Critters 3 and Critters 4

Critters 3 (1991)

       I've been trying to come up with things to say for this film and its sequel for months now.  Being early 90s direct-to-video releases, there isn't much data on them.  So I apologize for how short this write up is.  

     After the box office disappointment of Critters 2, the once promising series seemed to be done.  For 3 years the franchise kept dormant.  However, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a surge in the idea of shooting movies on a low budget in order for the films to bypass theaters and go directly to VHS.  It was akin to the idea of TV movies, but this way, instead of getting sponsers and the TV station to pay for it, you had the movie company pay more or less than a million bucks and hope to recoup the money with movie rental stores buying the rights to rent the film.  (It may surprise some of you, but film ownership was not important in the early days of VHS.  In fact, VHS was mainly made for the rental market back in the late 1970s, with VHS tapes costing about $100 each.)   So New Line was eventually persuaded to fund two Critters films to be shot at the same time, both to be released straight-to-video, and to be released pretty much back to back as well.

    The plot of Critters 3 is kind of like the first to films, but set in pretty much one building.  There's this teenage girl, Annie, and her younger brother.  They are going with their father to their apartment when their tire has a flat.  They stop at a rest stop and there they meet Josh.  Now Josh is played by a young Leonardo Di Caprio.  Supposedly he was 17 when this film came out, but he looks maybe 14.  Makes me wonder if perhaps the film was filmed way earlier than it was released and they decided at the last minute to release direct to video?  (As I said, there's not much info on these films to find out.)   Anyway, it was Di Caprio's first film.  Now Josh starts playing frisbee with Annie and her brother, and when the frisbee goes into the woods, they are surprised by Charlie, the village drunk and now alien bounty hunter from the first two films.  He's of course hunting Crites again and warns the kids who all think he's just the local crazy.  Once the tire is fixed the kids leave.  We also find out that Josh's stepdad, who he's traveling with, is a bad guy.  He's the family's new landlord.  Oh, also some Crites laid eggs under the family car and they are traveling with them to their apartment.  Well, I think you can guess how it goes from there.  The whole rest of the film takes place in the apartment.  Of course Josh and his stepdad show up, people die, there's some funny hijinks with the Crites thrown in, and after everything's over they set up for the next movie which was apparently shot at the same time.  Basically Charlie is told by a hologram of his best friend and bounty hunter Ug from the last two films that he apparently can't kill any more Crites.  That they are now protected and to give him the eggs he finds. 

    I didn't like this film as much as the first two.  The lower budget is very very obvious and none of the main characters from the first two films are major characters here.  It's not a bad movie.  It's even fun in some parts.  (Like the fat lady getting shot repeatedly by the Crite's quills, which make people partially paralyzed.  There's still a bit of blood and menace here, but not much.  It's more of a made-for-tv type of movie.  Nothing to really offend anyone... Except maybe the huge pair of panties the apartment maintenance guy holds up of the fat lady's.  Yeesh!

Critters 4 (1992)

     So at the end of the last film, Charlie, intergalactic bumbling bounty hunter, is told by a hologram of his friend an co-worker Ug that he can't kill Crites anymore as the two eggs he's about to smash are the last two and he can't cause a species' extinction and to put the eggs in a transport.  Well, somehow Ug gets stuck in the transport too, and it takes him into space and puts him in suspended animation.  In 2045, his pod is found by a salvage ship, but once the salvage ship captain reports the pod, Councilor Tetra tells the crew he will pay 3 times what they ask if they'll go to TerraCor, a space station, and hand it over.  Everyone on the crew, except the young engineer's apprentice Ethan accept the idea.  He just wants to get to earth and see his father, and this is another delay.  When they arrive, the station is empty, the core is slowly building to meltdown, and the station computer won't do what it's told.  (In fact, it always does the exact opposite, they find out.)  Well, after finding this all out, Rick, the captain of the salvage ship, decides he wants all the money for himself and opens the pod.  He finds Charlie, but doesn't believe he's the only thing in the pod.  So he goes in and is eaten by freshly hatched baby Crites.  At this point I should mention the other three characters.  There's Bernie, the drug addicted cargo specialist.  He's not a nice guy, just like the captain.  Then there's the pilot Fran, played by Angela Bassett.  She's sort of a mother figure to Ethan, our main character, on the ship.  And there's Albert, the head engineer.  He's played by Brad Dourif.  So, now the Crites have hatched, we soon find they've laid more eggs and are commandeering the salvage ship and setting the course for Earth.  Also, a recording was found showing that the station was being used to engineer bioweapons from alien species...  Yeah...  Now our entrepid crew must work its way through the space station towards their ship avoiding Crites along the way... But then Councilor Tetra shows up... and I'm gonna leave it there, because the ending is sort of a surprise.

   Now, I will tell you.  This movie doesn't have much Crite action in it.  The budget went mostly to the space station sets, I think.  Which is pretty sad as there isn't much to look at.  White walls mostly.  No, this is more character driven, which would be fine if the characters were interesting.  They aren't.  Brad Dourif does what he can with what he's got, but he's not playing crazy here like he usually does, so that's not much.  The film is also essentially bloodless.  Most of the comedy comes from the station's computer doing the opposite of what it's told to do, so there's not much to that either.  I guess the most amusing thing is that the movie is essentially Alien Resurrection but made 5 years earlier.  It even has Brad Dourif in it, albeit a very different character.  No talk of "beautiful, beautiful butterfly!" here, thank you very much.  And there's the engineering of a pesky alien monster to make bioweapons, which is the plot of the whole Alien franchise.  All that's missing is an android and crazy Sigourney Weaver.  

   This was the second worst Critters film, in my opinion.  The space setting, which is usually considered the point when horror series fail (Leprechaun and Jason X) works here.  I mean, the Crites are aliens after all.  The setting alone makes it better than the last film.  It brings a new feeling to the series.  What doesn't work is not having the Crites being the focus.  The focus is on the corporation coming to take the Crites to make bioweapons and the station close to having a meltdown.  The Crites are maybe in 5 minutes of the film.  There's really only two attacks.  Heck, if I remember correctly there's only two Crites in the whole film!   However, I must say the end reveal of the movie is just about unforgivable.   I mean it's believable, but it's not something the audience wants to happen, and it leaves the series on a sad note.  If you want to know what I'm talking about, watch the film.

So, after all that time dreading talking about these movies, I've finally finished and can now move on to writing about movies that have commentaries or making-ofs to them... that have documentation of their making, or retrospectives so I can actually give you guys and gals some facts and anecdotes.  I plan to start a write up of the Child's Play series next, so you have that to look forward to.  Also, I started over a year ago doing write-ups for the Star Trek films and only got through the third one, so I plan to get back to that as well.  We'll see how it goes.

Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)

Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)

     When the first Critters film did well in the box office, making 6 1/2 times its budget, a sequel was planned pretty quickly.   Sadly, there is not much info out there on the making of this series, so there's not much I can say.  The budget this time would be over twice as much as that of the first film, coming in over $4 million.  This meant that more money could be spent on special effects.  However, the well-known actors from the first film are mostly gone.  Only 4 actors from the first movie return for this one.  The boy from the first film is back, a little older now being a young teenager.  The space bounty hunter Ug, using his hair metal look from the first film is back as well as Charlie, the town oddball who joined the bounty hunters at the end of the first film.  Oh, and Lin Shaye is back as the town gossip/secretary.  

    So somewhere between the first film and this one Brad, the redheaded main character from the first film, has moved out of town.  It seems the town didn't like being known for man-eating aliens and sort of threw his family out of town.  (They voted out the sheriff too.)  Well, now he's coming back to town to visit his grandmother.  About time he gets back the town the Crite (critters) eggs secretly laid by the ones from the first film, are about to hatch.  Meanwhile, Charlie and Ug, just coming back to their ship from some bounty hunting, get an assignment to go back to earth because it's been learned that the Crites weren't fully eradicated two years ago.  All this happens during Easter break (guess I picked the right time to watch this one), and of course the Crite eggs are found and painted like Easter eggs to use for the church Easter egg hunt.  And just as Easter Sunday services are going on, the Crites hatch and kill the guy dressed as the Easter bunny. (Somehow he manages to fly through the church window dead, scaring the congregation pretty badly.)  It doesn't take long for the Crites to spread around town creating mayhem.  They kill people, animals, and... well they basically try to eat everything in their paths.  

      Even though the first film didn't take itself very seriously, this one is even more of a comedy.  Things happen like a Crite deciding to bite into a truck tire.  When it does that, his body inflates to epic proportions.  (He is still attached to the tire when the truck drives off, squishing the poor Crite.)  A Crite gets the hair on the top of its head shot off.  It looks in a mirror and says "bitchin!" in it's own language, which is of course translated for us all to see.  If the first movie was a lot like Gremlins, this one is more like Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which wouldn't come out for another two years, actually.  There's even a Freddy Kreuger joke in this one.  Don't start watching this expecting any scares or mystery.  This is a fun comedy with a bit of gore and nudity thrown in.  Speaking of nudity, one of the bounty hunters (the one who in the first film didn't transform into anyone) chooses to transform into a Playboy centerfold here.  Complete with bare breasts at first.  After the first scene she's covered up, but still, pretty daring for a PG-13 film.  The gore, too, is surprising for such a film.  I guess it was decided the gore was so fake-looking and in good humor that it wasn't really that offensive.   There's also the fact that the PG-13 rating in the 1980s was still finding its footing.  Heck, even PG films back in 1988 would allow the F word once or twice and non-sexual nudity, both of which would give you an R right away now.  (Ratings creep, my ass!)  

      I must say, the special effects here are just okay.  One of the main effects in this one is all the Crites getting together to form a big ball and rolling and eating at the same time.  (Getting it to go, as it were.)  You can always see the wire that's pulling the big fluffball.  And even when rolling as just one Crite, you can tell these were simply rolled or thrown where they need to be.   Still, if you can overlook such things like I can, you should have fun watching this.  Most fans of the series consider this film to be the best of the bunch.  I'm not sure I agree so far.  I find it equal with the first film, but they are quite different.  This one is set mostly during the day with the not-so-great special effects shown bare.  It's a full-out comedy.  And the direction isn't as good.  Mick Garris directed this, and I've never been much of a fan of his.  He's mostly known for directing Stephen King miniseries adaptations like The Stand (which I did like), The Shining (really boring and doesn't hold a candle to the Kubrick film), Desperation, and Bag of Bones.  This was his first theatrical film.  In fact, he only had directed an episode of Amazing Stories before this.  The point is, he's an old-fashioned TV director.  He's there to keep things on budget, to be done in a short amount of time, and that's about it.  He doesn't have a great eye for camera angles, character direction, or anything to make the movie stand out.  And for some reason, someone thought Eddie Deezen should be in this movie.  You know, the geek from Grease and Wargames.  He plays the manager of a restaurant called The Hungry Heifer.  And one of the bounty hunters turns into him for a few minutes.  I don't know why he was needed here, or for any other movie for that matter.  (Okay, maybe Laserblast just for the MST3K jokes.)

     Sadly, the movie didn't even make back its budget in theaters.  It made just over $3 million dollars, making 2/3 of that its opening weekend.  The movie wasn't liked by critics, but as I said earlier, a lot of people like this better than the first film.   Siskel and Ebert obviously didn't agree, but I can empathize with Ebert's reasons for his thumbs down.  His main problem is the quality of the effects and Garris's direction as well.   But don't let that make you think I didn't like the film.  I thoroughly enjoyed it as much as I did the first film, which was a great deal.  Both films have faults.  They aren't Alien or Gremlins, but I do think they are just as much fun as Gremlins...  Yeah, they don't even touch Alien.

 

However, even though the movie lost money, two straight-to-video sequels were made just 3 years later...

     

Critters (1986)

Critters (1986)

"Where do they come up with this stuff?!" - Raphael leaving a showing of Critters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

      The 1980s were probably the last golden age of the horror film.  It was also the last era of the science fiction B movie.  The late 80s brought about CGI, which rapidly became the special effect of choice through the 90s and continues to be today (along with wire work that is hidden by CGI and of course the old standby of green screen).  Back in the 1980s, science fiction and horror films were routinely made on low budgets with simple blue screen, matte paintings, and puppets for the creatures.  Now, of course, sometimes these effects look ridiculous now to some.   Puppets are clearly puppets to some people, and you won't convince them otherwise.  To me it's the same with CGI.  I know it's fake and I just see the actor there reacting to nothing but a tennis ball on a stick... if even that.  Give me the old effects any day.  Thankfully, in the past few years film-makers have started to mix puppetry and other older forms of special effect in with their CGI like CGI was supposed to be used originally.  The best films tend to do this.  Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings for example.  LOTR used a lot of large miniatures (bigatures) instead of just making CGI forts or castles.  Jurassic Park used more puppets and animatronics than CGI to great effect.  But I digress.  This is about a film that didn't use CGI at all.  A low budget movie made to cash in on the success of 1984's Gremlins.  

     So we all know by now (if you read my Nightmare on Elm Street blogs) that New Line was pretty much put on the map by Freddy.  (Kreuger, not Mercury)  And hey, if you do well with horror, why stop, right?  And man, that Gremlins flick did pretty darn well, didn't it?  So New Line buys up this script that's been sitting around since 1981 written by Dominic Muir.   The script was then redone to make it less like Gremlins was by the guy who ended up directing the movie, Stephen Herek.  Now Stephen was a Roger Corman productions alumni.  He was an assistant editor on 1980s Corman films like Space Raiders and The Slumber Party Massacre.   Working with Corman was probably the best thing for a person to do that was going to make Critters anyway.  It basically is a 1980s Roger Corman type film without Corman being involved.  It's low budget but does the best it can with that budget.  Take the plot for instance...  They did this on $2 million!

     Shape-shifting bounty hunters are sent after some little ferocious aliens that did a prison break from an asteroid penal colony.  (Great so far, am I right?!)  The nasty little things of course land on earth.  Where on earth?  Kansas!  Where else?  The bounty hunters do their job and pursue.  They learn about earth through TV transmissions and the lead bounty hunter choses his body from a hair metal singer in a music video he comes across.  (Hey, it's the mid-80s)  The other one finds nothing to his liking so he stays a no-faced green humanoid until later on.  When the critters get to earth, they start eating, which is what their race is known for.  They eat cattle and then decide humans are up there on the menu too.  Now, the story is brought to earth by this quaint midwestern family.  You have mom of all 1980s movie moms, Dee Wallace-Stone.  (Mother in The Hills Have Eyes, Cujo and E.T.)  Billy Green Bush as the father.  (Known for character acting throughout the 1970s and 80s.)  The sister is played by little known Nadine Van der Velde.  And of course, our main protagonist, little Brad, played by Scott Grimes, the only one of those besides Dee Wallace still working today.  (E.R., Band of Brothers, Robin Hood, Justified)   Also in the film are Ethan Phillips (Neelix from Star Trek Voyager), Billy Zane as the sister's boyfriend (and critter snack), and of course Lin Shaye (sister of New Line owner Bob Shaye) as the police department receptionist.  

    So, as you can see, it's not a bad little cast.  Now, the question is, is the film any good?  That answer I suppose would have to depend on if you like 1950s science fiction films.  Because that's essentially what this is.  Rural family is trapped in farmhouse by little vicious aliens and must defend their lives.  It's more akin to Killer Klowns From Outer Space than the 1982 redo of The Thing.  More like the 1980s Tobe Hooper remake of Invaders From Mars.  To be perfectly honest, I really had a fun time watching this movie.  It doesn't take itself seriously.  It's fun but not goofy.  (In that way it's not Killer Klowns)  The acting isn't horrible.  It's not great by any means, but it doesn't distract from the fun of the film.  This isn't in the so bad it's good category.  It genuinely is good.  You just have to watch it and go with it.  I mean, you have bounty hunters that steal people's faces and aliens that roll around on the ground like hedgehogs and shoot out needle things to paralyze their prey.  Don't go looking for deep philosophical truths here.  It's a B movie.  A very fun B movie filmed in the 1980s.  And it's got some meta-humor. One critter attempts to communicate with an E.T. doll.  (And Dee Wallace was in that film.)  The family's cat is named Chewie.  There's a lot of fun to be had watching this if you will allow yourself.  

     The special effects are okay for a low budget film of the time period.  The effects were done by the Chiodo brothers.  (They directed and did the effects for the aforementioned Killer Klowns From Outer Space, which I also recommend for fun.)  They tend to keep the critters partially obscured by shadow or in low light.  The puppets are clearly puppets here.  They didn't have the budget of Gremlins to do animatronics as were done in that film.  There is a critter that grows to giant size later in the film, which was done via a man in a suit.  (Also shot so detail isn't shown.)  I think most of the budget here went to destroying a church halfway through the movie and blowing up a farmhouse.  I can't blame them.  I would spend half a budget on cool explosions too!  In the end the effects are simply serviceable, which is all they needed to be.

     The film went on to make over $13 million on a $2 million budget.  Dee Wallace still says she loves the film, but then again, unlike many actresses she embraces her horror movie roles.  The director, Stephen Herek's next project was a little film called Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and he would follow that with the likes of Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead, The Mighty Ducks, The Three Musketeers, the live action 101 Dalmations, and Eddie Murphy's under-appreciated Holy Man.  Billy Zane would of course go on to be in one of the greatest movies of all time... Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knights... and Titanic.  3 of the actors, including young Scott Grimes, would come back for the second film in 1988.

    

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003)

     It had been 12 years since the last real Nightmare on Elm Street film (it's debatable on whether New Nightmare should be considered one or not.  If considered, it'd been 9 years), but only one year since the last Friday the 13th film (Jason X).  However, this film had been in development hell since about 1993.  10 long years.  Actually, both New Line who owned the rights to Freddy, and Paramount who owned Jason, had considered a movie involving the two fighting way back in 1987, but could never come up with a story that satisfied both studios.  After New Line bought the rights to Jason back in the early 1990s, the plan was more feasable.  If you remember, 1993's Jason Goes to Hell ended with Freddy's glove reaching up out of the ground and pulling Jason's mask down to hell.  And yes, it was meant by Sean Cunningham, producer of the film and creator of the Friday the 13th series to point towards the big horror match.  But when Wes Craven decided to make New Nightmare in 1994, all plans for this were put on hold.  And yet a script still had to be written.  By 2003, New Line had spent 6 million dollars figuring out how to do the film, paying people to write screenplays, etc.  One of the first story ideas involved both working as Hell's assassins for Satan, harvesting souls for him.  Satan starts a little contest sending the two to earth to see who could get the most souls (kill the most).  The one that wins gets to stay on earth to kill people, the other one goes back to hell and does nothing.  Even Brannon Braga and Ronald D Moore, who were responsible for the three Star Trek shows in the 1990s wrote a script!   There was one where it was revealed that Freddy once worked at Camp Crystal Lake and he molested Jason and then drowned him so he wouldn't tell.  (Um... no.  Ew.)

    Finally, a script was chosen that seemed to work well.  Two writers named Mark Swift and Damian Shannon wrote the one that was ultimately chosen. (About 14 screenplays were written over the 10 years.)  These two writers would go on to write the screenplay for the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th.   Finding the right director took a little while, but definitely not the 10 years it took to find the script.  They met with about 40 directors and finally they asked Ronny Yu, who had directed 1998's Bride of Chucky to direct the film.  Initially he had no inclination to make the film.  He wasn't a fan of either franchise.  But when told that he didn't have to take it seriously, he was on board.  They got Robert Englund to come back very easily.  (It was the last time he played Freddy on screen.)  However, fans of the series were not happy when the producers opted not to bring back Kane Hodder as Jason.  He'd portrayed the character in every Friday the 13th since 1988 (4 films).  They went for some other stunt guy who had more "emotive eyes" and who was 3 inches taller.  I dunno.  I don't see the big deal.  

   The movie has Freddy manipulating Jason (by appearing as his mother) into killing teens on Elm Street because no one remembers him.  The police department has hidden every trace of what happened on Elm Street in the past, including sending those who have witnessed Freddy's killings to a psychiatric hospital.   So, after the first few killings that Jason does (and make Freddy progressively stronger) but Jason is an unstoppable killing machine and won't let Freddy actually kill anyone (Freddy likes to play with his victims first, and Jason just hacks away.).  After a while the teenagers figure out what's going on (including the main character's ex-boyfriend who was locked away in the psych hospital after watching her dad who was really Freddy kill her mom) and plan to knock out Jason with sedatives and drive him 600 miles from Springwood, Ohio to Camp Crystal Lake, New Jersey.  (In the movie, it seems to take less than an hour due to cuts from the script.)  And of course there are two physical brawls between Freddy and Jason.  One in the dream world and one in Camp Crystal Lake.  

     The cast here is... a mixed bag for sure.  The main actress, Monica Keena, is usually an okay actress.  Here she's probably the worst actress since Nancy's mom in the first Nightmare film.  Her lines are overdone, and she seems kind of drugged out most of the time and I doubt it's just great acting due to sleep deprivation.  On the other hand you have the great Brendan Fletcher (Tideland) and Jason Ritter.  The other actors are serviceable I guess.  (Well, maybe not the deputy who I figured was supposed to be like Deputy Dewey from Scream.)   Jason Ritter was a last minute addition to the film.  His part originally was going to go to Brad Renfro (Tom and Huck, The Client) but his drug problems forced him to be recast.  (He died about 3 years later from a heroin overdose.)  

     However, people are so not here for the acting.  They're here to see Freddy and Jason kill said actors and kick each others asses.  But if you're hoping for gore galore, you'll be sadly disappointed.  A lot of the blood is CGI or unrealistic.  The whole film is so very over the top, especially the two fight sequences.  Ronny Yu wanted sort of a WWE vibe to the fight scenes, very theatrical with a lot of name-calling (at least from Freddy, as Jason is thankfully still mute).  In fact, before the film was made, a mock press conference was held with Jason and Freddy in the WWF etc style.  It set the fans up perfectly for what the movie would be like.  

     All in all, I don't have much to say about this one.  Pretty much everyone has seen it.  You know it's just stupid fun.  And it is fun.  Freddy is about like he was in Nightmare 4 making lots of puns.  Jason looks like he did in like part 4 of his franchise before he was turned into a eewy gooey zombie with a mask in part 6.  The characters are annoying and for the most part really stupid.  They're there to run around, pretend there is some interesting plot (there isn't really) and get killed.  And they do that admirably I suppose.  (Christopher Marquette has a charming womanly scream.)  I must admit, when I went to go see this by myself in Richmond back in 2003 on opening day, I was really looking forward to it.  I mean what slasher fan wouldn't be?  And even though it wasn't the dark gory film that I wanted, I still had fun watching it.  However, I hate, hate, hate the ending.  What a cop-out!  No winner?  WTF?  Well, I guess you could say the main girl and main guy in the film win.  They live, at least.  At least with the way it ended, both Freddy and Jason fans are either unsatisfied or satisfied.  Most of my friends see Jason as the winner because they like those movies and don't care for the Nightmare on Elm Street films.  I always consider Freddy the winner, because I've always liked the Freddy character more than lumbering, my walk is my act Jason.  Hey, at least I got to see that chick who's not Beyonce from Destiny's Child do mouth to mouth with Jason Vorhees!  

     The movie certainly did well at the box office.  I mean, when you get fans of two different franchises together and others who just are interested to see the fight, that's a lot of people!   In its opening weekend of August 15, 2003 (this was the last movie I saw before I moved to the mountains for a year for college) the movie earned 36 million dollars.  That was 6 million more than it cost to even make the film!  By the end of its theatrical run, it had made globally about 115 million bucks, making it the most profitable film of either of the franchises.  (A record it still holds even after the two remakes.)  Efforts were immediately made to do a sequel with either Pinhead, Michael Myers, or Ash from Evil Dead, and in fact, Sam Raimi was keen to have Ash fight the other two, but alas the deal was never worked out.  However, the screenplay was turned into a comic book which is apparently pretty good.  I'll have to give it a look one of these days.

Well folks, with that, there's only one more Nightmare on Elm Street film to blog about, which is the 2010 remake.  I hope to do that one sometime within the next week, but you know not to take my word on such things by now.  I'm sorry there wasn't much to this blog entry, but as the film isn't one of my favorites nor particularly bad, I just didn't have much to say about it.  The dream sequences were cool, though.  I will say that.  The movie is very comic booky, if you know what I mean.  You've got a Hong Kong director directing this one, so you should expect lots of wire work.  Seriously.  I am also sorry there's not much multimedia in this blog post.  The clips were available, but I didn't do any scene breakdowns here so I didn't need them.  Plus, from what I'm told, most don't watch the clips I put up anyway, as they read this on their Android phones or devices, and alas most of those clips require Flash, which those devices can't use.

Until next time, don't let the bed bugs bite!

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.