A Nightare On Elm Street (1984)

I have a confession to make.  I haven't been spreading my love equally across the great horror franchises.  When I started this blog, I quickly reviewed a few of the original Nightmare movies, but I got distracted by shiny objects and never really got back on track.  In the meantime, I have reviewed every single Friday the 13th and most of the Halloweens.  Out of a sense of fairness, it is high time I returned to the A Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, and where else should I start, but with the original?

A Nightmare On Elm Street begins with a mysterious figure crafting an all-purpose murder glove in a boiler room somewhere.  Coincidentally, Tina (Amanda Wyss) has a nightmare where she is chased by a mysterious figure wearing a murder glove!  It's always nice when you don't have to wait for plot points to pay off.  Tina runs from this creepy, fedora-and-ugly-sweater-wearing, razor-gloved meanie, but he catches up with her.

Maybe he just wants a hug

Right when he is about to kill her, Tina wakes up screaming in bed.  It was just a dream!  Except...her nightgown has slash marks in it, right where her nightmare man cut her!  Dum-dah-DUMMMMMM!!!  On a side note, teenagers wear nightgowns?  Anyway, Tina's not the only teen having dreams like this.  Her boyfriend, Rod (Jsu Garcia), her friend, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp, in his film debut), have all been having nightmares; despite Tina being openly creeped out by her dream, none of her friends comes forward and admits to having similar nightmares because teenagers don't have empathy.

Or props that make sense in their scenes.  What is with the birds by the boombox?

Since Tina makes such a big deal about her dream, Nancy and Glen agree to keep her company while her parents are out of town.  Rod shows up, too, just in time for some sex scenes that sound remarkably like people trying very hard to sound like they're having all the sex in the world.  After Rod finishes pleasing his woman, this happens:

He becomes the Magneto of flesh?

An invisible attacker slices the hell out of Tina and then, just for giggles, reverses her personal gravity; this was done presumably to force her family to clean her bloody footprints off the ceiling, which looks suspiciously like a deck.  That's when things go a little crazy.  The police, led by Nancy's estranged police lieutenant father (John Saxon), assume that Rod killed Tina (...on the ceiling...?) because he was the only one in the room.  Rod eventually gets caught and winds up in prison, but not before admitting to Nancy that he has had nightmares about a man with a razor bladed murder glove.  This blows Nancy's mind.  To be fair, it should.  That night, as she is dreaming, Nancy watches Mr. Razorfingers entering Rod's cell, preparing to kill.  When she wakes, Nancy knows that Rod is in danger, but no one believes that an invisible dream monster is going to attack him.  They should have, because Nancy was right.  After this point, Nancy is a teen on a mission: stop this mysterious dream monster!  Or at least find out who he is!

...before he falls through that latex wall and lands on her damn head!

The acting in A Nightmare On Elm Street is not very good.  In the lead role, Heather Langenkamp is pretty awful and sadly doesn't die (or does she...?).  She didn't annoy me, but she's not very likable and has trouble with any part of her character that can't be described as a "wet blanket."  Amanda Wyss was a little better as Tina, although she was also pretty basic.  Jsu Garcia was one-dimensional, but his one dimension was that of an insensitive rebel-type, and he did that fairly well.  Johnny Depp wasn't much better, with some of his line readings (especially "WoooOOOOoooo") being painful to watch.  On the bright side, his character didn't demand much acting, and Depp at least managed to get the most memorable death scene in the film.

If you're not going to be good in a movie, at least try to die well

Robert Englund spends most of this movie in the shadows as the evil Fred (not Freddy) Krueger.  Freddy doesn't display his trademark humor or cackle much in this first entry, but I think some of the visuals with Freddy are at their most iconic here.

That's a great introduction shot

Still, Englund isn't at his best here, if only because the script is not sure what direction they want the character to go; Freddy is a presence in this movie more than he is an actual character.  John Saxon actually headlined this movie, which is hilarious in retrospect.  In turn, he was about as good as John Saxon normally is --- he's a perfectly acceptable B-movie actor.  Rounding out the main cast, Ronee Blakley was absolutely horrible in every conceivable way as Nancy's alcoholic mother.  In all fairness, her character is terrible.  Still, Blakely should be able to act circles around Heather Lagenkamp (she is an Oscar nominee, after all), and that just doesn't happen here.

A Nightmare On Elm Street was written and directed by Wes Craven, after he read about (I shit you not) Asian Death Syndrome.  The basic idea here is a chilling one: what if the danger in your dreams was real?  As such, Craven goes out of his way to make a menacing villain, and he does so with some great visual scenes.

That's not Freddy.  That's a subtle warning to not date Nancy.

As far as his direction of the actors goes, Craven did a pretty awful job.  I honestly couldn't tell you if this cast had their lines memorized or were using cue cards.  The pacing in the film is okay, but it's a little slow for a slasher movie.  And that's what this is, oddly enough.  There are elements in the plot that could have made this far more suspenseful and frightening, but Craven opted for a simpler (and dumber) take.  I like the basic idea, but it's not very scary, exciting, or unpredictable, despite having the whole dream monster angle.

The special effects in A Nightmare On Elm Street had some definitely good moments, but it's pretty inconsistent overall.  Glen and Tina's death scenes are pretty great, no doubt about it.  I don't know what it is that makes them so memorable --- is it just the fact that they wind up on the ceiling? --- but they definitely stand out in the genre.  I also really like the moments where the audience is aware of Freddy's presence, but Nancy is not, like when he pushes his face in the wall above her bed, or when she is sitting in the bathtub.  Unfortunately, there are also moments like this:

Unless those are expanding dildos coming out from his shoulder, I'm not impressed

Why is it supposed to be frightening that Freddy can walk slowly with cut-rate Stretch Armstrong arms?  There are other moments that are okay, but have definitely aged a bit over the years.

Is that supposed to be silly putty?

On the whole, though, I think the look and feel of the special effects scenes work pretty well, even twenty-nine years later.

What about the horror, though?  For being a slasher movie, the Nightmare movies have always had a fairly low body count, and A Nightmare On Elm Street definitely sets that precedent.  Four people officially die in this movie.  Granted, two of those kills are pretty awesome, but...just four?!?  LAME. Worse than the low blood and gore count is the fact that this film completely ignores the easiest and most fun possibility for horror: the dreams.  Aside from a few bits with Nancy dreaming about Tina's talking corpse, the only dreamscape we see is Freddy's Land of Boiler Room Fun.  Dreams offer so many possibilities and even one good, weird one would have made a huge difference to the tone of this movie.  It might have even added *gasp* suspense to this slasher pic!

Don't get me wrong, A Nightmare On Elm Street is definitely better than most movies starring Freddy Krueger (noteworthy exception: Freddy Vs. Jason).  I just had a memory of it being actually good instead of just promising.  Really, how many horror franchises have a villain that has at least a kernel of justification in his back story?  Yes, he was evil, but the dude got lynched --- that may not be the best reason to kill teenagers, but at least he has a small excuse.  Unfortunately, most of the promising ideas aren't fully formed.  What makes Freddy Krueger stand out from his slasher movie brethren is his personality, and that is sorely missing from this movie.  Well, that and any logic whatsoever when it comes to when Freddy can kill you --- I'm pretty sure that only one person was actually asleep when they died, which makes no sense.  Even considering its many shortcomings, A Nightmare On Elm Street does have a unique feel to it, which goes a long way for the discerning fan of 80s horror movies.  Is it a classic?  I wouldn't say that, but it has its moments.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The horror franchise "reboot" trend is an understandable one.  Most horror franchises start with a low-budgeted surprise hit movie, and the sequels add gore and special effects, but never match the effect of the original movie or idea.  I totally get why movie producers would want to scrap all the continuity and baggage from years of lame sequels and try to start anew.  Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have all had reboots/reimaginings in the past few years, so breathing new life into Freddy Kreuger seemed inevitable.  Personally, I would have preferred the wish-it-would-but-never-gonna-happen Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash to have been made, but that's just me: a fan of awesomeness.

The story begins with Dean (Kellan Lutz) nodding asleep while at a diner.  He doesn't want to sleep because he is having some nasty nightmares, but we don't get much insight into them here.  When Dean's girlfriend, Kris (Katie Cassidy), arrives to meet him, Dean falls asleep once more; this time, it's fatal.  In the dream, Dean tries to protect himself with a knife from a shadowy, fedora-wearing, clawed-glove-wearing villain.  The villain turns the knife inward toward Dean and slowly pushes it toward his body.  In the real world, it looks like Dean's knife hand wants to kill him --- and succeeds.  He basically committed hari kari on his throat.  With Dean's death, a group of kids in town, start to admit to having the same nightmare; some guy with a hat and a clawed glove is forcing them to have bad dreams.  But bad dreams can't hurt anyone, right?  Well, I doubt this is your first exposure to Nightmare, but here goes anyway...SPOILER: They can.  And will.  Anyway, at Dean's funeral, Kris notices a picture of herself with Dean as preschoolers.  That's weird...they met for the first time in high school...or did they?  It turns out that all the kids who are having (and dying in) these dreams --- Nancy (Rooney Mara), Jesse (Thomas Dekker), and Quentin (Kyle Gallner) all went to the same preschool.  And, thanks to some detective work, they figure out that the mysterious dream figure is a man named Freddy Kreuger (Jackie Earle Haley).  But why is he hunting these kids?  And how?  For God's sake, I must know the origin of this supernatural phenomenon!

Actually, I don't need to know how Freddy attacks you in your dreams, but it is interesting that this film never even makes a half-assed attempt to explain that unusual course of events.  Really, there isn't even any explicit motivation given to Freddy, either.  Sure, they retell his origin, making it grimmer for today's jaded viewer, but there's never a "Freddy's going to kill me because ____".  I find that strange.  They just accept that Freddy is in their dreams and that he's trying to kill them.  Well, okay.  Maybe I'm just the curious type.  But, while I'm asking questions of motivation, why is Freddy attacking now?  It's been between ten and fourteen years since Freddy's had motivation.  What's with the delay?  We can't all be Jimmy John's fast, but that's a long time to hang out in dreams, not killing people.

Obviously, I have a few basic issues with the basic premise behind this movie.  Beyond the villain's motivation, how was this movie?  Pretty terrible, actually.  The movie starts with a kid being murdered in front of his friends and stays that cheery throughout.  These teens are, at no time, even remotely happy.  They're not even sarcastic, which is far more shocking than the happy thing.  With such a serious tone, the movie doesn't really have anywhere to go.  I'm not saying that horror movies need levity, but I need the actors to show a variety of emotions, if only to indicate that one scene is supposed to be scarier than another.  The big story when this movie was released was that the filmmakers had decided to make Freddy less of a hyena-laughing jackass and more of a killer.  I love that idea (the "Vegas Freddy" movies are pretty terrible), but the execution leaves something to be desired.  For some reason, Freddy still likes to laugh, but he doesn't make jokes.  He's not even being mean (aside from all the murdering) or a jerk, so his chuckles come off as very unnatural.  And, I'll be honest, I didn't think the realistic burn victim makeup did anything to enhance Freddy's menace.  There were moments where the recessed eyes and lack of facial definition made me think I was watching a muppet designed to teach children about fifth-degree burns.  So, the tone of the movie was too one-dimensional and the villain felt a little off.  What about the story?  Let me answer that question with a question: how much do you love back story?  If you answered anything less than "a crapload," then you're going to be annoyed.  The movie makes it seem like there is a mystery in Freddy's origin that will blow your mind when it comes to light, so the story spends a lot of time trying to develop that secret.  But the secret ends up that Freddy is a mean bastard that likes to kill people.  It's a little underwhelming, as far as secrets go, and the story is all about uncovering it.  Blech.

The acting was as good as it needed to be in a horror movie with this level of prominence.  The kids all look fairly young (they ranged from 22 to 25 years old), which is nice to see in a movie about high school kids, but that's probably the best thing I can say about them.  Every single character was one-dimensional and had no chances to develop; they're scared of death, then they're scared of sleeping and dying, and then they die --- it's not much of a dramatic arc.  I don't think any of them were overly terrible (except Kellan Lutz, whose line delivery is on par with that of a bored corpse), but the plot and dialogue make that hard to determine for sure.  I thought Aaron Yoo's uncredited cameo (which I didn't think people made, unless they were really famous) was some of the film's best acting, but that's not saying much.  As the film's resident adults, Clancy Brown and Connie Britton both had their talents wasted, with few scenes and less dialogue.  Jackie Earle Haley took over the Freddy Kreuger role that Robert Englund had played in seven movies.  His take on the character was, at times, pretty sinister; unfortunately, this movie delivers no actual scary moments (or even the startling ones), so I was pretty disappointed with the new, meaner Freddy.  This was the first feature film that Samuel Bayer directed, after a distinguished music video career that includes Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Blind Melon's No Rain, and all of Green Day's American Idiot videos.  Bayer can tell a story decently well, but if he can work with professional actors to get the right performances, the proof is not evident here.

Forget all that "acting" and "story" junk, what about the violence?  This is a horror movie, so the violence and nudity should help grade this movie on a curve.  As for nudity, there is none.  At all.  There's nothing remotely sexual about this movie.  So that's definitely different than most horror flicks, but not unheard of in the Nightmare series.  As for the violence, there are only three death scenes and one of them was a remake of the ceiling kill in the original movie.  There's nothing wrong with recycling a classic kill, but it looked as good now as it did then --- it just wasn't as scary, since I had seen that exact kill before.  The third kill (the first one was the one that opened the movie) was only decent, but I liked how Freddy taunted his victim; this was one of only two times where Freddy was intimidating at all.  A Nightmare On Elm Street has never been, as a series, about the body count.  I was surprised that a reboot wouldn't raise the number of corpses, but I was shocked by how visually boring these scenes were. There were maybe thirty dream sequences in the movie, and only two were even moderately cool or imaginative, and I'm pretty sure they lifted something from Silent Hill.  This movie even directly lifted two of the original film's best moments (Freddy's glove in the bathtub and Freddy's face in the wall), so the best parts of this movie were done exactly the same way twenty-five years ago!  So, let's recap: no nudity, mediocre (at best) kills, and no originality.  Even by horror standards, this movie sucked.

Man, the dream sequences pissed me off.  This is a movie where you get killed or chased or whatever in your dreams...but we don't ever see any of these kids dreaming.  Freddy doesn't interrupt them during a dream about being a spy or the Dos Equis guy or seducing that special someone --- they dream about being in a creepy industrial warehouse or boiler room or something.  Way to miss the boat, people.  You can dream anything, so these movie sequences could add all sorts of character insight, visual appeal, or extraordinary things that are not limited by realism.  Shouldn't the scary thing about Freddy be that he gets us in our dreams?  This is just dull writing, but you can't expect much when a first-time screenwriter is brought in to polish up the script from the writer of Doom.

Since this is a remake, and I have seen every Nightmare to date, I might as well address how it stacks up to the other movies.  Nightmare, unlike most other horror franchises, has always been tangled in its story continuity.  Does anyone really care about the details about Freddy's life and afterlife?  The answer is no.  We want to be frightened by something that we have no protection against, a monster that kills us in our sleep.  I liked that this movie tried to escape the convoluted story of the series, but they just introduced the least mysterious mystery I have ever seen in a horror movie, instead.  This movie doesn't capture the defenseless fear that makes the original film and Part 3 fun to watch, either.  Instead, it takes a more serious and boring path to its final destination, the bad movie pile.  It should feel right at home, though, since it's about as bad as the rest of the Nightmare series.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Metafilms are, almost by definition, kind of obnoxious.  Any time a movie is about the making of a movie, you know that the filmmakers are trying to be overly clever.  Usually, this requires a great script and director (see Adaptation).  Wes Craven, the writer and director of New Nightmare, is neither.  Don't get me wrong, I like the guy; I don't think anyone can make a convincing argument that his entries in the A Nightmare On Elm Street series are not the best of the bunch.  This movie, though, tries something new and doesn't quite pull it off.

Ostensibly, this move takes place in the "real world."  The actors (at least, all the Nightmare veterans) all play themselves.  Freddy Kreuger is not a creature of dream, but a character created by Craven and played on the screen by Robert Englund.  Heather Langenkamp is the primary character, but John Saxon, Tuesday Knight, and many other actors and producers from the series have small roles.  Essentially, Freddy Kreuger is trying to leave the realm of fiction and enter reality.  Something is different with Freddy, though; this is not the clownish "Vegas Freddy" of the past few movie installments.  This Freddy is meaner, with claws that appear to be a part of his body.  Wes Craven (the character) theorizes that this new Freddy is actually an evil dream entity that the masses have equated with Freddy Kreuger.  Since that is how the world sees this entity, it has assumed the guise of the Freddy character.  Craven believes that the only way to keep the entity at bay is to use art (in this case, a movie) to express the violence and evil that it wants to perform.  This will temporarily sate the entity's lust for carnage, until another movie can be made to keep the entity trapped in fiction.

No, really.  That's the plot.  If there's one thing I can safely say about this movie, it is that it does not insult the audience's intelligence...just their suspension of disbelief.

One of the downsides to making a Nightmare movie featuring the actors from past Nightmares is that those actors were never very good.  It doesn't matter that Heather Langenkamp is playing herself, she is still an awkward actress.  That's far more enjoyable to watch than Wes Craven's struggle to convey an emotion beyond "vaguely tired."  I've seen him in interviews, so I know a little about him...let me tell you, I have never seen somebody struggle so much to convincingly play themselves in a movie.  While this may sound strange to those unfamiliar with the Nightmare series, Robert Englund is clearly the best actor in the film.  He is the only actor that seems comfortable playing himself and he delivers as both the buffoonish Freddy and the new, improved "Super Shredder"-esque Freddy.

This is the seventh installment in the A Nightmare On Elm Street series.  By this point, Freddy had already done pretty much everything he could do.  He succeeded in killing all the children of those who lynched him, he became a dream demon, he he expanded his audience from the Elm Street kids to all kids, and he had been (allegedly) definitively killed.  I get it.  The series needed new life.  This, though, feels more like a homage than a horror movie.  Most of the kills (while done pretty well) are direct references to the more famous Nightmare scenes.  The plot tries to be grounded in reality but must come up with overly complicated justifications for key plot points at the same time.  I admire Craven's attempt, but it just doesn't quite work here; the effort paid off better when Craven fine-tuned this concept in Scream.  The big problem with this movie isn't the metafilm plot, though; the problem is that the previous movies were not good enough to support a clever (if flawed) metafictional homage to them.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

 

"Terror Beyond Your Wildest Dreams," eh? That's not only a bold statement, but a presumptuous one, too. Who knows what is even in my wildest dreams?  Oh, that's right...Freddy Krueger.  Who's Freddy?  Here's a quick recap: Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund) is a basically a powerful aspect of dream that can kill people in their sleep.  In particular, Freddy seeks revenge against his murderers by killing their children in their dreams.  In A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, Heather Langenkamp returned to the series (she was the main actress in the original film) to help a group of kids being terrorized by Freddy; together, they managed to find the mortal remains of Freddy, sanctify them, and bury them, thereby "killing" Krueger. Langenkamp and three other kids managed to survive, but they are the sole survivors of the children whose parents killed Freddy Krueger.

One of the survivors, Kristen (played by Patricia Arquette in the last film), is played by Tuesday Knight.  Don't be fooled by her possibly porn-industry name; the girl is a true triple threat.  She is an actor, an amateur smoker (when she pretends to smoke cigarettes in this movie without any smoke...now that's acting), and a semi-professional singer.  Yes, that is Tuesday singing the opening theme to this movie and, yes, she is probably looking for work as we speak.  She didn't last long in this movie, that's for sure.  Deciding that there was no reason to actually stay dead, Freddy chooses to come back to "life."  The scene involves a dog peeing flames and his bones growing muscle tissue; the logic governing this course of actions is never actually explained.  Well, Freddy makes quick work of Kristen and her two other fellow Dream Warriors survivors, thereby succeeding in his mission to kill the children of those that killed him (although nobody ever mentions Langenkamp for some reason, shouldn't she be considered a survivor?  Okay, I'll shut up).  That's not good enough for Freddy, though; in this film, he branches out from simple revenge to harvesting souls.  It's nice to see a grown man that can change careers so easily!

Oh, before I forget, Kristen manages to use her dream powers to pull a friend into her last dream and transfer the dream powers to this new girl, Alice.  You might wonder why...or how...but you shouldn't.  If there's no explanation for how Krueger returned, you can be reasonably sure that the transference of one-of-a-kind supernatural powers between friends through a dream is not a priority; basically, the writers are assuming that, if you believe in dream-dwelling serial killers, this will not be a hard pill to swallow.

You can guess the plot from here.  Alice uses her new powers to stop Freddy, but not until he has killed most of her friends.  But, right before the end, there's an interesting idea.  According to some ancient mythology, there are two gates to the realm of dream, a good dream gate and a nightmare gate.  Each has a guard.  It's implied that Freddy is the guardian of the nightmare gate, while Alice (and, presumably, Kristen before her) is the guardian of the good gate.  Okay, that's not a horrible way to enrich the history of Freddy's character.  But, of course, that's just an idea that I developed, based on maybe two lines in the actual film.  A teacher mentions the gates in passing and Freddy later says that he's guarded his gate for a long time.  Oh, well, so much for ideas.  Speaking of clever ideas, guess what defeats Freddy this time around.  Go on, guess.  That's right, a mirror.    For a movie about dreams, there's not much creativity here.  I'd like to say that this is director Renny Harlin's worst movie, but that title is owned by The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.

That's really the big problem with this movie.  Doesn't anybody want to think out of the box for this franchise?  Where are all the one-liners?  Where are the cool dream deaths?  Here, we have not one, not two, but three people die from Freddy stabbing them in the stomach!  Another dies by drowning!  Another by asthma!  Really?  Look, I understand that this is the fourth movie in a series, but that means that the deaths and insults should be getting more gruesome and creative.

Oddly enough, The Dream Master was the highest grossing film in the series (until Freddy Vs. Jason).  It was also the only movie to have a video game released in conjunction with it; along with The Dream Warriors, this was the basis for the truly horrible game for the original Nintendo console.  It even had a Fat Boys song on the soundtrack that featured Freddy rapping:

Sadly, this is also the first Freddy movie that doesn't really try to scare you.  It's kind of like Freddy got a horror movie "pass for life," where his scariness is always assumed and never requires proving.  From this film on, Freddy is less of a monster and more of a performer.  So, I guess you could call him "Vegas Freddy" or "Fat Elvis Freddy."  Another weird thing about this film is that there is no direct connection to the "Freddy house" that appears in each movie.  In the first two movies, the characters living in the house were terrorized by Freddy.  The logic in the first movie was because Freddy wanted his revenge, but it's less clear in the second.  In the third, Heather Langenkamp returned and Patricia Arquette dreamed about the house.  Here, though, and in every subsequent movie, the house is abandoned.  None of the kids after The Dream Warriors even recognize the house, much less live on Elm Street.  Why is this house used in every movie?  It's even implied that this was Freddy's house, but it wasn't.  Sorry if I'm paying too close attention to continuity, but it's odd to have a recurring image that has no real relevance.

While there isn't much to recommend this movie, I did like the effects when Freddy died and finding that Fat Boys video made me smile.  I also liked the fact that, by killing all the Elm Street kids, Freddy essentially won.  But, god, it is terrible.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

"They saved the best...for last."  Riiiiight.  That statement isn't correct in any way, shape, or form.  Not only is this not the best Freddy Kreuger movie, it's not even the last.  Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is the sixth installment of the A Nightmare On Elm Street series, and it takes the nightmare-dwelling slasher flick star and propels him into the future...for no particular reason.  No surviving characters pop up in the film, so the placement in the future is completely arbitrary.  Unless, of course, this "ten years later" refers to ten years after someone watching it...which means it is dependent upon viewers to happen.  So, if I was the last person to ever watch this movie, then in ten years, I would be indirectly responsible for the events in this film!  God, that's a depressing thought; I'd sure hate to share the blame for this crap with director Rachael Talalay (who also directed Tank Girl).  The sad thing is that there is an outside possibility that I will be the last person to watch this movie.

So, who wants to hear the plot?  Anyone?  Show of hands?  Yeah, me neither.  While the plot is unimportant here, there are a lot of revelations that add (and detract) from the Freddy mythos.  For instance, we learn that a young Fred Kreuger was still a sociopath; we watch him kill a schoolroom gerbil with a large hammer.  Why was there a large hammer available to young Kreuger?  Um.  Maybe it was "Bring Your Favorite Weapon" day for show-and-tell?  We also see Kreuger teased by kids chanting, "Son of a hundred maniacs!" over and over.  Leave it to the innocence of schoolkids to turn a tragic origin, where a child's father could be any one of the hundred violent inmates in a psychiatric ward that repeatedly raped his mother, a nun, and turn it into a fun little chant!  Kids say the darndest things!  And who told the kids about that, anyway?  Did somebody's parents teach them the joys of taunting rape victims?  Presumably, yes.  Later, as a teen, Freddy takes to self-mutilation as a way to handle (and enjoy) the physical abuse that his adoptive/foster father (played by Alice Cooper) heaps upon him.  Oh, and Freddy murdered his own wife, after she discovered evidence that he was murdering the kids of Elm Street.  Oh, and he did it in front of his heretofore unmentioned young daughter.  Now, from a writing perspective, it's a totally valid idea to create some history for Freddy's character that helps explain why he was so evil, and maybe even make him a little more sympathetic.  A good way to do this would be to show him being tormented as a child in school, or to see him being beaten by the only father he knows.  A bad way to do this is to show him being a sociopath from day one.  I'll give the screenwriters credit for making an effort, even if they totally undercut themselves.

Well, I would give them credit, but then they decided that, when Freddy was about to be burned alive, he was approached by Dream Demons who promised Freddy eternal life and the ability to continue being evil in exchange for...um...well, nothing.  Demons: not driving as hard of bargains as you might expect.

Another good idea stems from the fact that no returning characters, aside from Freddy himself, are in this film.  This allows the writers to show a Springwood, Ohio (where Elm Street is) where Freddy has run amok, killing every child but one in the town.  This, reasonably, drives the parents crazy.  However, nobody outside of Springwood seems to know about the tragedy of the town.  Not very realistic, but this is a movie with a recurring nightmare man, so I'll let that pass.  This means that nobody knows about Freddy or how to defeat him, which leads to a novel concept: if you grab Freddy in your dream and wake up, you can bring him into the waking world with you. Outside of dreams, Freddy doesn't have power, so he can die.  Although, if you fail to kill him, can Freddy return to dreams?  I don't see why not.  And Freddy still has a lot of dream powers in the real world, for some unknown reason, including physical transformations, healing, and more.  But a pipe bomb?  That'll kill him.  Seriously.  So...plot holes?  Got 'em right here! 

Freddy's ultimate plan in the film is to manipulate events so that his daughter will return to Springwood.  Once there, Freddy will hop inside her and...control her?  Or live in her subconscious?  Or what?  That's left a little fuzzy.  Regardless, she will act as a transport for Freddy, so he can find children of different towns and create new Elm Streets.  After all, he cackles, "Every town has an Elm Street!  MWA HAHAHAHA!"  Why couldn't Freddy leave Springwood?  Isn't he demon-powered?  Well, yes, but Dream Demons aren't allowed to cross the street without holding the hands of a grown-up.  What?  I can't make up dumb rules, too?  Why does Freddy need to establish more Elm Streets?  He hasn't been limited to Elm Street since Nightmare Part 2! 

This Nightmare has only three kills in it, so there's not a lot to distract from the plot.  On the plus side, one of the deaths shows a head exploding.  Anther has a young Brekin Meyer (mediocre actor and co-creator of the excellent Robot Chicken show) being controlled by Freddy, as Freddy plays a Nintendo-style game console.  Brekin's death isn't noteworthy, really, but Freddy does manage to fit in a Nintendo Power Glove joke, which I rather enjoyed.  There are a few cameos that are noteworthy, too, aside from Alice Cooper.  Being the "final" Freddy movie, Johnny Depp made an appearance, since the first Nightmare was his first movie.  Also, Tom Arnold and his then-wife, Roseanne, popped up as Springwood residents; Roseanne impresses as an obnoxious woman with a loud mouth, showcasing the acting chops of a bar of soap.  Former James Bond villain Yaphet Kotto also has a small role in the movie, but he's basically a plot device, so he didn't add much.

Overall, this is a bad, bad, movie.  It's not as bad as part 5, though.  It sure isn't good, either, but there are some bright spots.  The poor plot manages to make the smart choice to ignore continuity with the preceding films, which allows viewers insight into Kreuger's character.  Not great insight, but more than ever before.  I'll be honest, if it wasn't for the Dream Demons, I would say these character insights weren't terrible.  Yes, this movie has a bunch of characters that you don't care about.  Yes, this movie has a movie monster that is not scary at all, but instead aims at being allegedly funny.  But the saving grace for the film is Freddy himself.  Robert Englund is not a great actor, but you can tell that he loves every second of every scene of every Nightmare.  If this was, indeed, The Final Nightmare, I will admit that he had a pretty good performance in a film otherwise devoid of anything approaching acting.  So, that's one star for Englund, one star for a moderately creative (if terrible) character history for Freddy, and one star for a Nintendo Power Glove joke.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

 

If you didn't know anything about movies, you might assume that, if the fifth film in a franchise is released, it has the daunting task of living up to its predecessors.  Thankfully, horror movie franchises go out of their way to correct us of such thinking.  Why make good sequels when you can just make the first one look even better by comparison?   I think that may have been the director's plan when making The Dream Child.

For those of you who haven't seen all the Nightmare movies (shame on you!), here's what you missed: Freddy Kreuger was a child killer who was arrested, but was not convicted due to a never specified "technicality."  The Elm Street parents didn't like the idea of Kreuger going free, so they burned him alive and hid the remaining evidence of their deed, because mob rules and hiding evidence are the symptoms of truly justified individuals.  It's interesting that his lawyer was not murdered as well; maybe he was, though, and he just litigated the parents... from beyond the grave!!! Somehow, Freddy mysteriously became a creature of the dreamscape and sought revenge against his killers by striking against their children.  At the end of every movie, some kid figures out that their fear gives Freddy his power, so they find some way to banish him forever...or until right before the credits, so you can totally tell that there's going to be another sequel.  

Well, in A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Freddy finally kills off the remaining original Elm Street kids.  End of story, right?  Well, it turns out that Freddy is greedy and wants power, so he continues killing kids in their sleep, although now completely without the justification of the original movie.  The Dream Master ties directly into The Dream Child, with the character of Alice Johnson starring in both.  Alice has the power to bring sleeping people into her dreams, or to enter another person's dreams.  This allows her to fight Freddy with friends; in the last installment, Alice trapped Freddy within herself and basically locked away the key.  If he can't beat her, the Dream Master, he can't escape into the dreamscape and attack others.  It's all just that simple, and by "simple," I of course mean "horribly convoluted."

Alice gets pregnant in The Dream Child's opening sequence.  Presumably (although never explicitly stated), her unborn child has inherited her powers.  That means that, since babies are stupid and weak (I'm paraphrasing the screenwriters here, this is not necessarily my opinion), Freddy can influence or even assume control of the fetus' power to enter the dreams of others.  And since fetuses basically sleep whenever their moms are moving around, that means that Freddy can attack even when Alice is awake.  I'm pretty sure the movie makers would have loved for that last sentence to end in an exclamation mark, but it's all I can do to just mock this movie.

In a Freddy movie, you basically look for two things: creative death scenes and Freddy's terrible jokes.  This movie doesn't do much for the former and the best death scene has a comic book nerd becoming a super hero to fight off Freddy... and getting owned a minute later.  I'm pretty sure that only three people died in this movie, too, which never helps a crappy horror sequel.  On the bright side, the main theme won a 1990 Razzie for worst song:

Bring Your Daughter...To The S...

Now, so far the movie doesn't sound too bad.  Not good, by any means, but not terrible.  But it is terrible.  The script is awkward, like the screenwriters were sixty year-old Soviet political prisoners, locked away since 1946 and had never met a teenager in their lives.  We get to see the implied rape of Freddy's mother, a nun, by "one hundred maniacs."  It's off-screen, but gang rape is rarely in good taste.  We also get to see Freddy as a fetus, looking like a heavily scarred tadpole; not scary, but definitely disturbing.  The kids in the movie are a motley crew, again probably because the writers had never met teenagers but heard that The Breakfast Club was pretty characteristic of social groups.  The movie is terribly edited, too; in order to avoid an X-rating (which, trust me, it never even came close to with the final cut), the director allegedly had to make a lot of last-minute edits.  The problem was that the director (Stephen Hopkins, of Predator 2 fame) never bothered to make sure what was left fit together.  The viewer is left with props popping in and out of scenes with no explanation and bits of character-building taken completely out of context.

Don't get me wrong, I love horror movies for the good and the bad that they can bring to the table.  This one just leaves the "good" table bare and piles loads upon the "bad" one.