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Freddy 101, or If You’re Gonna Do It, Do It Right
With the death of Wes Craven still carving the hearts of the horror community, many tributes have flooded social networks. They’re heartfelt, and many show great imagination. Some, however, are showing the wrong Freddy. I know what you’re thinking, What do you mean “the wrong Freddy”? How many Freddys are there? The answer is nine. There are nine Freddy Kruegers. Official Freddy Kruegers, I mean, that have been in the films (and even on TV). Two actors (primarily) played him. I know, it may not seem like a big thing, but seriously, if you’re so much a fan of something that you want to make a tribute to it, then do it right. And since I’m a teacher by day, I’ll take it upon myself to teach you.
Any questions? No? All right, let’s begin with a….
Pre-Test
What is wrong with these DVD and Blu-ray covers?
If you answered “Nothing,” then this why we’re here. The Freddy Krueger on the cover of the Blu-ray cover of the A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 & 3 collection isn’t in either of those movies. It’s the Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. Hell, the house doesn’t even appear in any of the movies. Now the cover of the Nightmare on Elm Street Collection DVD cover is even more problematic. This collection offers all the Nightmare movies from 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street to Freddy vs. Jason, all of which starred Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. However, the cover shows Jackie Earl Haley’s Freddy Krueger from 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street remake—er…reboot, sorry. Oh, and poorly Photoshopped onto Mr. Haley’s Freddy’s body is the classic Freddy glove. And by classic, I mean the glove from Freddy vs. Jason, which is supposed to look like…oh, we’ll get to that in another lesson.
Anyway, let’s begin….
The Lesson
A Nightmare on Elm Street, written and directed by Wes Craven and released in November 1984 smacked the horror movie across the face. The slasher subgenre specifically. Instead of a masked stuntman stalking victims, audiences were given an actor whose face was the mask. The makeup, designed by David Miller, was a fantastic representation of the burn scars in Craven’s screenplay. Craven and Miller purposely decided to stray from realistic burn victims to create something that would be realistic but fantastic. Englund’s makeup is layered in spots, so the burned flesh appears to be falling away from the muscle underneath, and there’s even melted pieces dangling. Vaseline and K-Y Jelly was applied to the makeup to give it a nasty sheen. And if you want to nitpick further, Fred Krueger’s sweater only has green stripes on the torso, the arms are red.
For the 1985 sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, written by David Chaskin and directed by Jack Sholder, the makeup changed. Kevin Yagher picked up the makeup effects duties and redesigned the look. He and Sholder decided that Freddy should appear older, more healed. Gone was the double layer of makeup, never to return, and instead came a single layer of prosthetics but with more of a sculpt. Yagher thought a sharper chin and cheekbones would be more intimidating. He also gave Freddy’s nose a hook, a symbolic reference to one of cinema’s scariest villains, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. The fedora Freddy wears is also different. It’s bigger with a wider brim. Freddy also occasionally had brown eyes in this movie. Finally, the sweater isn’t as thick as it was in the first movie, and green stripes have moved onto the arms. There are other differences in costume and such, but let’s focus on the face in this lesson.
In 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, written by Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner and Chuck Russell & Frank Darabont, and directed by Chuck Russell, Yagher returned but changed the makeup again. The chin was dropped and the cheekbones were lessened. The scars became more defined again, though not as much as in the first movie, and the revealed muscles are a light, light pink, almost the same as the flesh. The differentiation between the open flesh and the melted flesh can only really be seen in bright lighting, which there is little of in this film. The hook nose is also brought back a little, though it’s still present. Finally, the fedora has changed again. It’s small than both of the previous movies’ hats, though more in style with the first film’s hat. The sweater’s thickness and bulkiness is also different.
Yagher’s makeup for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), written by Brian Helgeland, Jim Wheat and Ken Wheat, and directed by Renny Harlin, is very similar to the previous movie’s makeup. The chin is given only the tiniest bit more definition and so are the cheekbones. They’re not the overdone version seen in Freddy’s Revenge, but are just noticeable. Also, the nose is a little more hooked again. The patterns of the exposed muscles are very similar to that of the third movie’s but are more define by their paint jobs. This is, arguably, the most famous Freddy Krueger look. At least for anyone who was aware of Freddy in the 1980s.This was the face that appeared everywhere! The hat is very similar, if not the same one as, the third movie’s. Ditto the sweater.
David Miller returned to Springwood in 1989’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, written by Leslie Bohem and directed by Stephen Hopkins. Some of the wounds on Freddy’s head in the original film were quite big and Miller went back to that. He kept the hooked nose but lost the cheeks and chin. The neck is almost chicken-like. Freddy looks withered and old in this movie. The hat is seemingly similar to the previous two entries but the sweater is different, brighter in color.
When Freddy returned for the final time in 1991’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, it was only natural his originator should return. By that I mean David Miller did the makeup again. With a script by Michael DeLuca, director Rachel Talalay’s Freddy Krueger is a strange hybrid between the 3/4 makeup and the 5 makeup. The fedora has changed again, looking much more like Indiana Jones’s fedora than ever before. The sores on Freddy’s face are a little smaller and the cheeks, chin, and nose are amplified again, but there’s a strange fleshiness to the face now. Maybe Englund gained weight? Either way, the makeup is some of the weakest in the franchise, because in close-ups, it looks like a man wearing a rubber mask.
Do I even have to talk about Freddy’s look in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare? Craven’s true return to the franchise as writer-director had him rewrite the rules and turn a magnifying glass on his own movie. The Freddy in this film isn’t really Freddy Krueger, but rather an evil spirit/demon that had inhabited Freddy. The look is purposely different, though Craven said in an interview sometime in the last year or so that he thinks he maybe should’ve left Freddy’s look alone. I disagree. David Miller also did the makeup for this movie.
How do you follow up a masterpiece? With a cheesy money-grab monster fight. Still, in 2003 I paid my money down to see Freddy vs. Jason, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift and directed by Ronny Yu. In recent years, this makeup had superseded the Yagher makeup from The Dream Master as the most recognizable, though it obviously has its origins in Yagher’s design, which is a smart choice. That big spot that’s roughly the shape of South America on Freddy’s left cheek is like a feature-defining mole. I can’t seem to find any one person responsible for the look of Freddy in this film, but do you really care? Neither do I. (Not true, I do care, but it’s past my bedtime and I need to finish this thing!). Anyway, the chin and cheek enhancements are gone again. The hooked nose is far less prevalent but still there. The exposed muscles are much darker in color while the melted flesh is much brighter in color than their predecessors. This makeup really looks like a fan-made version of Freddy’s makeup. I wonder if they moved to silicon in this version. Anyway, the hat is different, still Indiana Jonesish, but by this point, what were the chances that Harrison Ford and company would return to that old franchise? The sweater is also much, much too dark.
And, finally, the Freddy Krueger makeup for the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, written by Wesley Strick and Heisserer and directed by Samuel Bayer, goes realistic. To break free from the fantasy look that David Miller and Wes Craven agreed upon in 1984, they wanted Jackie Earl Haley’s Freddy to look more like a true burn victim. The problem is that when the camera is anywhere but up close, Freddy’s head looks like a meatball. Digital effects meant to enhance the design only hurt it because their work doesn’t match up from scene to scene, making there no one definite look to Freddy in this film. Even the hat changed throughout production. Basically, like the movie itself, the look is a mess.
All right. Are you ready for your test? I’ll let you review the material for a few moments and we’ll begin. Ready?
Test
What’s wrong with the DVD cover and the Blu-ray menu?
And next time, we’ll talk about the differences in Freddy’s glove between movies.
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!
Friday in Gautham Part VII: Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
With the Friday the 13th movies still making money but straining a very thin premise, Paramount and producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. were looking for something new to do with the franchise. Sean S. Cunningham was also interested in possibly doing something new with the franchise, especially now that there was a new kid on the block. The block happened to be on Elm Street in a sleepy town called Springwood.
In 1984, the fledgling New Line Cinema released a film by Cunningham’s protégé Wes Craven called A Nightmare on Elm Street. The movie was scary and had become a sleeper hit. The villain of the film, Fred Krueger, portrayed by the classically trained Robert Englund, sliced his way to the top of people’s Favorite Villains list with a concept unlike any that had been done before. New Line went ahead with a sequel even though Craven refused and 1985 saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. While the critical and fan response to the second movie was much less favorable than its predecessor, the movie earned more than the first movie, securing another sequel. In 1986, filming was underway on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. With the return of Wes Craven, along with his writing partner Bruce Wagner, on the story and script (along with Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell), anticipation was high. Freddy Krueger was already being mentioned alongside Jason Voorhees as one of the best monsters of 1980s horror.
Cunningham saw this as an opportunity to revitalize the series he co-created and pitched the idea of putting the two maniacs together in the style of the old horror movies. So began talks between Paramount Pictures and New Line Cinema. Paramount wanted to “rent” the rights to Freddy Krueger, Elm Street, and the rest. Being an old movie studio, it was in a position of power. Except that New Line’s new horror villain was the “It” Monster at that moment. Freddy had a sense of humor, ran around, and got people in their dreams while Jason just shambled about. So New Line proposed “renting” Jason, et al. Neither party would budge and the deal fell through. Still, the movie was pretty close to happening.
So with the Jason and Freddy match-up off, Paramount and Mancuso, Jr., went ahead with plans for a seventh Friday the 13th. Still, the idea that Jason had a formidable opponent was forefront in their mind, so writers Manuel Fidello and Daryl Haney gave Jason a psychic/telekinetic teenage girl to fight. It reminds me of that famous quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “I asked for a car, I got a computer.” Paramount asked for Jason vs. Freddy, they got Jason vs. Carrie.
This was the first Friday the 13th I believe I saw since it came on HBO/Cinemax the year after its release and by that point I was officially into horror. I liked it well enough at the age of 12, I guess. It was interesting, at least, the girl using her mind to move things. Since this was before I began reading Stephen King and hadn’t seen the movie Carrie, I didn’t have that as a frame of reference. That probably helped me somewhat like the movie back then.
The Day
Jason (Kane Hodder) looks like a monster, which is cool. Between the third movie and the sixth, he could just as well have been Michael Myers of Halloween–a dude with a mask killing late-teenagers/young adults. Somewhere he even got a jumpsuit like Myers. With this movie, director John Carl Buechler decided to really have Jason look like he’s been through the wringer. While the previous movie zombified him, this movie went all out. He’d been in a lake for years and now looked it with his clothes in tatters and bones visible. It also made Jason different from the other famous monsters of the 1980s.
Teeth!
The attempt at something different should also be given a nod. It would have been real easy to just have the kids be at a camp all over again and Jason inexplicably come back to life and kill them one by one. This time, there’s a telekinetic teenage girl named Tina (Lar Park Lincoln). There was a hint of spousal abuse that could be brought up and a doctor (Terry Kiser) who seemed to be taking advantage of his patient for personal gain. Tina’s powers are a little silly at times (try not laughing when a TV flies through the air when she’s upset at the doctor and her mother) but the fights with Jason are almost interesting and somewhat entertaining.
Terry Kiser is good in this movie. His is a face you would recognize as he was in so much in the 1980s. I mean, he was Bernie in the Weekend at Bernie’s movies! He has a quality about him that’s just kind of slimy and he pulls off the Doctor-Up-To-No-Good thing so well.
Trust him…he’s a doctor….
The Night
The acting has gone back to being uninteresting at best. Some of it is horrible. Most of it is forgettable. Lar Park Lincoln does her best with the material but it just falls flat. I almost wonder if a better director, or better script, would have helped her. The rest of the cast fits into stereotypes, one way or another.
Though the look of Jason now distinguishes him fully from Michael Myers, I was distracted by the make-up effects for him. You can see his teeth and jaw exposed on the left side of his face and his ribs and spine on his back. Yet, they never feel like they’re in him, but rather on top of him, which they are. It was a valiant effort that ultimately fails and actually distracted me.
The beginning and ending are lame. The movie starts with young Tina running out of a house on Crystal Lake (where we see Jason floating beneath the surface, looking like he did in the previous movie). Young Tina climbs into a boat and rows away from the dock. We’ve heard the sound of her parents fighting and her father hitting her mother. Then Daddy comes out and chases Tina, saying he’s sorry and that he’ll never hit Mom again and all that shit. In a moment of anger, Tina uses the Force to destroy the dock, which means Daddy falls into Crystal Lake, to his doom. When she comes back for “therapy” years later, Tina goes to the dock and senses a presence underwater (I think…this is never really clear). Then she uses her telekinesis to bring Jason back, thinking it’s her father.
At the end, the way Jason is finally “killed” is lame because Tina, once again on the dock, her new boyfriend with her, is being attacked by Jason (who we thought was blown up with the house). Tina uses the Force again to feel a presence under the lake and WHAMMO! Daddy comes out of the water, through the dock, and brings Jason down with him. Unlike Jason, though, who decayed underwater for almost a decade, Daddy is a little dirty but is otherwise the same guy we saw in the prologue.
Look intent…aaannnd ACTION! I said action. Oh, never mind.
And while we’re talking about Daddy here, let’s talk about how fucked up this movie is when it comes to women. Now, I know that the Friday the 13th movies tend to objectify women, but there are some strongish women in most of the movies. Or at least I think they’re supposed to be strong, because it’s almost always a woman who defeats Jason, or helps defeat him. But bear with me here. So in the prologue, we hear the mother get slapped by the father, who, moments later, tells his little girl that he won’t do it again, even though it seems he’s made this promise before. So she kills him. Now, she comes back in her therapy (which is really just the doctor using her powers to make a name for himself) to the location where Daddy met his fate. She is distraught at the memory that she killed him. Her mother tries to assuage her grief. There’s a photo of Dad on the wall in the house. She killed her Dad, she killed her Dad…waaaah! And then she uses the same powers she used to bring Jason back to bring him back to save her. Has she forgotten the reason she killed him? Has she forgotten that he beat her mother? I know that a child may feel guilt at this, and that guilt might carry over the years, but how can Mom be so understanding? Or am I just reading too much into this subplot?
While the filmmakers attempted something different, they fail. By now, it’s beginning to feel like gimmicks are being thrown together. Not that the whole series is anything more than gimmicks. Jason in 3D! Jason dies! A new killer! Jason lives! Jason fights…um…er…you said we can’t use Freddy?….um…Jason fights…[sees Stephen King’s Carrie on the bookcase]…a telekinetic girl! Here’s the thing with the Friday the 13th movies and the character of Jason Voorhees as he’d been presented up to and including this point: You can’t do much with him. He is a zombie who doesn’t eat his victims, who has superhuman strength, and always manages to find a machete. He’s just a machine that kills. So you could have him fight a telekinetic girl, Freddy Krueger, or the Harlem Globetrotters but the fact remains that he’s just going to shamble around killing people.
Now the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme is in your head but it feels like this.
Saturday the 14th
I realized while writing that last paragraph that it was becoming the wrap-up, so I’ll wrap it up. By the seventh movie in this franchise, Jason Voorhees is a bore. The sixth movie proved to be the exception that proves the rule. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood was made for $2.8 million and earned $19.2 million after its May, 1988 release. Compare that to A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master, which was released that August and cost $13 million (about $10 million more than the former) but made $49.3 million, more than any of the original Friday the 13th movies had ever made.
The only thing the filmmakers could do to keep him interesting was throw in different gimmicks. What would be next? Freddy was too successful on his own. Fight Michael Myers, whose own franchise had been rejuvenated based on the successes of Jason and Freddy? Have Jason fight Superman, whose movie career was over for a bit? Or maybe a change of scenery would be it. Something silly, like sending Jason to New York.
Yeah, right. Who would buy that?
Blllaaaahhh!
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 2: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985)
So, the legend has it that, because strong word of mouth made A Nightmare on Elm Street a sleeper hit, Robert Shaye and the other folks at the burgeoning New Line Cinema asked Wes Craven for a sequel. Wes, being a smart guy and wanting to pursue other things, basically said, “I’ve said what I have to say in this world right now. Thanks, but no.” New Line was all like, “Well, we’ll do it without you, sucka.” And they did. To teach Wes a lesson, they hired an incompetent writer and worse director to make the movie.
Okay, some of that history is made up. Craven had originally wanted A Nightmare on Elm Street to be one film with a happy ending and New Line, which was trying to actually get off the ground, wanted that last frame Boo! so they could have a sequel. When Craven passed on a sequel, Robert Shaye went to David Chaskin, who’d been working at New Line while writing screenplays at night, to write the screenplay. Chaskin wrote the screenplay and handled rewrites and New Line tapped Jack Sholder to direct.
This was the second half of the double feature on HBO in the fall of 1986 that introduced me to Freddy Krueger. Even at nine, I didn’t like the movie very much. I say it’s the second worse of the series (stay tuned for what I think is the worst!). So, let’s get into it.
The Dreams
Kim Myers as Lisa. I’m not sure why, but I liked Myers as Lisa and still do. To be superficial, she’s not the most beautiful woman in the Nightmare movies, but there’s always been something about her that I found appealing. That, and I think she did the best acting work in the movie, except for maybe Robert Englund, but he doesn’t count. Considering the material, she did a pretty good job conveying the sort of emotion required to tell Jesse-in-Freddy, with a straight face, that she loves him. It is something that would challenge even Meryl Streep (whom Myers resembles) but she managed to pull it off. If Freddy’s Revenge had been as good as the original, she may have had a chance at being as well thought-of as Johnny Depp. Except that she probably wouldn’t have gotten on the cover of Tiger Beat, or the lead role in 21 Jump Street, or been Tim Burton’s alter ego. But still, she’s good.
Sorry, Lisa, you’re stuck in this movie with him.
Robert Englund. Kinda goes without saying, yes? Englund’s portrayal as Freddy Krueger is still scary. He still plays with his victims a bit, though this script doesn’t allow it much. I’m still a little disturbed by the scene after he comes out of Jesse (Mark Patton) in Grady’s bedroom. Grady (Robert Rusler) is lying in a heap by the door and Jesse is crying, bloody, in front of a full-length mirror. Instead of Jesse seeing himself, though, he sees Freddy, who is laughing and taunting him. It’s a fairly disturbing scene in a fairly milquetoast movie. He’s fun to watch in the infamous pool party scene, too. While the scene will be spoken about in further detail later, something about Freddy running rampant through the pool party is funny, and Robert Englund does his best to make it scary. He does an okay job.
The 1980s cheese factor is something that took twenty-eight years for this movie to achieve. When the movie came out, it was just lame. Now to look at it is to see why this movie, more than Craven’s original, is a sample of 1980s teen cinema. It was trying so hard to appeal to teenagers. While Craven’s movie was about telling a good, scary story (with some subtext below the surface), Sholder’s movie is an attempt to get teenagers’ money. From the outdated eighties fashions and music, to the stereotypical way in which the parents and the children interact, it makes the movie fun to watch. The effects are cheesy, the clothes and music are cheesy, and it all makes me think 1985 in big, neon-colors with a checkered backdrop. It actually makes the movie charming now, no small task for this turkey. Too bad it took nearly thirty years.
Its length. At 90 minutes, it’s too long, but at least it wasn’t two-and-a-half hours like Transformers. The movie is over before you know it, like a shot from the doctor.
The exploding parakeet. Just kidding, that’s one of–
The Nightmares
I’m going to try to keep this brief. Good luck with that on this turd of a movie, the second worst Nightmare movie of the franchise (see how I do that? Now you really have to keep checking back!).
Most of the cast. Mark Patton and Robert Rusler do the best they can as Jesse and Grady, but they belong on a sitcom, not in the follow-up to one of the best horror movies of all time. Clu Gulager and Hope Lange as Jesse’s parents are appallingly bad. They would be parents on a failed ’80s sitcom. Marshall Bell as the gay, sadistic gym teacher does what you’d expect for a role that is nothing more than a stereotype. And that’s one of the issues with this movie, almost every role in this movie is a stereotype. Jesse is the Hero, and New Teenager At School And Is Misunderstood. Lisa is the Girl Who Too Quickly Falls For The Hero/Rich Girl Who Isn’t A Bitch. Grady is the Enemy-Turned-Friend/Overprivileged Kid. Mr. & Mrs. Walsh are the Suburban Dad (Who Knows Best) & Mom (Who Puts Up With Dad). The kid sister is, well, the kid sister. Again, it’s a testament to Kim Myers that she made Lisa live as well as she did.
The story. In this interview, David Chaskin defends his work on A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. You can’t blame the guy. He probably did the best he could and, for him, it was just another horror flick. It was a follow-up to a movie that was doing well for New Line (to everyone’s surprise) but not the iconic film it has since become. But the story is flawed. According to Chaskin in the interview linked above, “I’ve heard a few complaints that we strayed too far from the formula (i.e., bringing Freddy into the material world) and that somehow, the syntax didn’t jive with the original, although I’ve yet to hear an example that holds up to scrutiny.”
True. Craven brought Freddy into the material world when Nancy first plucks his hat off his head while Roger Rabbit is running his tests, and again at the end for the Looney Tunes segment of the movie. I’m sure in Chaskin’s mind bringing Freddy Krueger into the material world (Madonna had said it was so just the year before) via his possession of Jesse wasn’t much different. But here’s an argument he can scrutinize: If Freddy had the power to possess someone and come into the waking world to gain his revenge against the parents who burned him, why bother with the whole nightmare thing? Why not just possess Nancy in the first movie (or Glenn, for that matter)? The answer is because it’s called A Nightmare on Elm Street, not A Possession on Elm Street. Or if you really want Freddy in the real world, maybe have poor ol’ Freddy stuck in the real world ever since the events of the first Nightmare and he’s trying to get back into the dream. He’s effectually powerless here and wants his power back. But even that idea has holes.
And I thought I had stomach issues…. Apparently, anatomy isn’t the
special effects department’s strong suit.
The wise thing would have been to truly built on Craven’s concept, explore Krueger’s history deeper, see if Heather Langenkamp would return as Nancy, and perhaps go even more fantastic.
Let’s not forget that Craven did the smart thing by making the female lead the hero of the movie. To make Mark Patton’s Jesse the hero is sort of a slap in the face. First, the actor is too weak. Second, the idea that the female lead was more than just a girl to be chased by the villain and to bare her breasts was something pretty cool, not even Jamie Lee Curtis was as forceful in fighting Michael Myers, but Jesse’s possession doesn’t do much for him as the main character. It is up to Lisa to save Jesse, which shifts the focus onto her, who is not the narrative center of the story until the pool party. Shifting focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing–Hitchcock does so in Psycho and even Craven did it in the first Nightmare (it’s easy to forget, but Amanda Weiss’s Tina seems to be the lead in the movie until she dances on the ceiling)–but in the last third of the movie? I don’t know….
The director. In an interview on the 1999 Nightmare DVD set, Jack Sholder comes out and says (I’m paraphrasing) that some directors use horror movies as an art form to release their own fears while other directors make horror movies to be fun. He implied Craven was the former and he was the latter. Sholder got some good, creepy shots in the movie. When Jesse notices Freddy in the basement cooking an arm in the furnace, struggles with the basement door with Freddy on the other side, then turns to find Krueger standing there, it’s scary. At the pool party (still coming to that, too), there’s a shot of Freddy looking back at Lisa, and he’s lit with the flames, making him creepy. But Sholder seems too willing to cop to what he thinks the teenage moviegoer in the mid-1980s wanted to see rather than making a scary movie that would match the original. Some of the “scares,” including the exploding parakeet, a creepy rat in an old refrigerator, and the dog with the human face all fall flat. The allowance of the majority of the actors to be rejects from bad sitcoms is another problem with his direction. And there’s more, so much more….
The only thing scary about this is that someone
thought it would scare people.
Freddy’s new look. In the first nightmare, the character is Fred Krueger. In one scene, while Nancy is being chased by him, she runs into her house and closes and locks the door. She starts up the stairs and her feet sink into them. Then the glove crashes through the window in the door and Krueger appears with a mask of Tina’s face. In Tina’s voice, he says, “Help, Nancy! Save me from–” He rips the mask off and, in his own voice, finishes: “–Freddy!” That’s the first time he’s called Freddy. If memory serves, that’s the only time in the first movie that he’s called “Freddy.” Of course, that name is in the title of this movie, thereby making him Freddy Krueger forever after. And if that wasn’t enough of a change, for whatever reason, Sholder (or the producers) decided to change the way Freddy looked.
For starters, they gave him stronger cheekbones. They also placed a hook on his nose, a nod to the Wicked Witch of the West. They also thought he’d look older with brown eyes instead of Robert Englund’s green/blue. Because Freddy possesses and comes out of Jesse, his knives come out of a burned hand in some scenes and the traditional glove in others. Lastly, his outfit is different. He’s still wearing a fedora, though it’s a different shape. And he’s still wearing a dirty red-and-green sweater, though this one is more form-fitting and has stripes on the arms. The makeup would change with each new director, but the basic sweater and hat would remain the same. The sweater with the solid red arms that appeared in the first movie wouldn’t be seen on Freddy again.
Is this a minor gripe? Sure, but why mess with something that worked so well before.
The knives coming from the hand still bother me.
The pool party. Yes, there’s a 1980s teen movie pool party in the middle. Lisa’s holding a pool party at her big friggin’ house (apparently, Elm Street is one of those streets that has a lot of social classes living on it, from the lower classes [think Rod Lane and some of the kids from the third movie] to the middle [Nancy, et al] to the upper [Lisa, Kristen in the third movie]) and invited Jesse, who is depressed and a bummer to be around. She finally confesses her interest in him and they make out, ready to go further when a large, greenish tongue comes out of his mouth (Freddy’s tongue, which we saw a lot of in the first one, always looked relatively unburned).
Jesse does what any boy with a weirdly long tongue and half-naked girl in front of him would: Run to his friend’s house (and we’ll get to that soon enough). Well, when he returns to the party with his now-dead friend’s blood all over him, freakin’ out about how “He’s inside me” (yes, I promise, soon), Lisa continues to tell him how great he is and…well…Freddy pops out again.
Not only does Freddy come to kill Lisa, and tells her in Jesse’s voice that he loves her or something like that, but he apparently freaks out with the knowledge that this nerdy kid is now in him, too, and he leaps out of some French doors, disappearing in mid air.
Waitasecond, the nine-year-old Billy thought. If Freddy is in the real world now, how can he vanish in mid air? The answer: Bad writing. But that’s just the beginning. Because then the pool begins to boil, and the hot dogs explode and catch on fire. The teenagers take care of it and seem like everything’s cool–until Freddy pops out of the ground and starts chasing them. Kids are running to a chainlink fence, where they burn their hands when the links get red-hot. Fire erupts around the edges of the yard as the kids are trampling other kids. And then there’s the future psychologist, who tells Freddy, “It’s all right, man. No one wants to hurt you.” Then Freddy introduces the douchebag to his claw. Oh, and there’s the eruption of flame that backlights Freddy with his arms out, Christlike, to give the message, “You are all my children now.”
All these silly antics in the movie could work, if they were in another movie, or if it were someone’s nightmare. But since it’s established that Freddy is now in our world, the waking world, how does all this happen?
The homoerotic subtext to the movie. I’m not against homosexuality in movies. In 1985, we were still five/six years away from Tom Hanks winning an Oscar for portraying a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia. It would have been interesting to have an actual gay character in the Nightmare series. Imagine the horror Freddy could have provoked on him on a psychological level? And it would have been a great way of humanizing, in a popular franchise, something that was still the butt of too many jokes. In the interview I linked to previously, Chaskin says there is a definite homosexual undercurrent running throughout A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Jack Sholder, the great intellectual director, says there’s no such thing. Who to believe? Well, there’s that line: “He’s inside me.” Guess we know.
But that’s not where it stops. Let’s say that, on an intellectual level, Jesse is uncertain of his sexuality and he’s torn between feelings for Lisa and Grady, you have the makings of an interesting horror film that could have seriously tackled a topic that many young people deal with. Instead, we’re given the coach, played by Marshall Bell, who turns up when Jesse finds himself in a leather bar. Basically, the old gay/leather bar schtick from the Police Academy movies. The coach takes Jesse back to the gym to make him run laps, and then go into the shower. Of course, Freddy pops out and kills the coach.
“Have you seen Mahoney?”
Actually, it wasn’t Robert Englund in the scene. Unable to film it for some reason or another, a stuntman played Freddy in that scene, with all the spunk that the stuntmen playing Jason often had. In other words, none at all.
Instead of seriously and maturely handling a controversial topic, they do it with “subtlety” and stereotype.
Neither your Freddy nor mine.
Yeah, I can see how David Chaskin would think that Nightmare fans don’t have an argument that holds up to close scrutiny. And how Jack Sholder can sit in his interviews and smugly speak about how Craven did his thing and Sholder did his own. Seriously, guys!
Of course, Chaskin and Sholder are so original, they decide that they will kill Freddy with…love. Lisa tells Freddy she loves him (well, she’s talking to Jesse, who she believes is in their somewhere) and then kisses him. Yeah! Freddy gets it on! Well…almost. Fire comes from nowhere and Freddy gets burned…again. Leaving wimpy Jesse behind.
Freddy got more action dead than I did in high school.
And then there’s the essential “Boo!” ending, with Freddy’s glove coming out of Lisa’s friend’s stomach/chest on a school bus, etc. & so on.
Of Interest
The town where Elm Street is located is given the name Springwood in this movie. It has been said that they were originally going to call the town Springfield, but New Line’s legal department was worried considering how many Springfields there are in the U.S. and how many of them have Elm Streets. I like that Wes Craven never specifically mentions the town; this could be happening anywhere.
Random Kim Myers picture.
The Morning After
Love runs deep, but hatred deeper. I spent about 1,600 words on A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film I love, and 3,300 words on A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, a film I hate. Weird, huh? Look, it breaks down like this: With a little thought, with a director who cared and a writer who cared, New Line Cinema could have followed up Wes Craven’s movie with another classic horror movie, the best horror movie sequel since The Bride of Frankenstein. Instead, we’re given a typical 1980s teen schlockfest. The ideas are boring, the story is silly, and the acting is terrible. I hit on what I feel are the major points, but I could go on for another 3,000 words.
Still, this movie helped me fall in love with horror, and made me a fan of Freddy Krueger. After watching these two movies when I was nine, things were different. I found a new path that diverged (yet in many ways followed) the path set before me by the Star Wars movies and superhero comic books. So imagine my surprise when Dad took me to see Sylvester Stallone in Over the Top and, in the theater lobby, I saw a huge cardboard display for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. That’s more of a memory of that day than the Stallone vehicle. I was on the road for my first horror movie on the big screen, and a seat to witness the birth of an icon.
Johnny Depp stole his Walkman.
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A Note:
Freddy must be pissed off at me. While I was writing the first draft of this essay, Pamela was preparing food for some company and cut herself badly. She says the knife sucked and blamed that. The knife has a skinny, curved blade, much like what one might find on a claw. I’m blaming Freddy.
Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 