Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

"Miss me?" - Freddy Kreuger

      By 1994, Freddy Kreuger had been dead for about 3 years.  The last film had done horrible critically, but had done very very well at the box office.  Yet New Line insisted that Freddy would stay dead.  In the end, the most unlikely source ended up bringing him back.  Wes Craven himself.  Now, Wes Craven didn't really like what New Line had done to his baby.  He meant it to be a self contained little film.  No sequels.  He begrudgingly came back to give the studio a storyline for the third film, which they took and streamlined.  He absolutely hated the last three Nightmare films after he saw them eventually too.  Bob Shaye called Craven I guess around 1993 to clear the air.  The two, who had not seen eye to eye even during the making of the first film had let old animosities build to crescendos over the years.  Wes blamed Shaye for taking his ideas and perverting them and Shaye was tired of Craven saying he hated the franchise.  In the end, they forgave each other and Bob Shaye asked Craven if he had any new ideas.  Craven said he didn't and would think about it.  (Shaye wanted another Nightmare film.)  And while Craven was thinking of how to go about bringing back a franchise that had been so twisted from its original concept and feel, he came across a great idea.  Not unlike Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation., he thought of making a movie about writing the script for Nightmare 7.  However, an idea is not a fully fleshed out story.   And he still needed permission from those involved to bring in aspects of their private lives into the eventual script.  So he had dinner with Robert Englund, who had played Freddy from the very beginning, and with Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the first and third film.  They discussed how the series had changed their lives and the way they lived it, and both agreed it was a good idea and that they'd be happy to be involved if the script was good.  Next, Wes went to Bob Shaye and pitched the idea (throwing in a scene for Bob Shaye himself for good measure).  Bob liked the idea and told Wes to get cracking on it.

    The filming commenced in late 1993, with not only Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund and Bob Shaye appearing in the film, but also Wes Craven himself and John Saxon.  (Plus other cast members from other installments in the background of a funeral scene in the film.)  Wes Craven wanted to explore some very controversial ideas in this film as well.  Most in the front and center is if horror films negatively effect children.  Remember, this was the early 1990s.  Back then and in the 1980s these concerned parents groups formed to ban certain TV shows, music, and movies under the auspices that they were harmful to minors.  (God forbid a parent control what their kids see instead of banning it for everyone.)   Also, how did horror effect those involved with making it?  These were some mighty big questions for a genre which for the past 15 years or so had been involved in little more than hacking and slashing as many people as possible.  Way gone were the days of The Exorcist, The Omen, Willard, or Frankenstein which asked real questions.  Horror by 1980 and until the mid-1990s was pure and simple entertainment at the basest of terms.  Bloodlust.   You could say that this was one of the first postmodern horror films.  What we now call 'meta' films.  Wes Craven would perfect this style (although it was more Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter) with Scream two years later in 1996.  During the filming, the 1994 Northridge earthquake hit Los Angeles as well, which was written into the movie.  (I think that sort of dates the movie, but they use it to signify the spirit of Freddy here.)  

     So let's talk plot.  The movie has Heather Langenkamp (fictional) played by Heather Langenkamp (non-fictional) being haunted by dreams of Freddy and being harassed by a prank caller, which she's had to deal with for years.  Her husband works special effects and she has a young son named Dylan who sleepwalks.  Eventually her husband dies in a car accident after he falls asleep (which she dreamt about that night, but shows Freddy having caused it) and her son starts to be attacked in his sleep by Freddy.  Meanwhile Heather is doing interviews and meeting with New Line about the Nightmare series.  They want her to do another movie and Bob Shaye, playing himself, says Wes has a new idea and is writing a script.  In the film, he explains it as, "this... entity.  Whatever you want to call it.  It's old, very old, and it's taken different forms in different times.  The only thing that stays the same about it is what it lives for.  Killing innocence one way of the other."  Eventually, as Freddy becomes more powerful, it's told by Craven that an ancient evil has decided that Freddy is the best form to come back in and kill people, and that he'd been kept at bay by the former movies.  Telling stories of the evil and its demise keeps it in check.  He says "It can be captured sometimes.  By storytellers, of all things.  Every so often, they imagine a story good enough to catch its essence.  Then it's held prisoner for a while.  In the story.  The problem comes when then the story dies.  It happens a lot of different ways, the story gets too familiar, or too watered down by people trying to make it easier to sell, or it's labeled a threat to society and just plain banned.  However it happens, when the story dies, the evil is set free."   

     It's a damned good concept, and is the main reason I love the film.  This movie isn't about crazy dream sequences or teenagers trying to get adults to understand that their lives are at stake.  It's not really an Elm Street film.  Freddy is just the form taken by the evil here.  He even looks different.  He's demonic and the knives are no longer on a glove fixed over his hand.  No.  Here the knives grow right out of his skeletal hands.  He still cracks the odd joke, but in the way he did in the first film.  These aren't meant for a laugh.  These are perverted taunts.  They're meant to scare you.  And besides the first two films, I think this is the only movie in the series that comes close to being scary in any way too.  Freddy is menacing here.  He's bigger, bulkier.  He's Terminator Freddy.  There's a child in danger here.  Heather's child is played by child actor Miko Hughes.  He was best known as the toddler Gage in Pet Sematary and the kid that tells Schwarzenegger that "Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina" in Kindergarten Cop.  I also remember him as that annoying kid that wanted to watch Arachnophobia in Full House.  (Apparently he was in 13 episodes.)  Oddly enough, his dad in real life is a special effects guy.  So is Heather Langenkamp's husband in real life.  And in the movie?  The dad/husband is a special effects guy.  (Nice going, casting!)  

    And who doesn't love Fran Bennett as the scary, intimidating black doctor in the film, always suspecting Langenkamp of child and self abuse.  She's 100% great in the role, so convinced that Langenkamp is delusional and unfit to be a parent in her current state.  Which she may actually be right about.  The movie is told through Heather Langenkamp's point of view.  It could all be Munchausen Syndrome and she's hallucinating and causing Munchausen by Proxy to Dylan.  I'm surprised people don't bring up that idea more.  It's actually more terrifying than the straight-forward idea.  I'm going to guess they don't due to the scene where Dylan's babysitter is killed in the hospital by Freddy with Heather nowhere around... and people seeing her get killed in the air.  If it weren't for that scene, my idea would work!  

    And let's not kid ourselves.  Even though I love this film about as much as I do Scream, it's not as well made.  It didn't age as well, it didn't reach a big audience like Scream did, and the acting isn't that great for the most part.  Especially Miko's role as Dylan.  His acting was better in Pet Sematary five years earlier, and he was just 3 then.  And I've never been convinced Heather Langenkamp is better than a Hallmark Original Movie actress.  However, Robert Englund does great playing himself, the old funny version of Freddy in one scene, and the new diabolical Freddy.  Freddy isn't on screen much in this movie, it's more about the actors and film-makers, but when he is on screen it's pretty scary.  And I think the focus on film-makers is why the film didn't connect with audiences, and Scream did.  The meta here is based on film-makers which most people don't really care about, much less b-listers such as the ones in this film.  Heck, I cared most about John friggin' Saxon, he doesn't do much in this!  Scream focused on the audience as characters, so we had someone to relate to.  Unless you're a filmmaker, you have no one to relate to here.

     The film was released on October 14, 1994 to pretty good reviews.  The critics loved the postmodernistic take on horror, and the idea of it being horror within a horror film.  Even Roger Ebert, who hated the Elm Street series, gave this one a thumbs up.  (No such luck for Mr. Pissy Attitude himself Gene Siskel, though.  I'm not even sure he really watched the movie based on his thoughts.)

    The film, which cost $8 million to make, didn't make much of an impact at the box office.  Especially with it being a Nightmare film.  It grossed just over $18 million.  So it wasn't a bomb, but it wasn't a hit either.  It is the lowest grossing film in the franchise.  Now, I don't blame it all on the movie itself.  The early to mid-1990s were a dead zone for horror.  The genre was dead and few horror films that came out that weren't named Silence of the Lambs didn't make money.  It would stay dead until Scream came on the scene in 1996.  I think the movie just came out at the wrong time, sadly.  It's now considered either the best or second best in the series by most fans.  And it is my absolute favorite.

 

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

"Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground gives way under him, And the dream begins... " - Friedrich Nietzsche 

"Welcome to prime time, bitch!" - Freddy Kreuger

    With the box office disappointment of The Dream Child, Bob Shaye, producer of the series decided it was time to be done with Freddy.  And everyone who'd been affiliated with the films agreed.  The question was, since all the Elm Street kids are dead now, what would be the story?  I mean, The Dream Child didn't have Elm Street kids, obviously, as they'd all been killed half-way through the fourth film, The Dream Master.  However, The Dream Child was a continuation of Alice's story from the fourth film.  The sixth film would not include any characters from the not well liked fifth film... except Freddy of course.   So who could come up with an idea for this, the final Nightmare film?  Enter Peter Jackson.  Yes.  That Peter Jackson.  Now, at the time, Peter Jackson was known only for his first film, the low budget alien splatter film, Bad Taste.  He had also just finished a perverted, violent Muppet-style movie called Meet the Feebles.  Yep, not even Dead Alive had been made yet.  However, those two first violent films, which Jackson also wrote, got him noticed by someone at New Line and he was asked to draft a script.  

     The first draft would have kept Alice and her son Jacob from the fifth film in it.  It would have been set 17 years after The Dream Child  and would have had Taryn, Joey, and Kincaid back from the third film.  (Yes, still dead.)  They would be the "dream police" trying to stop Freddy.  My God, I am so happy they thought that was crap.   Peter Jackson's idea for the sixth film (which was co-written by Danny Mulheron), which he called The Dream Lover, had Freddy as a decrepit old man in his dream world with no strength left.  He's considered a joke to teenagers now and kids actually take sleeping pills in order to go to the dream world and beat up on Freddy.  Well, Freddy eventually manages to kill one of these kids, which gives him just enough power to torment a cop that's now in a coma and trapped in Freddy's dream world.  I so wish they'd gone with this script.  It sounds very, very interesting and does sort of foreshadow the seventh film, Wes Craven's New Nightmare.  However, New Line decided to go with a rather lame idea sort of turning the first draft's idea on it's head.  This new draft was written by Mike DeLuca, writer of several episodes of the Freddy's Nightmares tv show.  

    The film is set 10 years after the fifth film.  So apparently it's 1999, yet people use early 90s slang and the early 90s horrible fashion sense.  Every child in Springwood (where Elm Street is) has been killed, but rumors are that one got away.  Shon Greenblatt plays John Doe, so named because he has amnesia from the very beginning of the film when, after he's found on the side of the road unconscious, he wakes up in a home for troubled teens with only a newspaper clipping about a missing person.  Working at this home is a woman named Maggie Burroughs, who helps the wayward teens.  The other teens there include a stoner named Spencer (Breckin Meyer in his first film role), a teen with a hearing impairment named Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan), and a feisty angry girl named Tracy (Lezlie Dean).  And of course there's the mysterious psychiatrist that runs the place who goes by Doc (Yaphet Kotto).  Both Maggie and John Doe are having dreams about Springwood, so they decide to go there.  When they get there they discover the other three teens have stowed away in the van too.  And man, has Springwood gone crazy.  There are no kids there, and the adults have all gone quite loony, talking to themselves, seeing things.... turning into Roseanne and Tom Arnold.   (Yeah, not kidding.  They are in this movie.)

    Yep, and then things get really trippy.  Really crazy.  This movie is not horror in the least.  It's full out comedy.  And there's no gore either.  I'd be comfortable letting a 12 year old see it, it's so tame.  Not even any nudity!   The body count?  3.  Yes, you read that right.  3 people die in this movie.  And two of them border on hilarious.  One gets killed by getting high (and seeing an anti-drug commercial starring Johnny Depp, who was in the first film) and getting sucked into the TV only for Freddy to turn him into a video game character.  (And Freddy is playing the game as the bad guys.)  He even uses, get this, a Power Glove!  And whammo, the film is dated really badly just right there!  What's worse is after his friends get him out of video game land, his character is still asleep, so his real body is reacting as it would in the game doing high hops, getting punched in the chest repeatedly, punching through walls...  It's just about the most ridiculous thing I've seen in a mainstream film.  It's also one of the reasons the film is so hated by fans of the series.  Frankly, I think it's both horrible and amusing at the same time.  

     Another death is done by Freddy changing the hearing aid of one of the teens so that the sound is amplified way louder.  He plays with him by dropping pins from high above... then he scratches his glove's blades across a chalkboard... which causes the teen's head to explode.  Yes, the Nightmare films had officially jumped the shark.  However, New Line was playing this right in my opinion.  When I was in kindergarten, we knew who Freddy Kreuger was despite most of us never having seen a film.  He was the ugly guy with the cool glove.  And he was funny.  We even played Freddy Kreuger during recess.  And I think New Line was trying to cater to teens and younger despite the R rating.  As I said, there's little blood here, it's really wacky, there's no sex or nudity...  I think the worst you get is some pot smoking and probably a few F bombs.  In fact, even though I didn't know it at the time, the first scene of a Nightmare on Elm Street film I saw was from this one.  (Actually it was the one really serious scene in the film where Freddy is disguised as the father of a teen that sexually abused her and she repeatedly hits him in the head with a toaster... Which you never see impact because as I said, little violence here.)  Apparently director Rachel Talalay had been watching a lot of Twin Peaks at the time and she got her ideas for the Springwood portion of the film from that.  I didn't notice, because I've never been a fan of Twin Peaks and I'm not sure her idea came out well either.

   The best part of this film is of course the nightmare sequences.  John Doe's nightmares in this film are quite funny too.  Freddy makes his house fall from the sky with John in it, forcing him to jump out.  And it's a recurring dream so he has to do it at least twice during the film.  Freddy even appears outside the window on a broomstick pretending to be the Wicked Witch at one point.  (Told you the film doesn't take itself seriously!)  There's of course the two death scenes mentioned earlier.  And then there's the last ten minutes of the film.  When the film first came out, those last 10 minutes were in 3D.  They take place in Freddy's world as Maggie delves into Freddy's memories.  (In this portion we see Alice Cooper as Freddy's abusive father and Freddy's death by fire at the hands of Elm Street parents.)  This culminates in a feisty battle between a glove-less Freddy and Maggie.  (He ends up getting blown up by a pipe bomb.  Pretty weak ending.)  The series' strong point has always been it's imagery though, and it's no different here.  The special effects, though dated now, are quite cool to look at.

(Did I mention the makeup in this one is absolutely horrible?)

    Anyway, despite the lesser box office of the fifth film in 1989, Freddy's Dead opened with almost $13 million on the first weekend of September 13, 1991, which was $2 million more than its budget!   It was the best opening for a Elm Street film (until Freddy Vs. Jason 12 years later).   It would go on to make almost $35 million at the domestic box office, making it the fourth highest grossing in the series (not including the remake).  Despite the commercial success of the film, the film got the worst critical reviews of the series (again, not including the remake) stating that Freddy had become a joke. (Which apparently they were 4 years or so behind on noticing?)  Yes, apparently Freddy's death was a success.  The critics were glad he was gone, and the film was a financial success.  But oh wait!  Wes Craven's got a new idea!

 

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

     So Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was a great success financially and popularly.  The critics were mixed to negative on it and if you read the last blog post, you saw that it was my least favorite movie in the series.  However, with the success of the fourth film, Bob Shaye started right away getting things ready for a fifth film.  New Line decided to send out feelers into a group of authors who specialized in writing a genre called 'splatterpunk', which were stories or novels that focused on non-stop gore.  Writers like Jack Ketchum and Clive Barker were a part of this trend for a while.  The genre was started with a book called "The Light at the End" by John Skipp and Craig Spector about a guy riding a New York subway and being turned into a vampire and going on a killing spree.  So those two were brought in to do a draft for the new movie.  The studio wanted birth to be a theme and so they wrote this story about Alice, the heroine from the first film being pregnant and Freddy getting into her dreams through her baby.  And of course, she could get into Freddy's mind the same way and learn why Freddy became the way he was.  The studio didn't really care for the script and the screenwriters were shown the door.  They ended up bringing in a guy named Leslie Bohem to do the screenplay, as he had had an idea of someone giving birth to Freddy back in the days of the third film and though it wasn't the idea they wanted back then, it seemed right now.

     Now it was time to find someone to make this idea a reality on screen.  Enter Stephen Hopkins, a Jamaican born guy who was raised in Australia and England.  He had done a small thriller two years before called Dangerous Game, which was not successful, but he did have a background in art direction and was able to show his ideas for the film by storyboarding them.   (Note that the bigwigs at the studios love when a director can do this, because they know what he/she's going for.)   He was a guy that was really into comic books and so not only were they storyboards, but they were done sort of like comic books.  He got the job on Valentine's Day of 1989...  The movie was to be released on the first week August, less than a year after the last film debuted.  That gave him 6 months to prep and film the movie, special effects and all.  The script was not up to par.  It was very muddled and the rules weren't quite clear.  So Stephen Hopkins and Mike De Luca did the best they could as the movie was being filmed.  Yes, New Line didn't learn from the last film that working with an unfinished script is not a good idea.   The plot is that Alice was impregnated by her boyfriend Dan (and yes, both actors are the same as they were in the last film), and her child is getting taken over by Freddy as her friends die.  (He needs the souls of all four of her friends to win, like some sort of demented role-playing game.)  Now, Dan dies early in the movie, so there's also a very good subplot dealing with abortion questions and maybe giving up the baby to Dan's parents.  It's sort of like Juno as a horror film.   And believe it or not, the acting is much better than the last film.  I mean, it gets kind of soap opera like in places, but I'm not taken out of the movie because of how forced the acting is either.

    Also, Freddy's toned down the jokes a bit here.  He's not back to being scary, but he's not really annoying like he was in the last film.  They originally wanted to make Freddy scary again, but for some reason that didn't come through.  It doesn't help that the make-up for Freddy in this one is the worst in the entire series.  They got the guy back who did the makeup on the first film, but the studio and Robert Englund wanted the makeup to be done faster and cheaper.  What we got was something not as detailed and that looked like a Halloween mask.

    Now the deaths in this one are pretty good.  Dan has a nightmare that his motorcycle starts to bond with him turning him into some sort of machine man out of HR Geiger.  It's very cool to watch as he has wires and steel pipes insert themselves into and under his skin.  And it's actually quite disturbing.  Another victim, who is bolemic gets fed her own intestines by Freddy until she dies.  Another one, which I like because it's so damned funny-looking and cool is when the comic book nerd gets pulled into a comic to go up against Super Freddy and turns into a 2D paper version of himself as he gets shredded by Freddy's glove.  The film-makers strive in this one to make sure that the characters actually fall asleep to have their nightmares where they die.  Now, the film was originally going to be a lot gorier than what was shown.  By 1989 the MPAA had really started to go after gory films.  This is the same year the virtually gore-less Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan came out and virtually killed that franchise.  When this movie came out on VHS, an unrated version was released that put back in the footage cut from the death scenes that made the movie more disturbing.  The skin of Dan's head is torn off when he's turning into the motorcycle man, it's made clear that Greta's being fed her own innards which is not clear in the theatrical cut, and apparently there was more to Mark's death too.  Here's the uncut version of Dan's death so you can see what they were going for.  (Note that current DVDs and blu-rays do not include the unrated version of the film.  Only the laserdisc and VHS ever did.)

     Also, the film has a gothic feel to it.  Stephen Hopkins wanted the ending of the film (which was done essentially script-less) to have an M. C. Escher sequence.  Escher did this...

So we have Freddy chasing the 'Dream Child' up and down stairs going all sorts of directions.  It's really cool.  Also, the beginning of the film is set in the gothic church that the fourth film ended in.  I love the look of this film.  It's dark, unlike the last film was while still doing the cool camera tricks that Renny Harlin brought in.  It was still very much like a high budget horror music video.  (If you could call the fourth film horror.)  Except maybe for Alice Cooper instead of Ratt like the fourth one.  

     Now, you may have noticed that the movie is called The Dream Child.  Yes, there is a kid in this movie that is the personification of Alice's unborn baby who could potentially become a vessel for Freddy.  That kid is played by Whit Hertford.  Or as I like to remember him, that fugly kid that says the Velociraptor skeleton in Jurassic Park isn't scary and looks like a six foot turkey.  Of course, he's 4 years younger here, and not nearly as annoying.  He's still odd-looking though.  His last line in the movie was supposed to be "Fuck you, Kreuger."  However, since he was not allowed to say that, the line became the nonsense "School's out, Kreuger."  Then he barfs on Freddy and his vomit grows heads and kills Freddy.  (Yeah, I don't get it either.)  Well, technically Amanda Kreuger's ghost kills Freddy and traps him in hell, but only because the kid barfed.  Or.. something.  (But we do get to see ugly demon Freddy born from his mother in the film too, which is kind of amusing because he reminds me of a chihuahua with mange.)

    The film was released on August 11, 1989, less than a year after the last film was released.  Budgeted at 8 million dollars, it only brought in just over 22 million.  That's less than half of the last film, breaking the cycle of each Nightmare film making more than the last.  The critics also wrote negative reviews of this one, which I just don't get.  Was it Freddy fatigue?  I mean, in no way was the fourth film better than this one.   Why did it make so much less?  I think that was, in fact due to Freddy fatigue.  That and maybe part 4 wasn't so good, so they didn't see the fifth one.  And the trailer didn't help.

    Showing every one-liner Freddy says in the film... and trying to sell it as a scary movie.  Yeah, that'll work.  Not.  Some say that it was the themes of abortion, drinking, bolemia, anorexia that did the movie in.  Sure, pretty heady stuff for a 1989 horror movie, but I think they make the movie better.  Maybe the teenagers didn't like it.  Maybe it was more of an adult Elm Street?  Who knows.  But one thing the movie did do?  It told New Line that maybe it was time to lay Freddy to rest, which they did in the next film.

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

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

"When deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." - Job IV, 13-14

     Around the time between A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the fourth film, Freddy Kreuger was at the peak of his popularity.  Freddy was hosting Headbanger's Ball on MTV to promote the next film, the soundtracks which were mostly metal with some rap songs thrown in sold well, there were even Freddy toys!  And of course, the Freddy costume was popular with Halloween trick or treaters in 1987 and 1988.  The third film had been successful by making Freddy less of a scary guy.  He quipped with puns and didn't just kill people with his knife glove anymore.  Instead that film took on more of a surrealistic fun tone with some dark subject matter with apparent teen suicide.   It was quite apparent that the new feel of the series was going to be one of kick-ass visuals instead of blood and gore, with an emphasis on surreal dreams.  The question was who were they going to get to make the film.  New Line wasn't all that worried about having big names direct the films.  Chuck Russell had never directed a theatrical release before Dream Warriors, and Jack Sholder had only done a prior slasher film for New Line before the second one.  Newly arrived in America from Finland, a big hulking guy that kinda looked like Thor went to New Line to beg to do the new film.  He got a meeting with head honcho producer Bob Shaye, but with Renny's bad grasp of English, Bob Shaye kicked him out of his office.  Not willing to give up, Renny Harlin would just stay in the New Line office lounge and try to get more meetings with Bob Shaye.  Now Renny Harlin was living in this trashy apartment at the time, wore the same (unwashed) clothes every day, and was living on canned beans.  Finally, just to get him out of his hair, Bob Shaye agreed to let him direct.  Now, I'm sure there was more to the story than that.  Probably Bob Shaye saw Harlin's first film Prison, which was full of cheap but effective special effects.  That film was about a wrongfully convicted man executed in the electric chair in 1964 coming back as a ghost in the prison to avenge his own death by killing the man who executed him, killing inmates along the way.  So it was pretty close to the Nightmare films anyway.

     Apparently the filming of this was not a great experience for those involved.  Patricia Arquette did not come back to get killed off by Freddy.  Instead another girl, Tuesday Knight, was to play the Kristen role.  This didn't sit too well with the other two surviving Elm Street kids from Dream Warriors.  The actors, who knew they were coming back just to get killed off, didn't feel the sense of family they did on the third film.  And they're gone before even 20 minutes is up.  Renny Harlin, the director, was looked down upon by producer Bob Shaye.  They didn't even speak to each other during production.   The film was being filmed without a complete script.  They had a release date and a poster, but didn't have much of a story or script by time they needed to start filming.  And anyone in the film business can tell you that that's a dangerous situation to be in.  So with filming happening fast with no real direction, of course tensions were high.  Add to that a mostly untried director unliked by the producer and you get an even worse situation.

    So in this film, Kristen, one of three survivors of the last movie, has dreams pointing to Freddy's return.  She has started pulling Joey and Kincaid, the other two survivors, into her dreams to warn them and protect her, much to their chagrin.  So Kristen starts to stay awake again.  However, Kincaid and Joey don't show up to school one morning and she learns that they've died the night before.  (In fact, since Kristen hadn't been sleeping, Freddy used Kincaid to bring him back to life in a dream.  Kincaid has a dream where he's walking his dog in the junk yard where Freddy's bones are buried.  His dog then, I shit you not, pisses fire on Freddy's gravesite and this causes Freddy to return.  He kills Kincaid in his dream, and the goes to Joey's dream to kill him.)  Soon, Kristen's friends start to die in their sleep too.  That's about the crux of it.   There's not a huge plot to speak of here.  Even the Dream Master idea is kind of stupid.  Alice, the main character in this one, (Kristen gets killed off halfway through, and Alice is her best friend.) gets Kristen's dream warrior powers and gains her friends' skills as they are killed by Freddy.  Why?  Who cares.  Apparently it wasn't important enough to explain.

    I will admit, this is one of my least favorite of the Elm Street films.  For a lot of people, it's their favorite, and I've never understood why.  The acting goes back to the level of the original film, the deaths aren't that great on the whole, there's not any blood or gore really, the plot is stupid, and the film is so damned bright and colorful!  Most of it even takes place in the friggin' daytime!  Freddy and nightmares just aren't scary when it's bright and sunny!  But worst of all, Freddy is the one we're supposed to root for!  He's a wisecracking, full of confidence, cool guy here!  He's not threatening in the least bit and this is the one film in the series I dread a scene that he's in, because it's those scenes that tend to bring the movie down.  Here's one scene that shows some of what's wrong in this one.  The bad acting, Freddy's wisecracks, and the overall bright color scheme.

    Even the death scenes here aren't really that great.  The only one I really like is the one that everyone likes.  One of Alice's friends that is terrified of bugs turns into a cockroach and is tormented by Freddy.  It's really quite gross and also quite ironic.  Also great is the time loop that Alice and her friend are trapped in to make it so they can't save the friend. 

    Speaking of the time loop, the film does have some excellent setpieces when it comes to the dreams.  And those are the reasons I watch the film.  In fact, that and the camerawork are the only reasons to watch.  Renny Harlin and his cinematographer did great camera tricks here.  It's kinetic and shot more like a high budget music video from the late 1980s.  I suppose that's where the bright color scheme comes from too, but I find that unforgivable.  When Kincaid is facing Freddy and is stuck in a circle of junked cars, he yells to the sky asking for Kristen to help him, and as he does so the camera zooms out really fast until the whole world is shown to be a maze of junked cars with their lights flashing off and on.  Later on Freddy traps his victims in a sort of nightmare funhouse.  And best of all is the scene in the movie theater where Alice is dreaming.  She's watching a movie and slowly things get pulled towards the screen.  Popcorn, her popcorn box, her drink, and finally she herself get sucked into the black and white 2D world of the movie screen.  So the film has interesting ideas and is shot very well.  No one's ever said that Renny Harlin wasn't a flashy enough director.  Still there are ideas that don't work at all and are detrimental to the film such as Kristen dreaming she's on a sandy beach and Freddy's glove acting as a shark fin coming towards the beach and continuing as a shark fin in the sand finally blowing up a sand castle on the beach (seriously, the sand castle explodes with fire) and Freddy appearing... in sunglasses.  And it sucks.

    There's also a lack of blood and gore here.  When Kincaid gets killed by Freddy's glove?  No blood.  The asthma attack death later in the film of course is bloodless.  I'm trying to remember if there's any blood in the film at all.  I don't think there is besides some slashes appearing on Freddy's back when he's pretending to be a female nurse.  (Yes, you read that right.)   In fact, the film could have been PG-13 rated had the few F words been cut and there hadn't been tits in one shot.  Seriously, worse than this is seen on network tv now nightly!  I'd have no trouble showing this to a 13 year old.  (Honestly, I've never gotten why boobs are so horrible for kids to see.  They carry milk for babies and are just like fat deposits otherwise... and when it comes to the language, I guarantee you they hear it more in school and probably use worse too.)  This is not in any way a horror film.  It's not even remotely creepy as the last film was.  It's a dark comedy, and I use dark lightly.  Some like Freddy this way.  Now, I enjoy Freddy doing occasional wisecracks as he did in the third film.  But this much combined with the films other problems really destroys this film for me.

      It's obvious that they weren't going for horror here.  The film was clearly marketed at teens, and the movie came out on August 19, 1988, about a year and a half after Dream Warriors and before started back for most students.  The film, which was made for 13 million dollars, which was more than 3 times the amount of the last film, went on to premier at #1 and stay there for three weeks!  It made just over 49 million bucks, which was almost 5 million more than its predecessor.  So apparently people back then didn't agree with my view of the film.  Either that or the film was successful just riding on Freddy fever and the success of the third film.  It was popular enough for Freddy to get his own syndicated TV show called Freddy's Nightmares.  That show was basically Tales From The Crypt as presented by Freddy instead of the Crypt Keeper.  In fact, when this show was cancelled after two seasons (it was apparently not a good show outside of the pilot that told the story of Freddy's arrest and death) the crew moved on to the new Tales From The Crypt series.  Either way, Freddy wouldn't be so popular for much longer.  Why was that?  I'm going to blame the Fat Boys rap music video done for the Nightmare 4 soundtrack.  (Yes, this is just a reason for me to post this horrible music video featuring a rapping Freddy.)  Also, it launched the career of Renny Harlin, who would direct Die Hard 2: Die Harder the next year and later would direct Cliffhanger and Deep Blue Sea.  His work tends to get bad reviews, and his films are only hits sometimes.  (He also did Cutthroat Island and this year's The Legend of Hercules after all....  But hey, at least Nightmare 4 had a kick-ass poster, right?

 

  

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

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

"Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them." - Edgar Allan Poe

     So Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was a financial success.  However, that was the only way in which it was a success.  The critics didn't really like it, and neither did the fans.  It broke the Freddy rules by having him kill people in the awake world.  It had this weird gay vibe to it.  Freddy did poltergeisty things.  Knowing that they didn't do a great job with the second film, Robert Shaye and the rest of New Line wanted to get the third one right.  Instead of putting out a sequel less than a year later, this one would take a year and three months to get out to the public.   To help make a better movie, Wes Craven, writer and director of the original film, agreed to help pen a script.  However, with him doing prep work on his next film, Deadly Friend, most people think he did little of the actual script writing of that first draft.  Bruce Wagner was credited as a co-writer and most think he actually did most of the script with just little additions and a story idea by Wes Craven.  Mainly Wes Craven did the "writing" here to kill the series.  He wanted it to end here.  New Line liked the plot of the script, which had Freddy killing off teenagers in a mental health hospital and the teens having dream powers that they band together and use to defeat him, and that was kept, along with some of the character attributes to the teens.  However, New Line was kind of aghast at the script.  Freddy was very vulgar using disgusting language the few times he talked.  (Even the dreaded 'C' word.)  The deaths were also much more gruesome.  (If you'd like more info on the very different original script, go to this link, which has the whole plot synopsis and what Craven wanted the film to be.  Wes Craven's Dream Warriors

     New Line was approached by two budding screenwriter/directors named Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont who really wanted to work on the new Freddy movie. They came in with a youthful excitement and wanted to focus on the dreams more than Freddy as a character himself.  (Oddly enough, Chuck Russell co-wrote Dreamscape a few years earlier, which was also about going into dreams.)  New Line, not knowing where to go with the series after thinking Craven's script went too far liked the idea of optical and special effects driving the film towards the fantastic.  So Darabont and Russell rented a secluded cabin and wrote a new draft in eleven days.  New Line approved the script, but wondered how it could be done on a small budget.  However, somehow this movie was done on the surprising budget of $4.5 million.

     This film is set six years after the first film.  This teenage girl Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) has been having really bad nightmares and one night she gets her wrists slashed in her nightmare.  She wakes up one night having just slit her wrists with a razor blade.  (In her dream, the sink faucet handles grow blades and slash her.) 

So her horrible mother has her committed to the town's mental hospital where other teenagers are suffering from sleep deprivation due to bad dreams.  About the time she arrives there, a new doctor arrives.  Yes, Nancy Thompson, the heroine from the first movie has apparently gone to college and become an expert on nightmares and psychology and she now works for the mental hospital under Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) and Dr. Elizabeth Simms (Priscilla Pointer).  She quickly becomes close to her new patients because she knows exactly who they are dealing with and why they will not go to sleep.  The first night after she arrives, the deaths start and she and Dr. Gordon must help the teens discover their secret dream powers to defeat Freddy before all of them die horrible but inventive deaths!

     This movie was (along with the second film) the first of the Elm Street films I ever saw.  The local UPN station, channel 65, would air movies on Sunday afternoons and I being about 14 (I still wasn't allowed to watch rated R films at the time) taped both the second and the third film from the station.  Of course, they were slightly edited for language, nudity, and gore, but not to any extreme extent.  (In fact, this film isn't really all that graphic.)  I had been fascinated by slasher movies since I was young, especially with not being able to watch them.  I would frequently go into the video rental store while my parents were grocery shopping and just go through the horror section and look at the cool cover art and read the plot synopsis on the back of the VHS boxes.  And when we got the internet, the first screenplay I read online was to this movie.  So I was very excited to see it even in a very static, edited, full-screen form.  And I was very pleased.  This wasn't a regular old fashioned slasher film.  It was kind of funny, it was special effects driven, it had inventive kills, and it wasn't simply focused on a body count.  (In fact, none of the Elm Street films really worry about how many deaths there are.)  The movie is just... fun.  The film-makers knew that they could not top the horror of the first film.  They had tried that with the second one and failed.  So how do you make the story interesting?  By making it something no one has seen before.  And by making Freddy into a pop culture icon.

    Many people say that this is where Freddy Kreuger stopped being scary and became a wise-cracking sort of anti-James Bond with his puns.  There is some truth to that, but I think he hasn't completely gone over to that here.  Look at this scene for example, which includes one of Freddy's most famous lines.

  It's... kind of creepy with the disembodied voices coming from the TV while it's all staticy.  It's entertaining and cool with Freddy's lines.  And it's kind of funny because the Freddy head coming out of the top the TV has antennas on it!  I think this film works best because it shows all the best out of the series.  The horror isn't completely gone.  I mean one of the deaths has a teen being forced to jump out of a window as he sees Freddy treating him like a marionette walking him through the hospital to a fourth story window by his tendons from his arms and legs.  It's disgusting, but it's very cool and something you don't really see anywhere else.  (And Freddy materializes from a claymation effect of a puppet himself!)  The movie is just a heck of a fun time to watch.  You even get to see Laurence Fishburne in one of his early roles as a male nurse!  (He goes by Larry Fishburne here.)  And of course there's actress Patricia Arquette known for this year's film Boyhood and of course the long running TV drama Medium.  The movie actually even gets downright creepy at times.  There's a nun that appears to Dr. Gordon sporadically throughout the movie and talks to him.  She also disappears quickly.  It is through her that we learn how Freddy came to be.  And it is in this film he's first referred to as "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs" which is just so darned memorable.  (His mother, a nurse at the mental institution in the 1940s was trapped with the inmates over the Christmas holiday and raped hundreds of times.  She got pregnant and gave birth to Freddy.)  But it's really the special effects that I dig here.  Claymation Freddy puppet, a stop motion skeleton battle, a hovering door in the middle of a room leading to hell, and of course the giant Freddy penis snake.  The final version of it looked like this.

But originally it looked like she was being eaten by a giant penis, so they added the slime and stuff to make it look less dickish.

   Yeah, looks like a giant veiny circumsized penis eating a happy Patricia Arquette.  I mean, the scene is still quite laughable, but the effects in the scene are surprisingly good.  It's just hard to take a giant snake-Freddy-penis trying to ingest a teenage girl seriously.  But at least the effect worked, right?

  It's pretty clear that this was supposed to be a possible end to the series too.  You have two characters return from the first film, Heather Langenkamp as Nancy and John Saxon as her father, who is now just an alcoholic security guard.  And you can guess what happens to them since as I said earlier, New Line wasn't sure this was going to be a hit.  But guess what?

   When the film opened on February 27, 1987 it opened at #1 in the box office.  By the end of its original run, it had made $44,793,333 at the domestic box office.  That's over 11 times its budget.  Heck, even the critics found it to be pretty good!  (Ebert not withstanding.  He and Siskel always hated 'teen death' films.)  In fact, the film was the 24th best grossing film of 1987.  I guess this was before February was the month all the studios put their horrible films out.  And with a trailer like this movie had, who can blame people for really wanting to see it?  It doesn't show any of the film.  It's like a teaser, but it's pretty darn brilliant giving the feel of the film without seeing a lick of it.

   The movie got Patricia Arquette more acting roles, it was the first independent film to be #1 in the box office, and it jump started the career of Chuck Russell, who went on to direct the 1988 remake of The Blob (which is excellent, by the way) and then later The Mask, Eraser, The Scorpion King, and episodes of Fringe.  And of course Frank Darabont would go on to write the Blob remake and The Fly II...  But what you probably know him for are writing and directing three great Stephen King films.  The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist.  Oh, and he's the reason that The Walking Dead was brought to TV.

     Oh yeah, and the film has an awesome theme song by 80s metal band Dokken.  In my opinion, it's one of, if not their best songs.  Don Dokken can't sing it these days, (he could hardly sing it then it was so high, according to him) but it has a great music video using the hell set from the film and starring Dokken, Patricia Arquette and Robert Englund.  It's a really catchy song to boot.  The beginning of the film used another Dokken song, Into The Fire, as Kristen is making the model of the Elm Street house.  (And that's another of their best songs, by the way.)  Here's the music video for Dream Warriors.

      Yes, Freddy was still getting more and more popular, even though the second one was a bit of a disappointment.  With the third film now bringing Freddy to new heights, the question was could it last?

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2:  Freddy's Revenge (1985)

      After the original film in the series was released in November of 1984 and became a huge success, grossing $25.5 million dollars on a budget of less than two million, Bob Shaye, head of New Line Cinema and producer of the first film, immediately wanted a sequel.  Now, Wes Craven wanted nothing to do with a sequel.  In fact, the original ending for the first film was Nancy turning her back on Freddy and we find out the whole movie was actually a nightmare.  Her friends (no longer dead) drive off to school on a beautiful morning.  That was supposed to be the end of the story.  However, Bob Shaye wanted a hook at the end of the movie, and since he got the whole project going, Wes Craven decided to humor him.  That gave us the ending that is actually present in the first film where Nancy turns her back on Freddy, he disappears, she walks out and it's morning.  Her friends (not dead after all) come to drive her to school, the convertable top slams shut, the car drives itself away with the teens screaming inside, and then Nancy's mom gets sucked into the house via the front door window.  The end.  Now, that ending actually makes no sense whatsoever.  Is she still dreaming?  Was the whole movie a dream within a dream within a dream?  Freddy's not defeated?  Did he even really exist?  Who knows...  This is one of the reasons Craven was against this ending.  But still, when he learned that a sequel was in the works, he wanted nothing to do with it, but read over the script that was selected anyway... and he thought it was horrible.  Also, him and Bob Shaye had some real headbutting going on during the making of the first one.  So he left the project and Bob Shaye brought in Jack Sholder, director of New Line's first feature, Alone In The Dark, which was a slasher film set in an asylum starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and Donald Pleasance.  Jack Sholder was also the man who edited all of New Line's movie trailers.

     The writer of Freddy's Revenge was a guy named David Chaskin.   This was his first script (he hasn't wrote many more, either) and in the hopes of getting a sequel made as quickly (and cheaply) as possible, New Line accepted it.  It had Freddy in it, people got killed, and it was weird...  It had all they wanted.   Now, Jack Sholder was not a huge fan of the original film.  He understood why people liked it, but he felt no need to stick to the rules of the original, which with the new script was probably for the best, as it broke some pretty bold rules set forth in the first film anyway.  The only cast member from the original film to come back was Robert Englund, and even he almost didn't come back.  He held out for more money and the studio tried having a stunt man to play Freddy.  It went horribly, so they agreed to pay Robert Englund more money.  (Which he totally deserved.  This isn't just a hulking mongoloid like Jason or Michael Myers.)  Fresh faces were brought in for the new set of teenagers.  Unlike the first film, none of these actors got to be well known though.  No Johnny Depps here.  However, the acting is quite a bit better in this one.

    So Jesse (Mark Patton) is this geeky, outcast kid that's just moved onto Elm Street five years after the events in the first film.  And guess which house his dad (Clu Gulager) decided to buy?  Yep, Nancy's house from the first movie.  The bars are even still on the windows.  He's crushing on this girl Lisa (Kim Myers), who comes from a rich family, but you'd never know it.  She's very girl next doorish, and she has a crush on Jesse.  Well, since moving into the new house, Jesse's been having really bad nightmares about this guy in a striped sweater with finger knives trying to kill him.  But soon the dreams change.  Now Freddy tries to get Jesse to kill for him.  Also, Jesse is attempting to fit in at his new school.  The resident jock, Grady (Robert Rusler) is a pain in Jesse's ass at first, but later on Grady becomes a... slight friend I guess?  He's not a bad guy, just the regular jock type.  There's also the sadistic coach Schneider (Marshall Bell) who likes to torment Jesse and hangs around in S&M bars...More on that in a bit.  To make a long story short, Jesse gets possessed by Freddy for longer and longer intervals and he and the people around him start to think he's going crazy as the body count starts rising and weird things start to happen on Elm Street.

    I think it's best to tell everyone that this is one of the two films considered the black sheep of the Elm Street films.  Some people forget this film ever happened or don't consider it canon.  Others of us, like me, find the film endlessly amusing or even quite good in some ways.  Now, I do recognize why people would hate it.  Those that really loved the ideas presented in the first film, and the characters too, would be very disappointed here.  One of the rules in the first film is that Freddy's powers are linked to people being asleep and dreaming.  Well, no one actually dies in their dreams in this movie.  Freddy is more like a specter here.  As long as Jesse, whom Freddy possesses, is near someone, Freddy can use his powers to manipulate objects and can use Jesse to kill with the glove.  At least, that's what I think is happening here.  It's actually not a good script.  It doesn't make much sense.  The movie has a friggin' demonic parakeet that attacks Jesse's family and then explodes for no reason, for cryin' out loud.  It's like Freddy is a demon fighting for Jesse's soul.  But at least Freddy looks a whole lot more gross than he did in the first one.  (Different makeup guy here who wanted Freddy to look more like a male witch.)  He has more of a melted appearance here than burned, and he's more skeletal in the face.  It actually makes Freddy look more menacing (as much as that's possible since the first film kept shadows on him for the most part and this one has more bright lights on him) and ugly.

Now, that picture above is from a scene that people really, really hate.  There's a pool party towards the end of the film and after Freddy literally rips himself out of Jesse's body, he now can appear in the real world... and he attacks the pool party while making the pool boil, fires start, and making the gate electrified...  He then goes around slicing and dicing... Too bad the teenagers are bigger than he is.  I actually don't mind the scene, because at least I'm getting some carnage, which by this point is all I care about, seeing as the plot doesn't make much sense anyway.  Speaking of that scene where Freddy rips himself out of Jesse, it's so friggin' cool.  It's almost like the American Werewolf in London transformation scene.  Very good special effects, unlike the demon parakeet.

   Okay, here's the part everyone who's seen the film has been waiting for.  This movie is very, very gay.  And I don't mean that in a mean way or anything.  It's just that there's this gay (I can't really call it subtext, because it's too bold for that)... theme... in the movie.  And there's some debate as to whether it was on purpose or not.  The director says no, the writer says yes, and the main actor (who is actually gay) says... maybe.  Want proof?   Besides the game of Probe prominently displayed in Jesse's closet and the sign of No Chicks Allowed on his door?

    Okay, so maybe that's not really gay, but it is really embarrassing.  Especially twerking to close your drawer.  Then there's the scene where after Jesse runs away after trying to make out with his girlfriend, he goes to jock Grady's house, sneaks in his bedroom, wakes him up and says he wants to stay there the night and that something's trying to get inside of him.  Jesse also is a great scream queen... and by that I mean he has a high pitched scream that's even better than Jamie Lee Curtis', as shown at the end of this scene.

   Oh, and there's also the scene where he stumbles out of his house in his pajamas, walks into town into an S&M bar only to see his coach there.  His coach takes him to the school gym (which is...kind of a creepy thing to do at 2 AM with one of your students) and makes him run laps and then shower.  The coach is stripped naked in the showers and spanked with a towel by invisible Freddy and then slashed across the back until naked.  We then see that it was Jesse possessed that did it.)  Yes indeed folks, the most homoerotic horror film I've ever seen... and I've seen a lot of horror films.

   Based on the good reviews and box office gross of the first film, when this one opened 51 weeks after the first film did on November 1, 1985, it actually did better financially than the first one did.  That's very rare when it comes to sequels.  Shot for $3 million dollars, this one made $30 million just in the US and Canada.  Only ten times the budget this time, but $5 million more than the first one made.  The reviews this time, alas, were not great.  They weren't horrible, mind you, but there were more negative ones than good ones.  And I say again, I can understand that.  The first one's a classic despite the bad acting.  It had an original idea.  One that hadn't really been done yet.  This one was your routine possession/ghost film with some slasher side effects.  I'd compare it to Amityville II and Amityville 3D.  They both were not great films, but they were at least interesting.  Sort of in the so bad it's good way.  In fact, I even like the direction on this film better than Wes Craven's on the first film, which seemed kind of sloppy to me.  If you care more for story comprehension than visuals, you probably won't like this much.  If you can overlook such things to have fun sometimes, you may get a kick out of it.   I do find it remarkable that sometimes a sequel, and one that's considered inferior by most, can actually do better than its classic predecessor.  This actually happened quite a bit in the 1980s, but not as much now.  People would go to films or get albums from a band based on the greatness of the last one, so the second one would get more box office or higher billboard rankings and the third film or album would do worse, no matter if it was better or not, based on the disappointment of the second one.  However, this was not the case with Elm Street 3...   Stay tuned, and pleasant dreams...

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

One, two, Freddy's coming for you...

Three, four, better lock your door...

Five, six, grab your crucifix...

Seven, eight gonna stay up late...

Nine, ten, never sleep again...

    By 1984, Friday the 13th was on its quote, unquote "Final Chapter".  Halloween had bitten the dust until 1987 due to the disappointment of Halloween III, and the slasher craze was at the beginning of a fast descent into self-parody and censorship woes.  Enter Wes Craven.  Wes Craven had already made a name for himself in horror, even before the slasher craze was started in 1978.  He'd directed two drive-in movie type hits that shocked critics and censors already.  In 1972, he and Sean Cunningham, (the director and creator of the original Friday the 13th in 1980) made a sort of anti-hippie film called Last House on the Left.  Now, I must admit, I've never seen it, but it did make an impact when it originally came out.  Sort of a show that the hippie era was dead, this was the era of Vietnam and the Manson family.  It was basically a goried remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.  It brought some name recognition to both Craven and Cunningham.  A few years later in 1977, Wes Craven made what is in my opinion his best film.  It was about a family in a RV getting broke down in the desert... and they are terrorized by inbred wild cannibals.   It was called The Hills Have Eyes.  After that, Craven did a few lesser films like Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing along with two horrible TV horror movies.   Let's just say thank goodness Nightmare on Elm Street happened.  Because the movies he did right before and after this film were downright bad.  

     Craven had remembered reading in a newspaper somewhere about Cambodian teens who had fled the US bombings there in the Vietnam War having nightmares so bad, they refused to sleep.  And when they finally did sleep, the died.  Boom, there's a good plot.  Dying from nightmares.  Okay... Keep going Craven.  When Craven was a boy, one night he looked out of his window to see a disheveled man walking past... Stop... and look right at him suddenly.  Craven got scared and hid.  A few minutes he went back to the window, and the guy was still right there just looking.  This would be the inspiration for Freddy.  And finally, the name came from a bully who used to beat Wes Craven up in middle school named Fred Kreuger.   Yes folks, this is how movie writers get ideas sometimes.  Being treated like the cowards we are when we are young.  

    Now the funding had to be found.  Disney liked the idea but wanted to make it more kid-friendly (but this was the same time they made some really dark stuff like Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, so it makes sense), but Craven didn't.  Paramount wasn't interested because they'd just done the similar and not too successful Dreamscape.  Finally, Bob Shaye, head of distribution company New Line decided to finance the film.  (Mortgaging his house and basically everything else to do so.)  So with a budget of under $2 million they were ready to start filming.  And for the most part it went well enough that I don't have to tell you about that.  The only significant thing about it was it was Johnny Depp's first film.

     The film premiered on November 9, 1984 as a limited release in only 165 theaters.  Remember, New Line was just a distribution company at the time, mostly for educational films.  This was their first big release.  The move ended up making back almost its whole budget in its opening weekend.  I say this is partially due to the two posters for the film, shown above, as they are both totally awesome.  (I must say, I wish posters would go back to real artwork instead of photoshop and pictures of the actors.  They worked much better in giving you the feel of a film.)   The film was instantly critically acclaimed unlike most other horror films at the time, and unlike Friday the 13th.  Were the critics right, do I think?  Well...  It's no Halloween.  However, it's better than the vast amount of horror films from the 1980s as well.  And it made over 12 times its budget!

    One of the issues I have with this film is the acting.  You have just three good actors in the whole movie as anything more than bit parts.  John Saxon as Nancy's father, Johnny Depp as Glen, and Robert Englund as Freddy are good actors.  You believe them and they don't seem to over or underact much.  Heather Langencamp is just okay.  There's a reason she hasn't had much acting work outside of the Nightmare series.  She's not movie star beautiful, but more the girl next door type, so she was never a star.  She is better in the two other Nightmare films she's in though.  The bad acting award goes to Ronee Blakley, however.  She was a musician and was well known for her starring role in Robert Altman's Nashville about ten years earlier.  I hated Nashville and have tried to push it out of my memory, so I can't tell you about her acting there, but good god is it horrible here...  If it's possible to underact and overact in the same film, I think she's done that here.  She shows no emotion in scenes where she should emote.  And in others she turns into Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Blvd.  Sure, it works sometimes as her character is supposed to be a depressed, alcoholic, secret hiding mother.  But really it turns out to be unintentionally funny whenever she's on screen.  Even Wes Craven and Heather Langencamp in the commentary poke fun at Blakley's acting, saying she acted as if she was in a different film than everyone else.

     Johnny Depp is quite different here from what we know as Johnny Depp today.  This was even before 21 Jump Street, which is where he became popular.  He's still a pasty faced, skinny boy, but for some reason he's supposedly a jock?  And he's got an odd haircut, but in a different way than in most films.  (More 1980s.)   Now let's get to Freddy Kreuger, the man with the plan.  Now, we find out that more than just some spectral boogyman, he was a real person.  He was a child murderer 10 years back and after being caught by the police and given a trial was let go on a technicality.  So the parents of the area went to Freddy's boiler room and set him on fire, killing him and keeping it a secret.  Now he's back to get revenge by killing his murderers' kids.  Now, that's pretty sick on its own, but originally Freddy was supposed to molest the kids before he killed them too.  This was played down since the McMartin preschool sex scandal was national news during filming.  (You should wikipedia that case.  Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, people thought all daycare and preschool workers were secret satanists that wanted to molest and kill their children...  At least now it's only male teachers in general they think that of... and not satanic ones.)  I don't think I'd have liked this movie at all if they'd kept that in.  There's some element of fun here, but with the molestation angle, which you can still read between the lines to see there, it just turns icky.  It definitely wouldn't have gotten sequels.  (They did ramp that idea up on the remake, and we see where that got it.)  Also, unlike the later sequels, Freddy is still kind of scary here.  He doesn't kill with punchlines yet.  He's not the James Bond of horror icons yet.  Sure, he plays with his victims, but he actually only speaks a few lines here.

  And now for the part you've read all this way for.  The deaths.  The Elm Street films are known for their inventive, special effects laden deaths.  Unlike Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees, death doesn't just come from a knife, arrows, being run over, or something so plausible.  Sure, he uses his bladed glove every once in a while, but the deaths in this series are rather... imaginative.  The first death in the film is pretty startling the first time you see it.  I would imagine even moreso for those in 1984.  

      Now, beyond the rapelike imagery and feel of her final demise right in front of her boyfriend, the lead up to that is also pretty brilliant.   She wakes up to someone throwing pebbles at her window, but there seems to be no one there.  She goes outside to investigate and sees Freddy in the alley.  His arms are like 6 feet long, and he seems to be taunting her and playing with her, laughing as he gives chase and disappearing behind her only to reappear in front of her.  He even comes from behind a tree and tells her "Watch this" and then cuts off two of his fingers, laughing perversely before tackling her as she tries to run back in the house... and that's all a dream.  So it makes sense her going out to investigate a strange sound.  That happens in dreams whether you consciously want to or not.  It explains the teleportation.  Unlike other slashers, this being the dream world, stupid decisions and unreal geography make sense because they don't make sense.  However, dying in a dream means dying in real life too.  Because after that, we see from the real world point of view.  Tina starts thrashing around on the bed as if being attacked and gets slashed in the belly before levitating off the bed and around the walls and ceiling screaming and pleading for help before splashing down dead back on the bed.  (They had her sliding around along the walls by having the room rotate with everything in the room nailed or glued down, including the camera.  That way the actor could move with the room.)

    Then there's the lesser death of Rod Lane, which Nancy sees is getting ready to happen in a dream while Rod is in jail for the death of Tina.  He's choked by bed sheets and hung up to the jail window.  Not quite as interesting as the first death, I know.   In fact, besides Tina's death, there's only one other memorable one in the film.  Yes people, the Depp bites the dust in this one.  Sorry ladies.  But boy is it a cool way to go!    As he put it in Inside the Actors Studio, "I got eaten by a bed.  Not a bad gig."  Yeah, he gets swallowed by his own bed.  (So does his TV, actually.)  Then, it spits out gallons of blood up to the ceiling.  (In a deleted scene it spits his lifeless body out too.)    But actually, this movie isn't about body counts.  There's... 4 deaths in the whole movie.  That's less than even Halloween and much less than Friday the 13th.  

   The movie is very original though.  And it's pretty fun to watch.  I'm sure the jump scares, which there are many of, used to work, but to the trained eye and mind of someone who's studied these films and knows when to expect a jump, they don't work.  The dream sequences are superb.  Nancy keeps seeing dead Tina in a translucent body bag, even with a centipede coming out of her mouth at one point.  Freddy's melted face gets pulled off.  A lamb appears out of nowhere in the boiler room.  The hall attendant that's knocked down by Nancy has Freddy's finger blades and voice when she turns back around to her.  And those are the parts where you know it's a dream.  Sometimes you'll come to scenes that are supposed to feel like real, but a few minutes later we learn are dreams.  Back in 1984, I'm sure people loved this.  I just don't think the film has held up as well as it could have.  I mean the fashions and hair aren't as dated as later in the series, but the movie isn't frightening anymore.   It does, however, work on both a entertainment and psychological basis.

    In the 1980s white middle class people had moved out of cities and into the suburbs where they felt safe and could be with other middle or middle upper class white people.  There was little crime, the houses were kept up, you knew your neighbors, blah blah blah, all that Norman Rockwell 1950s crap they wanted you to believe.  This started in the late 1950s, but I think by the 1980s people had discovered they were sold a lie.  Suburbia held secrets.  Sometimes worse ones than the city.  There were still child molesters, murderers, other races and non-conformists around.  Every town has an Elm Street.  Being part of it just makes it easier to hide your crimes.