We are going to travel back in time, but first, a briefing of what happened to Jason in Jason X, which chronologically(thus far) was his final adventure. He awakens on a space vessel in 2455 after being frozen years earlier. He begins to murder the folks aboard and actually almost is destroyed, but is rebuilt in to Super Jason. He has some kind of Cobra Commander looking new metal mask and is now a cyborg. Jason ends up literally “in” space floating at a very high speed about to collide with the survivors, but Sgt. Brodsky flies towards him and they both start heading toward Earth II where they are sucked in to the atmosphere. Thankfully, lakes exist on Earth II and we see two young people at one as they watch a shooting star fall in to the lake.  It’s Jason’s mask! Wooooo! What will happen next? Oh, yeah, we go back in time and visit another troubled town.

If you recall, at the end of Goes to Hell, Jason was defeated and in fact sent to hell. Suddenly, Freddy Kruger’s arm pulls Jason’s hockey mask down as well. Freddy vs. Jason picks up after that, in a crossover that fans had been anticipating for years.

Freddy is trapped in hell. He is no longer able to kill people in their dreams, because no one fears him anymore, thus he has no power. Anyone who has been tormented by Freddy is locked in an institution, and given medication to prevent them from dreaming. The rest of the residents of Springwood don’t even know who he is, or is keeping him a secret in order to prevent him from coming back. To remedy this, Freddy disguises himself as Jason’s mother and wakes him up. He tells Jason to go to Elm Street because the kids that live there have been bad. Jason first visits Lori’s (Halloween reference?) house where some kids are partying. Lori happens to live in the same house that Nancy Thompson did. Jason quickly, and quite brutally murders one of them. Because of the house involved,  Freddy’s name is quickly thrown around as a possible suspect. Not quite powerful enough to kill yet, Freddy lets Jason take care of some more kids, but this just complicates matters as Jason starts killing all of Freddy’s victims. This causes the titular “versus.”

It may be because of the extremely poor quality of the last few Jason films, but Freddy vs. Jason is not as terrible as I remember. Yes, the plot of the film is a bit of a stretch and all Freddy does it repeat or alter most of his catch phrases from his films. But there’s some interesting things going on here.

While Robert Englund reprises his role as Freddy, Kane Hodder does not return as Jason. This time he is played by Ken Kirzinger. His Jason is rather frightening, as his eyes are vacant as opposed to menacing. He seems like a lifeless killing machine just following orders rather than seeking out victims. This makes sense as he is killing Freddy’s victims and not camp counselors or family members.

Also interesting was the combination of people being dispatched both in dreams and real life. It caused a sort of humorous debate of which psychopath was worse and which one should be afraid of more. Unfortunately, this also caused an unavoidable uncomfortable spilling of exposition as the survivors magically pieced together what happened and then formulated a plan to stop them both.

What wasn’t good? The films drags terribly for a while. Even with Jason killing people, there are some very long spots of things uninteresting. Freddy was too “funny.” Especially when directly compared to Jason. The mood of the film was quite dark when Freddy wasn’t present. I would have preferred an overall darker film.

Overall this was a better Friday sequel than a Nightmare sequel. It was also very mediocre. It was not very redemptive of the hype and anticipation invested in it. It was also very isolated from both franchises in feeling, despite the inclusion of music from both and obviously the two main characters. This film escapes the “crap” category, but barely.

Favorite kill: Have to go with Trey. He is repeatedly stabbed in bed, then as if it were a roll-away, Jason folds the bed with Trey in it.

**THIS RANT CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ANY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET MOVIE**

A remake/reboot/reimagining/whatever is truly not a bad idea at the surface. There are many films or even ideas that are not fully realized in their original form whether it suffered from technological limitations, poor production, or other issues. Other than the George Lucases of the world, most filmmakers or companies are not able to retroactively go back and fix problem areas in an already released movie. The problem comes in when a remake offers nothing over the original other than a polished look, a slew of teen actors, and a more modern setting. The Nightmare on Elm Street remake is one of those offending movies.

For any movie, whether it is based on an existing property or somewhat original idea, the goal should be to create something not only enjoyable but a film that can stand on its own. The Nightmare remake (which PBF did a wonderful job summarizing my thoughts before I had them in his review) leans far too much on the existing films to be seen as anything other than a money-grab from nostalgic fanboys like myself.

To find the essence of a good, nay spectacular, remake let’s look at 2004′s Dawn of the Dead. It had zombies and people in a mall. Other than cameos and a few repeated lines, there was little else in that remake that was ripped from the remake. In contrast, I would guesstimate approximately 68% of everything in the NOES remake was either directly lifted from at least one movie of the original series or a sometimes subtle, and at other times not, homage.

Like PBF said before, if you are going to rip off iconic shots from a movie, do it shot-by-shot like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. It might not turn out well but at least it had a clear intention. Others, like Dawn, take the mere essence of the story and branch off. Would I have been upset to have a movie titled “A Nightmare on Elm Street” that had the burned-face Freddy Krueger hunting kids in their dreams? No, as long as the story was something that I hadn’t seen before.

Where I will give the remake credit is that the underlying story was different than the original films and largely interesting. A group of kids have similar nightmares, discover that at one time they knew each other, and have to piece together both their connections and the man of their dreams.

In fact, the main crux of the tale is what would stop me from labeling it as crap. In fact, it was pretty cool. It takes the pop-culture knowledge of Freddy and further vilifies him as Krueger is not merely a child killer but a child molester. Add to that the guilt that the characters feel thinking that their accusations may have killed an innocent man and we’ve got a pretty decent story going. Why does Freddy then have a razor-blade glove in the flashbacks? Oh, just another stupid allusion to its source.

What isn’t cool is to rip me out of this story to have gratuitous callbacks to the original movie (and even the sequels which I really did not understand). For the sake of nostalgia, I was willing to forgive the inclusion of the bathtub scene or the hallway that turns into a blood-red sea of unwalkable sludge like the stairs from the original. What I was not forgiving of was random quips like “How’s this for a wet dream?” or pointless shots like Freddy coming out of Nancy’s wall (albeit in horrible CGI) which quickly cut to another scene with no further reflection.

I hate that movie producers are so quick to harp on those that bash a remake because it is a remake. Well, geniuses, if you weren’t reminding me every three minutes that you are unoriginal enough to fill your movie with pointless references to another film, I might be more open-minded. That argument holds as much water as someone remaking Star Wars as ‘Star Battles’ with a character named Jon Soho complaining about the constant comparison.

Going back to the Dawn remake, it had rather subtle references to the original movie. Ken Foree had a brief part as a preacher. A store was called Gallen Ross (one of the actors in the original). These sorts of things are homages, not blatant plagiarism. There was some subtly here though with Nancy driving a Volvo station wagon (that type of car shows up at least three times in the original series) or a particular shot of Kris driving in her convertible that mirrors a shot in Nightmare 4. I’m convinced these cannot be accidentally but purposefully included for the fans like me who grew up on this series.

Why then must the characters of Kris and Jesse (obviously patterned after Tina and Rod but named after previous series characters) have expanded storylines? They die. We know this. But every minute they are on screen, we have less time with Nancy (Nancy) and Quentin (Glen) which makes their time together so awkward that their casual conversation consists of “What’s your favorite color?” Whereas in the first film, we had a firm grasp on Nancy and her personality as it slowly became unraveled, no one character gets time to expand because of another stupid reference shoehorned into the movie!

To summarize, I agree with PBF’s assessment that you cannot like both the new and old NOES. If you like the old, you will find the new one irritatingly different and similar at the same time. If you like the new, you have not seen the old. If that is the case, you should rectify that as soon as fucking possible.

/endrant

I am not sure if this poster is from the new A Nightmare on Elm Street. In a similar fashion, I really was not sure what I was watching when I saw the film.

I would like to say that the only reason I am reviewing this, as opposed to Puck, is because I just happen to have seen it first. Puck has given us an incredibly insightful and brilliant analysis of the original franchise thus far, and I am eager for the remaining installments. I also, having not had a computer for a while, have not contributed anything to the site as of late. So, with Puck’s approval, here is my review.

I will spare you a plot synopsis, as it is the same story. Freddy hunting and killing teenagers in their dreams as revenge. Between the 8 other movies that feature Freddy and Puck’s recent reviews, if you are not already familiar with the plot, I question your comprehension skills and you will not find this review helpful at all.

So, I guess the thing that bothered me the most about this movie, is trying to figure out what the hell the point of it was. Not the story, the movie specifically. It was some bizarre cross breed of re-imagining, remake, and reboot. All I know is that I kept re asking myself, “What the fuck?” during this thing. While the basic plot is the exact same as the original, there were many differences. There is a Nancy, but her last name is Holbrook rather than Thompson. Other than her and Freddy, no other characters were named the same. Oddly enough there was a Jesse, and as I neglected to notice while watching the movie, Puck pointed out that the main character in Nightmare 2 is named Jesse. Also, there was a character named Kris, perhaps a reference to Kristen in Nightmare 3. Also, Nancy worked at a diner, like Alice did in Nightmare 4. These facts alone can be used to argue that the remake category is out the window. However, the choice was made to include the some of the same scenes, some as they were in the original and some slightly altered. This really distracted me. I could not help comparing the movie to the original and asking myself why certain choices were made. For example, there is a scene in which Kris, who is closest to being the Tina character from the original, has a nightmare in class and wakes up screaming. This happened to Nancy in the original. Yet the rest of the events of the film that involve her, were more close to (if not the same as) the events that involved Tina in the original. What purpose did making that choice serve? Was it solely to be able to classify this as a re-imagining?  I would say no, as this movie was not so much “imagined,” as it was “stolen” This was a really lazy re-whateveritwas. I would have preferred that they fully committed to something. Remake it scene by scene even, at least I would not be confused. I would have liked if they had completely different events happening, but say, left the bathtub scene in there (not because of nudity, jackass, there isn’t any in that scene) as an homage or something.  I also think the fact the Freddy is dressed exactly the same also disqualifies this as a re-imagining. In my opinion, I think he looked more like an actual burn victim than Robert Englund did (no offense to him, he is and will always be the only Freddy as far as I am concerned. Also that would be a make up issue, not an acting issue). There were other things that I took issue with, such as the absence of Nancy’s father (but I guess technically that was not really Nancy, so that may be irrelevant) but I think I have made my point.

As far as the film outside of the pre-existing universe it was lifted from, I would say it was passable. Jack Earle Haley did a decent enough job. Freddy was quite mean, and even swore regularly in this one. He made some jokes, but was hardly the the stand up comedian that Freddy was in the later films of the franchise. No one else in the film was especially good, but the writing was not that particularly great. The only time I actually felt bad when someone died was not because I connected with them, but rather because of the brutality of their death.  This film was quite gory. I was kind of hoping for that and was rewarded, but the suspense was sacrificed a little. That whole, “someone looking around, saying ‘Hello?’ then someone jumps out of some place” wears a little thin after the 10th time it happens.  Besides the fact that it is not a new technique. The use of “micronaps” was a tad annoying in that respect as that is where a lot of this activity took place. I did like the way that Freddy’s origin was told, and that the kids all somehow knew each other, but they had to figure out how. That was executed pretty well I thought. Another thing I liked was that this was set in modern times but there was no emphasis on that. As opposed to say, Platinum Dunes’s (and New Line Cinema for that matter) other re-whateveritwas, Friday the 13th. That film was rampant with iPods, glowsticks and GPS devices, as if to scream, “Look at me! I am Friday the 13th, but 29 years later!” This one was not. The gadgets that were in this were all used minimally and simply as products of the time. Nothing really new here, just your typical slasher film. While it did not break any ground, on the whole, and again ignoring the original franchise, it was a popcorn movie at best.

I found it outright impossible not to compare this to the Wes Craven Nightmare. So much so, that it was distracting. If you have not seen the original, then you might like this. But I do not think it is possible to like them both. For if you like one, you will find the other inadequate (and by inadequate I mean “much like parts 2-Freddy vs Jason”).

Check out Puck’s rant on the movie here.

According to Box Office Mojo, the 1994 kids’ sports movie Little Giants grossed a meager $19 million in its theatrical release. Why is this movie relevant in a review for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare? The Rick Moranis and Ed O’Neill PG-rated family movie had the distinction of being released within a week of New Nightmare. As such, I saw New Nightmare at least seven or eight times in theaters via Little Giants. I also had a VHS copy of Man’s Best Friend, the Ally Sheedy-starring Cujo-ripoff just because it was the first with a preview for Nightmare 7 before its release. For the record, I believe I watched the movie once and the opening previews at least a few dozen times.

You see, somewhere between 1990 and this film’s release in 1994, I became very obsessed with horror films (healthy for an 8-year-old, huh?). When I first got wind of the newest Freddy film involving Heather Langenkamp and Wes Craven, likely through some random issue of Fangoria, I was excited. When watching it, I found it humorous that the film was set in a reality where New Line sucks, destroyed the Nightmare series, and thus has unleashed an ancient horror on the world which apparently really likes being Freddy. That’ll teach ‘em. As I said, I watched this movie tons when I was just an impressionable twelve years of age to the point where I can still visualize the cigarette burns between reels and hear the booming DTS clang of ironworks in the opening scene and recognize that one of the kid’s laughter from the background with the New Line logo was also used in the park scene later on. Again, none of this is really germane to the quality of the film but even if this movie were complete garbage, which for the record it is not, I would be the most impartial judge ever due to these circumstances.

But enough with nostalgia as this film does not need aid from my rose-colored recollections of it. It is just a damn fine movie on its own. Most of the acclaim I gave to Part 5 was its attempt to return to the roots of the story, namely horror instead of comedy. That movie failed though with its out of control, mainstream Freddy. Here though we have Wes Craven, who has most certainly been shocked and chagrined at life over the later sequels of his work, returning to form with his original concept and elements that work. For the better part of the film, Freddy is mostly a passer-by. Sure, he causes some damage and kills but for the first hour or so of the movie, the character of Freddy is largely absent. In his place is a menacing threat to Heather and her family. It may be Freddy, it may be a psycho fan, it may be paranoia and dementia. Who knows?

As opposed to the remake (which I have not seen but am just going off of PBF’s review), we have a largely original story but heavy callbacks to the original film that actually fit with the premise of the movie. While the overall idea of an evil entity which has taken Freddy’s form is a bit much to take at first, once you get past that, the illusions to the first film fit in quite well. Iconic moments such as the bathtub scene, the phone-makeout, and Tina’s death are referenced but not recreated as their original forms have no place in this film. And of course to bring things back to formula, Freddy starting out is once again a dark, menacing force with little time to mug for the camera or spout one-liners.

Above all, my main problem with the film was the change in course in the back half of the picture, especially pertaining to that particular penchant of Freddy. While still cleverly executed, after Freddy emerges from Heather’s closet, he seems to be on a rapid acceleration back to his former self from the last few pictures. The jokes are not as bad or as forced as before but to have a villain thrust upon you, immediately delivering trailer-worthy bits of dialogue is a bit much all at once. Once Heather/Nancy travels into Freddy’s world, the picture slams on the brakes for me. While I appreciate the reference to earlier in the film, for Freddy to die by way of the witch in Hansel and Gretal is a bit lazy and the finale is where the special effects are called to the plate and strike out with pretty bad CGI and matte paintings that are damn close to removing you from the story. However, even at its worst, the finale of New Nightmare is remarkably better than the ineptitude shown during any part of Freddy’s Dead.

I enjoyed how a prominent theme from the original (and some of the sequels) was carried over: namely, idiot parents. Just like Nancy in the first film, Dylan is having nightmares and seeing Freddy but he is quickly dismissed by his parents as nonsense. And once Nancy comes around to the existence of Freddy in real life, she then has to try to convince her “parents” or authority figures, John Saxon and that bitch doctor. Even though it was heavily re-edited (and twelve-year-old me noticed it too), the final part of the original Nightmare shown on Heather’s TV only expounds the notion that parents or authority will always think they are right and things like Freddy are just fantasy.

The reason that I keep watching and enjoying this film is simple though. It is expertly crafted leaving just enough details out of reach (such as what the hell is wrong with Robert Englund) and constantly building to bigger, more scarier things. And while it might be because my own kids now, I was quite anxious during the playground scene even though I have known for sixteen years that Dylan will survive. And when he cries out for Rex after Julie is Tina-zed, I got shivers. It was just that effective.

This is my longest Nightmare review to date but I feel it is quite warranted. Go ahead and disparage me and my beliefs if you must but New Nightmare is the best of all the sequels and at times comes damn close to beating the original in sheer execution if not originality. As I said, I am probably the worst person to get an unbiased opinion from on this film but it is remarkable and I am sure the few extra bucks that Little Giants got from me was worth it.

Now, I get that this is a really broad generalization encompassing over a hundred different actors but the Nightmare on Elm Street series seems to have been a showstopper for many an actor. All one has to do is peruse through the IMDb pages of the various films in the series to see several who have stopped working, taken extended hiatuses, or have been relegated to brief TV-show appearances or DTV movies. While this phenemonon is also apparent in other long-running slasher series as well, for now we are talking Freddy. So let’s dig in.

Lin Shaye: Random Teacher (Original)
Being the baby sister of the studio head can’t hurt but Lin Shaye has managed to carve out a pretty decent resume. She was in There’s Something about Mary, Snakes on a Plane, both Dumb and Dumber movies, and Boat Trip? Okay, I didn’t say these movies were good but at least a good chunk of her appearances make a (albeit probably brief) appearance in theaters says something.

Breckin Meyer: Spencer (Freddy’s Dead)
Again, not saying anything about the quality of the production but here we have the main guy from Road Trip, Jon from the Garfield movies, Go, and most recently appearing in a shitload of episodes for Robot Chicken as well as other recurring roles on several TV shows.

Patricia Arquette: Kristen (Part 3)
While she has been busy of late headlining Medium, previously Arquette appeared in Little Nicky, Lost Highway, and True Romance. Speaking of, what the hell is David Arquette up to nowadays?

Larry Fishburne: Max (Part 3)
Oh, shit. I mean Laurence. Apparently that’s still a touchy subject for him. We all have seen him recently (or I guess you all have as I don’t watch it) heading up the original CSI crew but lest we not forget his appearances in the Matrix series, the good Mission Impossible movie, a personal favorite Event Horizon, as well as the upcoming Predators.

Tracy Middendorf: Julie (New Nightmare)
Whereas some of the Nightmare alum may have to slum with random appearances on TV shows, Tracy has embraced this lifestyle with appearances in several of my favorite shows including Angel, Alias, and 24. While she is essentially playing disposable characters for the story’s sake, at least she can do so consistently.

Marshall Bell: Coach Schneider (Part 2)
Ah, yes. The S&M gym teacher. Who could have thought this would become the man who would fight for humanity in Starship Troopers, defend Charlie Sheen (in the movie!) in The Chase, and babysit Kuato in Total Recall. That’s a bad-ass man.

Lyman Ward: Mr. Grady (Part 2)
This goes to show that thirty seconds of screen time can be just enough to propel you into stardom … sort of. Ward went on after this to be Ferris’ dimwitted dad, Jake’s dimwitted dad in Not Another Teen Movie, and some dimwitted fool in a favorite killer child movie of mine, Mikey.

Jason Ritter: Will (Freddy Vs. Jason)
The son of John Ritter (who also worked with FVJ director Ronnie Yu, weird) went on to have regular status in the series Joan of Arcadia and The Class as well as working with director Oliver Stone in W. Not bad for a guy and a character that I remember not a damn thing about.

Wes Craven: Himself (New Nightmare)
Yeah, this is cheating but coming up with a list of nine(!) people from this series is hard. So while Craven’s acting has been limited to cameos here and there, he helmed a successful horror franchise with Scream, helped reboot his own films The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left, and made a movie about an orchestra or something.

Writer’s Note:
I automatically disqualified Johnny Depp and Robert Englund as they were too easy to include. And John Saxon was excluded solely for his participation in Beverly Hills Cop 3.

Way back when I rewatched and reviewed Hatchet, I commented on how most movies that attempt a combination of horror and comedy (in any percentages) usually suck ass. Now upon watching Freddy’s Dead for the first time in quite a while, I feel that above statement may be too harsh for some other films that may try horror/comedy but fails. This is because Freddy’s Dead also tries that combo but fails EPICALLY! There is a theory about long running franchises and how the first film you see in theaters ends up being your favorite. While that holds true for James Bond, Freddy’s Dead was the first Nightmare film I saw in theaters and that just makes me more angry. I would also like to apologize to Nightmare 2 as I previously held it tied with Freddy’s Dead for worst of the series. Nightmare 2 is brilliance dedicated to film comparatively.

Where I may have been able to enjoy Part 5 due to some effort that was put forth towards it, every single person involved in this movie seems to be on auto-pilot, driving towards a paycheck, starting with the writer. Jettisoning the relative simplicity of what worked before (and even any previous characters), we have a retcon of Freddy’s motive: he’s really killing kids because they took his daughter away. While it may make sense that Freddy had a wife and daughter at some point, wouldn’t the fact that his wife was murdered (or disappeared) put Freddy on the radar for the rash of murders (not counting his father and a hamster years before)?

Never before in a Nightmare film have there been had such a group of worthless characters with no redeeming qualities. Everyone in this movie makes me angry at life for how it disrespected the films before it. As the three punk kids are lost in Springwood, I almost wondered if Freddy did not have anything to do with it and they were just too fucking stupid to get out of a small town. Possibly excluding John (and that is just because we don’t know anything about him), the rest of the kids and Maggie are just horribly drawn caricatures of previous Elm Street residents, stupid decisions and all.

Also, considering that Springwood was supposedly only two miles away from this unnamed metropolis that the opening and closing acts take place in, why does everyone again have to be told about Freddy? I would think that if a few thousand (judging from the new population mark on the sign) kids had died or disappeared, the whole damn state at least would know about it. But no, in order to shove more exposition in the film, we have to bring everyone up to speed. The parts where the adults were all crazy in the town were mildly entertaining and creepy but the presence of Tom Arnold and Rosanne killed that for me.

Even some cool stuff that was tried was so horribly executed. The famous jump-rope song was not spoken but John and Maggie run across it scrawled in various places in Springwood, I suppose to be an ominous warning of some sort. Sad part is, they left out “7-8 Better Stay Up Late!” I understand it was probably filmed and edited out for pacing or whatever but even as a 9-year-old that shit irked me! And for my first 3-D experience in theaters, the finale of this was so boring, you could have developed an additional couple of dimensions and it would not have made any difference. Yeah, it was sort of interesting to see Freddy as a child or teenager but I’ve checked out after the previous seventy-five minutes, not to mention that awkwardly shoving a backstory into the big finale of a series just seems rather lazy.

It seems that despite working on every other Nightmare movie (other than 5), Rachel Talalay has no clue what to do with Freddy. His make-up here looks more like a rubber mask that I donned for Halloween many moons ago and his already terrible persona is turned into more of a demented cartoon character with the broom riding, video game playing, and many other dumb things. It almost seems as if the filmmakers had no clue of how to make Freddy scary again, nor did they want to, so they went with “humor.” You will notice this movie is not filed under comedy because it was only funny in a sad way. The fact that no one seemed to mind this character assassination is troubling even as New Line President Bob Shaye has the balls to appear in this movie, laughing like a damn fool.

For the record, I thought that Johnny Depp agreed to come back and cameo in this was neat and I loved the continuation of the idiot parent theme from a few films ago as all of the parents in this movie are either abusive or neglectful. There may be a deeper meaning to this in the movie but it was drowned out by all the crap floating around it. At the very least, I am thankful that I have suffered through that now to go onto largely better films in the franchise. Fuck this movie. No, seriously.

I will admit that I was not looking forward to A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 as part of this ongoing game of catch-up with the original films. Previously, I have been more or less ambivilent to the film as it is not the worst, is not the best, but falls into that middle ground also safely occupied by its predecessor. Due to the extreme condition of diminishing returns over the life of the franchise thus far, I had expected it to fair quite poorly, especially compared to the commercially-acclaimed Part 4. While this is in no way a good film, director Stephen Hopkins and at least one of the three credited screenwriters on this film had their hearts in it.

Yes, I know that this movie is rated in the same league as Freddy’s Dead and Part 2 as far as quality goes but I felt this movie at least tried to not only stay within the growing cannon but also return to tension and scares over goofy puns and elaborate death scenes. Notice I say tried because for all the praise I could give this movie for the effectiveness of the character-driven scenes, Freddy’s part of the film is amplified 5x over the last film which leads to a really bizarre shift in tone whenever he is onscreen. It almost seems that two different scripts were written for this film, one goofy like the last and one more oriented to the first part of the series, and the film we received was an unholy combination of the two.

I certainly appreciate the fact that Alice is brought back for more than just killing her off in the opening scene as her character, and those around her, are vastly better than the relative cookie-cutter ensemble of the previous few films. Alice, her dad, and three friends who she seemingly became quite close with despite not knowing a year prior, are all fairly sympathetic characters and well written characters. I definitely bought the dialogue between these friends moreso than Debbie, Shelia, and the rest of the old gang.

Having fewer characters (and thus Freddy fodder) was a benefit to the story, although only having three deaths seemed to step backwards from the ratcheting up body count. While Alice’s connection to Freddy is dubious at best (Freddy, while still dead from the last film, inflitrates the dreams of her unborn child?), it works to the point that you do not have to buy the awkward change from one heroine to another like some other films. Also from the jump, one of my biggest problems with the last film was rectified here as the poppy 80s songs over the title credits and sprinkled throughout was replaced with original score music from Jay Ferguson which, like many other entries in the Nightmare series, was quite good in conveying mood and atmosphere through the gothic sounds of choirs and organs. In fact, short of the character of Alice and the god-awful Freddy, this movie seems to cut a lot of ties from the last.

So, while all of that was good, the problems I had previously have compounded. Freddy is more background now and I would guess has a significantly less amount of screen time but the time that he does appear kills the movie. Even leaving Super Freddy out of this for now, the makeup still looks like crap compared to the early films and the fact that this movie’s lame Freddy is so prominently featured in his scenes kills any goodwill the rest of the flick affords. And while some people might prefer the comical Freddy to the original incarnation, his puns and one-liners here seem to be done in the vain of a ZAZ movie with “jokes” being tossed out for quantity rather than quality. In most cases, Freddy is just lame in this movie with such memorable lines as “Let’s rock and roll” and “Bad-year!” It is a shame to see a great character fall in so few years to appease the mainstream.

It seems almost comical that this film, and its poor box office reception, lead to Freddy’s Dead to serve as an end for the franchise as this is light-years ahead of the crap that is yet to come in the next portion. In the end, I take comfort in the fact that at least someone tried to make a decent movie but was likely thwarted by New Line and their quest for gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

So now we come to the fork in the road. Nightmare 3 has ended. A sequel is greenlit. I would imagine the head honchos at New Line sitting in the conference room thinking about how to best continue the series. I would guess by this point Freddy had become fairly mainstream if I, a six-year-old at the time, had seen a fair amount of merchandise, television promos, and previews for the last films. So, instead of continuing on the path of relative excellence established by the previous film, Bob Shaye turns Freddy into a laughably bad stand-up comedian on a beach, presumably to click with more teens and more dollars. One might say this was a good choice as this film more or less launched Freddy into stardom, but it was at the expense of a good series to that point.

For some reason, I have historically really liked this film in spite of the about-face in technique. It was, and to a point still is, a pretty fun movie to watch but man did it piss me off this go around. I chalk that up to the fact that I cannot say I have actually watched all of the Nightmare movies in chronological order, instead skipping around to avoid Part 2, 5, and Freddy’s Dead. But watching the movie on the heels of its predecessors almost immediately sets it up for failure. In the first sixty seconds, you have many indications that this movie will be nothing like those before. This is not only the first in the series to give Robert Englund the main starring credit, but it also is the first to have the updated New Line logo and feature a typical 80s pop song over the credits as opposed to the score. Granted, these are relatively trivial things but these just forebode the rest to come.

I had remarked in my review for Part 3 that the final third of the movie seemed to start the train of flashy Freddy who was more direct and more entertained by his overly elaborate stunts. Well, this flick takes just that final twenty minutes or so, puts it on ritalin, and breeds it. The relative simplicity of Freddy has now been all but lost as his kills this go around range from the strategic repositioning of a junk yard, encasing Joey in a water bed, deflating Shelia’s lungs and I guess all of the oxygen molecules in her body at the same time. You get the picture.

While the sight of Brooke Theiss turning into a roach is cool and all, could Freddy not have slashed her in the stomach while doing upside-down crunches or smashed her head with a weight-set? Sure he could have but I suspect the producers, and likely the audience too, wanted less suspense and terror but more trailer and quote-worthy scenes instead. Regardless, you can keep the kills but get rid of stupid, wisecracking, beach-going Freddy and we would have a significantly better movie.

The concept itself is one I could get behind if it were done differently. After the survivors from the last film are slowly killed off (why even bother killing Kristen if she’s going to last almost half the movie), Freddy wants to continue but he needs a conduit. So, enter Kristen’s friend Alice who was pulled into Kristen’s final nightmare. As Freddy uses Alice to bring him new blood, Alice is stricken with the guilt that her involvement indirectly has resulted in the deaths of her friends and even her brother.

Alice is a pretty cool character after all. While I had thoughts to amend my plea for her return, she is still the best part of the movie from the development of her character as she progresses from the meek girl afraid of her drunken father to the chick who can take down Freddy with some fancy footwork. In fact, I don’t think even Kristen got as much development or progression of her character and certainly none of the other kids from the previous films, save Nancy of course.

The danger in bringing Freddy into full view was the makeup which I would say is remarkably terrible here. Again, he was fairly prominently featured in bright lights during portions of the third, but it almost seems like the makeup artists were dictated to tone down Freddy’s appearance to match the more audience-friendly nature of this and later sequels. He no longer looks scary or disgusting, he just looks like Robert Englund with a prosthetic nose and a bunch of makeup.

The final showdown was, like the rest of the film, over the top and unnecessarily convoluted but I would say that it worked as Freddy is now dead, the souls of his captured children have been released, and everything is hunky-dory. Until the next one that is.

I really do not want to be too hard on this movie as I liked it before, it still is nowhere near as craptacular as what is to come, and I am sure I will have a burning desire to see the ‘Dramarama-kickboxing’ or ‘Suiting Up’ scenes at some point in the future. The turn this series makes here is still disappointing all the same.

I would have to say my first real viewing of anything Freddy related, other than brief snippets, was Dream Warriors. I vividly remember fighting my brother for the VCR rights to record the horribly-tv-edited version while he wanted to record wrestling. That resulted in the VCR being thrown down the stairs and a hole being kicked into a door. Was it worth it? Fuck yea! At that time (I was probably about eight or so), Freddy was still savage, gruesome, deadly, and appeared in good (relatively speaking of course) movies.

This installment is more or less the true sequel to the original. Certain things were different from Freddy’s inception but the story line actually progressed instead of stalling out like Kristen running in that goop while trying to escape Freddy. Here we get a little more backstory on his origins but the pleasant thing was they did not seemed to be shoe-horned in by studio dictation into an already completed story line. These plots points added nicely to the overall mythos of Freddy but more as complimentary facts rather than a main plot-line as some sequels in other franchises had done.

So, since we have moved past worthless Jesse and his movie, we pick up with kids who are indirectly related to Freddy’s death, a point sorely missing in the second installment. While it is sad that this is really the only movie to deal with the parent’s responsibility heads-on (save for the first act of NOES 4), thematically it was quite important as these kids were eventually given validation and direction from Nancy, played obviously by Heather Langenkamp, who acted as more of a caring mother figure to these misfit, sleep-deprived, fucked up kids then their own parents did. Perhaps I read more into it but I find this comforting as all of the parents in this series are either dumb as shit or in denial as children around them drop like flies and they dismiss the kids’ claims of a fedora-wearing boogyman as nonsense. Even Nancy’s own father in this installment, still an excellent John Saxon, disregards Nancy and her thoughts again even when evidence mounts up to say otherwise.

After rewatching the film again, I will break from the conventional horror-fan base here. Most say, justifiably so, that the downturn of the series came with the star-billing and pun-wielding Robert Englund in the fourth installment. But here, the first two acts of this film feel oddly different from the last portion in tone and execution. Early on, we get a good look at Freddy but only in fleeting moments: the mirror in the bathroom scene, appearing at Phillip’s bed, emerging from a TV to kill Jennifer. While these few scenes revealed much more of Freddy and his appearance than the last two films combined, these were not lingering shots, easily missed if you are commencing a drinking game. After the remaining kids enter the dream world to retrieve Joey though, Freddy goes from being an unseen menace scratching at padded walls to thrust in your face at every turn. This is not to the detriment of this film though as the final act features some impressive effects and dream sequences. But this is where we go from the Freddy in the shadows to Freddy with syringes for fingers and in a hall of mirrors. I never quite picked it up before but it almost seems as if the script from the final thirty minutes was written totally independent of the rest of the film with the exception of a scant number of references to earlier.

Having watched the movie with fresh eyes, I would have likely anticipated a different outcome. Of course in the end Freddy is defeated (like that really matters), but the characters who live and those who die seem odd if this were a conventional movie. We know Kristen will make it and probably Kincaid as well as they were fairly well developed (in the sense of this genre at least) and noteworthy characters. Jennifer, Phillip, Will? Goners and anyone could spot that. But I am actually a bit sad that Taryn did not make it though as Jennifer Rubin played her quite well and she was tougher than the rest of them. But Joey made it? The guy who didn’t say a damn thing until the hall of Freddy? I still dispute that especially given his quite incredulous death scene in the next installment (oops, spoiler alert!).

This of course is not to mention that Nancy and her father die while battling Freddy. While Langenkamp still cannot act to save her life, her death probably resonated more than any other in the entire series, especially due to Freddy’s deceptive (and to quote The Avod) dickish behavior. The most traumatic thing though is that this would have been an awesome bookend to the original three films (even though the second does not quite fit in). All the ties and callbacks to the first film have been severed, all the main characters are now dead (for now at least), but a cryptic ending followed by a Dokken song must have convinced New Line to forge ahead to disastrous results.

All in all, there was a whole lot of good in this movie (especially coming off of the failed experiment of Part 2) but I would argue that this is the film that killed the franchise, or at least inspired the crap ahead, with a bigger budget, wackier dreams, and an open opportunity for another sequel.

If Chris Nolan ever needed to be consulted on a franchise, it was right after the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Granted, he may not have been up to the task at the time but he like few other directors know how to make a follow-up film to a highly regarded sequel, not by making a carbon-copy of it, but by expanding upon its original characters, story-lines, and plots. Sadly, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge did none of that.

It is almost as if New Line took a page from the Exorcist II fiasco of jettisoning everything effective from the first movie for the sequel. We replace Nancy with a whiny bitch, even though he does scream like a girl. Rather than focusing on developing the characters and humanizing them to make their inevitable deaths have an impact, we have a half dozen or so lazily-written characters with almost no defining characteristics. And most importantly, instead of a definitive motive for Freddy to avenge his death by striking back at the loved ones of those who killed him, we have random possessions to kill these totally worthless characters.

The subtitle of this movie makes no sense at all. Yes, we know Freddy is pissed about being killed/ignored at the end of the first movie. Yet, instead of continuing his streak of murdering the Elm Street children, he decides to pick a random kid who happened to move into Nancy’s old house and kill other characters who for all we know had nothing to do with Freddy or his death. It even seems strange that the events of the first movie are totally ignored except for the happenstance recovery of Nancy’s unmentioned journal detailing the events of the first film. One would think when a few teens die in pretty bizarre ways in a seemingly small town, that knowledge would still be present only five years later.

To keep continuity with the first film, no one in this movie can act. With the exception of Sir Robert Englund and Marshall Bell, no one in this movie is really recognizable or talented (not that the NOES series is famed for launching careers). For the protagonist, I am not really surprised Mark Patton did little else after this film as he is quite possibly the worse adversary to Freddy in the series. Hell, the only reason I still remember Clu Gulager is from the Feast-based Project Greenlight season.

I will give this film acclaim where due (and that is not in many places) as it was different. Not different in a good way but at least they had attempted to take the character in a different direction. After being banished by Nancy at the conclusion of the first film, Freddy needed a way to continue with his homicidal ways which he found in Jesse. The power of remote possession might have been granted to Freddy after the last installment but it was an interesting turn of events. Even the fact that Jesse was technically the murderer (as apparent by the knives protruding from his fingers as opposed to the glove) was unique we could say. Perhaps this explains why Freddy was going after the random citizens of Springwood instead of those who caused his demise but I don’t buy that and I think I am putting way too much thought into this now.

The main problem is, whether it is really Jesse in Freddy-face or not, the fairly defined rules of the first apparently do not apply here. There was some grey area established but Freddy could mostly only lash out while you were asleep. Here though, he can apparently do whatever the hell he wants to: crash a pool party, burn a toaster oven, explode a bird, you name it! Another is the fact that Lisa (who should have been the final girl as opposed to the final girl’s girlfriend) can beat Freddy using the same logic as the last film which is just plain lazy. It is not even established how Freddy came back after the first (assuming it was not all a dream) so for all the audience knows, that shit does not work. And even the burn makeup on Freddy looks horrific (and in a “man, that looks like shit” way) as he is prominently featured in a few scenes with bright lights as compared to the shadowy figure of the last film.

While we have not yet reached the point where Freddy is the main character in the Nightmare series, his screen-time seems to be increasing. I would estimate we had about 23.748% more Freddy in this movie than the last go around (give or take). This still leaves more emphasis on the characters but sadly, no one gives a shit about them in this movie. In retrospect, while this movie might not be the very worse of the series (at the very least it is tied), it was still a disappointment coming off of the exhilarating original. And I did not once mention anything about the huge homo-erotic themes as well!