
I was half a year away from being ten and I was jazzed as I left the theater. I thought that Dream Warriors was way better than Freddy’s Revenge and I couldn’t wait for there to be more Nightmares. I was already in a pretty deep NOES fever by this point. Dream Warriors intensified the fever.
The Dreams
Wes Craven returns. Kind of. Craven and Robert Shaye patched some of their problems up and Craven, with his writing partner Bruce Wagner, pitched and wrote a screenplay for Dream Warriors. For years I wondered what Craven’s screenplay would have been like without being touched by director Chuck Russell and co-screenwriter Frank Darabont. Thanks to The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion (the fine fansite where I’ve been borrowing the pictures that have appeared in these little diatribes), I was able to download and read Craven and Wagner’s screenplay. I have actually written a review of the whole script but for the purpose of this essay, suffice it to say that the script was bad.
Director Chuck Russell and co-screenwriter Frank Darabont brings Freddy Krueger back to his roots. Where Freddy’s Revenge alludes to the first Nightmare through conversation between characters as well as Nancy’s discovered diary, Dream Warriors makes no mention of Freddy’s Revenge. It’s as though the second movie were a nightmare best forgotten. Freddy first appears in a nightmare that Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is having and he chases her through hallways and tunnels, before finally appearing in a bathroom mirror and slitting her wrist. The rest of the nightmares take hold of Craven’s idea that in the dreamworld, Freddy can do and be almost anything, and runs with it. Even though the fans knew the rules by now, even though they’d been down this street before, the movie has enough surprises in it to make it feel like more than the third movie in the series. They use some of what Craven and Wagner put into the original screenplay, yet tamed it down, and actually make it more like the first movie, while still being its own thing.
Back to basics for Freddy.
Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy Thompson. Without evil, there can be no good. Because Wes Craven is a writer as well as a filmmaker, and a very intelligent man to boot, he understands symbolism.¹ If Freddy represents evil at its worse, Nancy represents good at its best. During the course of the first Nightmare, Nancy becomes Freddy’s greatest foe. With her reappearance in the second sequel, the audience has someone they instantly connect to and root for. Now that she’s a little older and wiser, she’s a much more formidable foe for Freddy.
Good and Evil. Oh, yeah!
The overall cast for Dream Warriors also deserves kudos. Not every performance is great, and there are definitely stereotypes, but this cast far outshines that of the second movie’s. Patricia Arquette gets one of her first major film roles as Kristen Parker, the main character of the story. She is a little squeaky at times but there is a quality to her that makes one understand how she had a pretty good post-Nightmare career. Craig Wasson as Dr. Neil Gordon is superb as the stressed psychiatrist who cares so much for these troubled kids that he’s willing to put his career (and eventually his life) on the line for them. John Saxon returns as Donald Thompson, former lieutenant, current security guard. The cast portraying the troubled teenagers are also pretty good in this movie. Oh, and I can’t forget Priscilla Pointer as Dr. Simms and Laurence Fishburne (credited as “Larry Fishburne”) as the orderly Max. His understated performance also hints at the career he will enjoy.
One of the good parts of this movie is the information about Freddy’s origins. The mysterious nun that only Neil Gordon can see is a welcome addition. To find out that Freddy was “the bastard son of a hundred maniacs” is a pretty nice touch, while not a subtle one. Of course, an argument can be made that this information is one step toward making Freddy more human and more sympathetic, and that it’s also pretty melodramatic. All true, but it also sets Krueger up as more of a symbol. Evil is what spawned him, evil is what drove him through life, evil is what drives him in the afterlife. It also doesn’t excuse his actions in any way.
Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Yes, I know. I’ve put this in all the essays thus far. Don’t worry, it won’t always be this way (remember, my least favorite Nightmare is still impending…). This is the last film of the franchise where Robert Englund gets last billing in the opening credits. Freddy is still the villain at this point. Yes, his role is larger in this movie than in the first one, and maybe even the second one, but he is still the villain. The audience only sees him when his intended victim becomes aware of him. One of the most frightening shots of Freddy in the entire series is in Kristen’s opening nightmare. She’s running through a long hallway and far behind her, Freddy comes running around a corner with his glove raised, headed straight for her. I believe the shot is slowed down just a bit, just enough for the audience to think, Oh, shit! There he is! It is clear that Englund relishes the role and basks in playing this despicable monster. When he rips his sweater open to reveal the faces of his victims, the smile on his face is priceless.
Look at those pecs.
The ending. I dare say that the ending in Dream Warriors is better than Nightmare‘s ending. The dual climax of Donald Thompson and Neil Gordon fighting Freddy’s skeleton in the junkyard where the Elm Street parents placed him and the nightmare boiler room from hell and the mirror room are more interesting than the Looney Tunes hijinks Nancy sets up to defeat the pulled-from-the dream Krueger. Even Nancy’s demise feels fitting, especially with Kristen’s promise to dream her into a beautiful dream, which could have been used as a set up for further movies (and was eventually used in a comic book series written by Andy Mangles in the early 1990s).
The Nightmares
There are less nightmares in this film than the previous sequel and the ones that follow, but let’s explore them, shall we?
Heather Langenkamp’s return as Nancy. Huh? Didn’t you just tell us that is was one of the dreams of this particular movie? Yes, I did. While it was great to see Ms. Langenkamp’s return to Elm Street as Nancy, I feel as though her performance was a little wooden in some scenes and that Russell didn’t really give her much to do. By making Kristen the lead character, Nancy gets a smaller role in the film. Yes, a lot of the movie follows her, but I also feel as though she’s along for the ride a little more than she should be. Here’s a character that has so much more potential. Honestly, I believe it was less Russell as the director than it was New Line’s bureaucracy that’s to blame. For them, the Nightmare movies (and Freddy Krueger) were huge moneymakers. They got a small fan rebellion with the poor quality of Freddy’s Revenge‘s story and probably felt that returning to teenagers having nightmares was the thing to do. The fact that there are so many adults in the mix of this movie doesn’t happen again until Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, which we will get to in due time. Nancy’s return could have been more, especially if we’re going with the aforementioned symbolism of Freddy = evil and Nancy = good.
“Weren’t you only fifteen three years ago?”
The beginning of the wisecracks. Yes, giving Fred Krueger a personality was genius on Wes Craven’s part, but here’s where the personality begins its decent. Freddy is still scary in this movie, but the sense of humor, while dark and smile- (and maybe even chuckle-) worthy, is a little too much. When Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow) gets pulled into the tv, do we really need, “Welcome to prime time, bitch.”? Yes, it makes us chuckle, but this is Freddy fuckin’ Krueger! I don’t mind him fucking with his victims, it’s one of the things that makes him so scary, but this is a little much.
The stereotypes. The idea of having troubled teenagers that everyone thinks have tried to commit suicide is a pretty good one. It brings us away from the suburban Elm Street, though these kids are supposed to be children of those original parents (it also brings us away from Craven’s viewing that suburbia isn’t as nice as one might believe) but some of the stereotypes are a little much. There’s a recovering young addict who liked to shoot up, played by Jennifer Rubin, who has all the stereotypical issues and fantasies (though Rubin’s performance is pretty good and transcends the stereotype). Then there’s the nerd who loves his Dungeons & Dragons-eque role playing games. There’s the girl who wants to be an actress (with a face for radio, if not the voice), the shy kid who refuses to speak but fantasizes over the stereotypical hot nurse. The head of the clinic, Dr. Simms, is another version of Nurse Cratchett, who lacks any real bedside manner or compassion. The worst of the stereotypes, though, the one that irks me every time I see this movie, is Kincaid, the young, angry, foul-mouthed black kid whose fantasy is to have Herculean strength. By 1987, we should have moved beyond that, yet there he is.
Freddy hates stereotypes, too.
Nancy’s house becoming Freddy’s house. Boy, did this take a lot of Expanded Universe ‘splainin’! In Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner’s original script, Nancy and Kristen come across the home Freddy Krueger was born and raised in. It’s the typical haunted house. They find the house and their nightmares also bring them there. It’s not in Springwood on Elm Street, but somewhere else. Nancy is brought there in the same supernatural manner (though she doesn’t realize it) that pretty much brings many characters in horror fantasy fiction from place-to-place. Somewhere along the way from Craven & Wagner’s script to the Russell & Darabont script, Nancy’s house becomes Freddy’s house. Well, let me correct that: In this movie it’s still Nancy’s house. The idea, I guess, is that the nightmare version makes it look like a haunted house. For some reason, though, Freddy seems to have inhabited it in the nightmare. Maybe the boiler room was too uncomfortable. Who knows? But it throws us off. It’s good that it connects Nancy to the story again, but it doesn’t make sense that Kristen and others would go there.
Of Interest
The 1980s was a hot time for the horror genre. By the beginning of the decade, Stephen King had blown up and by the time A Nightmare on Elm Street came out, he was a household name. There were a lot of horror novels coming out every year and horror films being made. Maybe it was a sort of punk-anti-establishment thing. We had Ronald Reagan telling us everything was good, everything was fine, yet there was the sense that his finger hovered over The Button and all it took was his psychic to tell him he should push it; maybe this was one reason for the popularity of horror at this time. I think that a result of these times and the Horror Boom is that A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors benefited. Frank Darabont was (and still is) a huge Stephen King fan. By the time he would have been brought onto Dream Warriors, he would have already written and directed the short film The Woman in the Room, an adaptation of a Stephen King story. Of course, Darabont would go on to adapt and direct other movies based on other King works. The Shawshank Redemption–based on King’s novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist were all very good movies that captured everything that makes King not only such an entertaining writer but also a great writer. When work on Dream Warriors was underway, King would have been having one of his most prolific and biggest years ever, with the publications of It, Misery, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, The Eyes of the Dragon, and The Tommyknockers, not to mention the film adaptations of Pet Sematary, Creepshow II, and others I’m probably forgetting. Many of the ideas in Dream Warriors seem like something King might have put into the movie had he worked on it. The role of the adults in this movie is similar to the role of the characters of It, having to face something from the past, the teenagers being individuals with personalities, whether stereotypical or not. The way Nancy and Freddy seem to be drawn together is also reminiscent to how the characters of It are drawn to It.
Freddy has another makeover. Gone are the brown contacts and the too-high cheekbones, though the hook nose remains. His scarring is also more reminiscent of the second movie’s, yet less healed in some ways. His hat and sweater are pretty consistent at this point. The green stripes remain on the arms. The glove is back and there are no noticeable changes to it. What has changed is Freddy’s lighting. By now, everyone knew what he looked like. He was in magazines and hosting double features on HBO and doing interviews and appearing on MTV (to help sell the soundtrack) and showing up on posters, etc. His surroundings are still dark, but Freddy is lit better. The mystery of his face is gone and with it, so is the fright.
A photo of me from my junior prom.
Freddy’s first music video! Dokken’s “Dream Warriors.” Patricia Arquette must be proud.
One other piece of info that you might be interested in. I mentioned above the copy of Craven and Wagner’s original screenplay for Dream Warriors (located at The Nightmare on Elm Street Companion). If you are a fan of the series, it might be interesting to read it. I read it with the hopes of reading a script that kicked the movie’s ass, but rather found a script with a lot of issues. I wonder if Craven truly intended that as a legitimate Nightmare or if he knew it would be rewritten. There are some interesting concepts in it, but I feel as though the script is lacking. Majorly lacking. What is interesting, though, is how much was borrowed by later Nightmares.
The Morning After
Overall, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors works. Freddy Krueger has his last hurrah as a frightening character, it’s great to see his original enemy back to square off against him, and the new kids (and adults) are formidable opponents. Chuck Russell (who would go on to direct the movies The Mask and Eraser with the likes of Jim Carrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger under the name Charles Russell) and Frank Darabont use Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner’s original story and build on it to success. Had they been interested (or allowed, I don’t know the behind-the-scenes story on why they didn’t work on any other Nightmares, though I have suspicions) in going further in this franchise, I suspect there may have been some interesting movies (or at least one interesting movie). At nine, I thought this movie rocked. I went home and built a Freddy glove with pens and pencils. Realizing how silly it looked, I built another one with popsicle sticks, until I was able to buy the official glove one Halloween. At thirty-five, I still enjoy the movie. It doesn’t have the power of Wes Craven’s original, but it is a solid sequel and is better than any of the Friday the 13th movies. It shows imagination and an understanding of fear.
In history, the movie made big change for New Line Cinema and garnered enough press that it was inevitable that Freddy would be coming back. Perhaps that’s where things went wrong. Eager to capitalize on Freddy’s ascent from cult figure to pop culture icon, the movie was barely out of the theaters before New Line was prepping A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. So the summer I turned ten, Robert Englund was in Freddy makeup filming the fourth movie, and things began to turn ugly….
Freddy calls, “Cut!”
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¹ In 2010, a pair of great documentaries about the Nightmare on Elm Street movies had yet to be released. I Am Nancy, produced by Heather Langenkamp does not only show the importance of the character Nancy to the films she appears in, but also to the fans. It also features great interviews with Robert Englund and Wes Craven, who goes into great detail about the importance of Nancy as a character as well as a symbol.
Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 