1) I first asked Kane Hodder about Freddy vs. Jason while he made an appearance with Linda Blair at some local Halloween carnival. I'd just gotten into horror in a big way, and Jason Voorhees was my big heeeero. Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday had just come out an the film ended with Freddy Krueger's gloved hand reaching up from hell to retrieve the iconic hockey mask. I was all of eleven years old and a lifetime of superhero books engrained a love of the superfight. Hodder said that the film was in development, but it didn't come out until well after I graduated high school. I wasn't disappointed.
2) I'm ultimately a Jason guy. Jason is my Frankenstein. He's ultimately pitiable, if you're willing to be reaaaaally generous about his origin story. Freddy is fun, but he's a harder guy to like. He's the bully. The whole child molestation thing also doesn't help much.
3) I got really into following the development of the movie on the internet. Multiple scripts had been written, some with really farcical ideas on how the two characters should battle. They finally turned in a script that made neither slasher the "good guy" but gave them plausible reasons to come into conflict. The movie ultimately feels more like a Nightmare film than a Friday film, but it works, in it's own overly complicated way. It's perhaps a little too invested in tying the mythos of both movies together, but it also understood Jason's appeal. They knew he has a big, dumb, lost kid gone bad.
4) Freddy vs. Jason isn't particularly scary per se but it has some astonishing nightmarish images, in particular Mark's nightmare visit from his dead brother. The film bears the distinct touch of legendary Hong Kong director Ronny Yu. I got into pre-takeover Hong Kong action cinema after seeing John Woo's Hard Boiled and I loved Yu's wild fantasy film The Bride With White Hair. Yu works in vivid colors and operatic fights, which made him ideal for the FvJ comic book battles.
5) A lot of the plot is actually pretty clunky and the lead characters come off as more weird than anything else, but the set pieces are cool. Krueger's boiler room looks like a nightmarish hellscape, the flashback scenes of Camp Crystal Lake establish the brutality we've long suspected was part of Jason's childhood, and the portrayal of Freddy's corruption of Jason's mother all flesh out the mythology of both characters brilliantly.
6) Say what you will about everything that came before, the final fight between Freddy vs. Jason does not disappoint. It's one part pro-wrasslin', one part superhero battle, with a dash of Hong Kong wire work for flavor. They ditched Hodder, the best Jason actor, over stuntman Ken Kirzinger. Kirzinger towers over Robert England, and they make a great visual contrast. The battle nearly tears Crystal Lake in two, and the addition of the nearby construction site gives them a bunch of stuff to hit each other with.
7) Jason wins. I don't care about the final knowing wink to the audience, there's one guy walking out of the lake at the end of the movie.
Conclusion: It's often said that the death of a monster is either parody or fighting other monsters.Freddy vs. Jason obviously falls into the grand tradition of all the great Frankenstein/Dracula/Wolfman mashup. Both Freddy and Jason had their final pre-Platinum Dunes hurrah and it fulfilled every boyhood dream of mine.
1) I gotta start this one up with a controversial point: I think that the original Nightmare on Elm Street film hasn't aged all that well. It's a good movie and has some great imagery, but it's also very dated.
2) One of the best things about NoES movies is that the teenage victims tend to be better-developed than most slasher movie characters. We need to know who they are so we know what Freddy will use against them. And who is more vulnerable to the depredations of Freddy Krueger than a bunch of kids in a mental health facility?
3) I like that this movie brings back Nancy Thompson from the original movie. Nancy is one of the best final girls in horror history. She's smart, proactive, brave, and resourceful. We rarely get a chance to see final girls after they survive, but I like that she's become a youth crisis counselor. She didn't break down, she didn't become paranoid, she took her experiences with Freddy and turned it into something positive.
4) The kids in this movie are awesome. While none of them seem particularly unwell, they all have strong personalities and meet the challenge of Freddy Krueger head-on like a bunch of mini-Nancys. My favorites are the punk rocker and the wizard master.
5) This is right before Freddy got super-goofy in part four. He's got a sense of humor, but it's deeply cruel. One of the most famous kills is when Freddy jams the would-be actress into the television. He says "This is it, Jennifer. Your big break in TV! Welcome to prime time, bitch!" before he smashes her into the screen. It's funny, but not ha-ha funny. It's the bleakest, blackest humor imaginable, which makes it the perfect fit for Freddy Krueger.
6) The fight in the graveyard is pure Harryhausen. The junkyard itself looks like a Gothic reimagining of urban decay, with the stacks of cars framing Freddy's grave like an arena. I really like John Saxon, especially after Enter the Dragon and his epic battle against Krueger marks the highlight of the film.
7) There are some great scare scenes in the movie. Most people favor the aforementioned TV smash, but my two are the veins-as-marionettes for sheer squick factor, and the "sorry kid, I don't believe in fairy tales" death of the Wizard Master, because that's the way I'd probably go.
8) Larry Fishbourne
Conclusion: The saga of Freddy is ultimately one of inherited guilt. The kids are paying for the sins of their parents, and we can see the strain it has taken on the last of the so-called Elm Street kids. They are aided and empowered by sympathetic adults, but they ultimately confront and defeat Freddy themselves. Dream Warriors is a story of youthful can-do spirit. It's all the Scooby-Doo and Hardy Boys stories I loved as a kid, with a compelling monster for them to go up against.
1) Freddy's Dead was the very first horror film I ever rented as a child. I ran up and down the rental shelves, looking for the least-intense movie I could find. Freddy's Dead had a bright cover, a fanciful description, and promised a final showdown between good and evil.
2) Having been my first introduction to the Freddy Krueger mythos, the movie felt like a fairy tale. I had no idea why the town of Springwood was so strange, nor why all the kids were missing.
3) Most people hate it when Freddy got funny, but part of the appeal of Freddy's Dead was the fact that it was an evil version of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The bus, the chalkboard, the spiked bed, the video game, all of which were, heh heh, executed with such gleeful aplomb.
4) I liked that the kids were from the halfway home. They were angry, edgy badasses. They were interesting! And one of them knew karate!
5) Roseanne and Tom! "I want my children back!" "You know they bring him!"
6) Yaphet Kotto makes a great wise man. Plus, the movie gave me my first hint on the futility of institutional efforts. The program that he runs seems desperately strapped for resources and he seems to it together with compassion tempered by a no-nonsense attitude.
7) The cheesy 3D special effects. Totally gimmicky for it's time, totally amazing.
8) The final fight ain't no joke. NoES heroines are always tough cookies, and the brawl at the end between Freddy and his daughter is brutal and exciting. Plus there are ninja stars.
9) The first time I heard "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly was during the Spence scene. It blew my fragile 11-year old mind. That, combined with the video game scene (I'm a child of Nintendo) made a horror scene that spoke to my sensibilities.
Conclusion: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is like a childhood storybook for me. It's full of bright colors, grand characters, and an undeniable streak of darkness. It's a good story and a fun movie. I recognize that it also represents the nadir of Freddy Krueger as a horror figure, but it was the best introduction I could have asked for to the wonders of the horror genre.
Shhh. Don't tell anyone, but I already outlined my review before going to see the movie. Here's the outline, unedited:
1) Jackie Earle Haley brought the scare back. Platinum Dunes knows how to cast 'em. 2) I hate hate HATE the constant soundtrack spike jump scare. 3) Teenagers bore me. 4) Harp on the whole "Freddy was always a pedophile" argument again. 5) Fun but dissatisfying, like McDonalds or sex with an ex.
Most of my little predictions turned out to be correct. Jackie Earle Haley was genuinely creepy. No disrespect to Robert Englund, but Freddy had become way too cartoony over the course of the series. You had to clean the slate completely over the course of a reimagining and, love 'em or hate 'em, Platunim Dunes knows how to cast a monster.
I very carefully avoided reviews of the movie before seeing it. I heard through the grapevine that it wasn’t getting good reviews, but horror movies never do. I did chance on Roger Ebert’s review of it where he accused Wes Craven of being the “Ray Kroc of horror”, which I found both distasteful and dismissive. It’s no secret that he doesn’t care for a lot of the stuff I really like and it’s no secret he’s become the crazy old coot who constantly rails against the things my generation does, but his review is very flip and he completely blows off the contribution Craven has made to our cultural landscape. You don’t have to like ‘em, but creating monsters is just as valid and valuable as any other art form. It’s meant a lot to me, at any rate.
I don’t think I cared for the movie all that much. The nicest thing you could say about it was that it was unambitious. There’s a lot of subtextual meat on Nightmare’s bones that the filmmakers don’t particularly seem interested in exploring. It’s just happy to scream in your face every few minutes. The screenplay is terrible, with character moments constantly interrupted by god-awful dialogue that sounds leaden and off-key. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Freddy is on-screen.
One thing that struck me as most interesting about the new Freddy was how different his characterization felt. The original Freddy was evil in a kind of simplistically joyful way; he basically gets off on hurting people. We don’t really have a sense of who he is prior to his death and he carries off his role of dream murderer with a malicious glee that made him curiously likeable. We don’t think too deep on his crimes because he’s a lot of fun to watch.
Haley’s Freddy is much, much angrier. We see him when he’s alive and it’s clear he’s a very sick man. In the flashbacks of his life, he portrays Freddy as apparently suffering from a mild form of retardation, and his death at the hands of the enraged parents is almost tragic. His Freddy isn’t the callow sneering demon of the Robert Englund day. The new Freddy is a sniveling little shit made monstrous by his murder.
He’s also got a more specific reason for going after his victims. While the original Freddy seemed to be targeting all the kids in Springwood, the new Freddy is killing the children who told their parents about his hidden playroom and the terrible things he did to them. One of the movie’s big redeeming factors for me was that it dealt explicitly with something that has always run through Freddy’s mythology, which were his crimes as a child molester.
There’s a lot of fans in the horror community who are up in arms over Freddy being “recast” as a pedophile. I don’t really get that. It’s always been fairly clear to me from the get-go that he was a child molester. His taunting has always had a leering, sexual edge and the only reason they never went into it in depth is that pedophilia is always a taboo subject, even in a gory horror film. Slasher movies have always had a preoccupation with sexuality and the leering gaze, but Freddy has always been pretty explicit about his predilections. Really, why does he always have little blonde girls following him around, showing victims the boiler room and saying “this is where he takes us…” This movie deals heavily with repressed memory and the long reach of childhood sexual trauma. The characters haven’t healed from it and it reaches out to affect their lives. The scene where the two remaining kids find Freddy’s hidden chamber is genuinely disturbing in a way very little of this movie is.
One of the things that ties into the motif is the parent’s conspiracy of silence. Slasher movies are always about isolating the teenagers from their forces of authority, usually by getting them into an abandoned something-or-another. Here, the isolation comes from the parents not believing the kid’s admittedly outlandish claims and concealing their complicity in Freddy’s murder.
The rest of the cast is pretty good too. I never quite warmed up to this movie’s version of Nancy. She’s really cute and kinda looks like Felicia Day from The Guild, but her performance is wildly uneven. Is she the aloof, guarded artist? The shy loner? The angry teenage rebel? She’s more interesting than the bland fake-out final girl we initially follow, but she’s ultimately too impenetrable to win my sympathies. The male characters are slightly more interesting. Aside from being better actors, they portray the stress and fear of crossing over into Freddy’s hellish world much more believably. I don’t’ remember where I read this, but I remember that Thomas Dekker gave an interview where he said that he wanted to portray Dean as scared out of his mind, rather than as the stoic male lead we’ve come to expect. He did a great job and I’m never going to be more creeped out by the words “We’ve still got six minutes to play.”
It’s also funny to note that Friday the 13th’s Aaron Yoo has a cameo appearance as another one of Freddy’s victims. I like that guy, but every time I see him some maniac uses his face as a speed bag. At the rate he’s going I feel Platinum Dunes owes the poor guy a chance to balance the books. Maybe when they inevitably get around to remaking Child’s Play he can stuff Chucky into an industrial-grade printing press or something.
I really liked the whole notion of the micro-naps. One of my favorite parts of all the Freddy movies are how the real world and the dreaming world intersect as the victims become more and more sleepy. This movie gives a stronger reason for this phenomena, and some really trippy stuff starts to happen. I particularly liked the bit in the pharmacy, where Freddy’s dream-self takes big swipes at Nancy, knocking over stuff from the shelves.
In the end, I guess I was vaguely disappointed by it. It was nice to see Freddy doing his thing again and I really liked Haley’s performance in the role, but there wasn’t a lot more to the movie besides jump-shock scares. I try to be kinder about Platinum Dunes movies than a lot of my fellow commentators, especially because they’re keeping my favorite icons alive, but they seem to think of horror as a sledgehammer with which to bludgeon an audience. All the classic scenes from the original are there, but they're amped up to ten. The girl doesn't crawl up the wall, she's violently slammed around the bedroom. Freddy doesn't eerily stretch out of Nancy's wallpaper, he pushes out of it like bad CGI from The Haunted. Sigh.
There’s very little attempt to building any real tension or creating any sort of creeping dread. I get a bunch of jolts, which always leaves me twitchy and nervous, and I can leave the movie behind at the theater. It doesn’t follow me home, it doesn’t tuck me in bed late at night, it doesn’t stand over me while I sleep, waiting for me to open my eyes.
What’s worse is that, even though they work in a very formulaic subgenre, the movies Platinum Dunes have made come off feeling very cold. The people involved are too experienced and professional to make movies that have the weird amateurish enthusiasm of the classic slasher flicks. The stars are all very good looking and marketable, the camera work is very skilled, and the watching the movie feels like watching a technically skills if emotionless ballet. Bitch about Zombie's Halloween remake all you want, but at least that had soul. It was ugly, unpleasant soul, but it was there.
Walking away from the movie, I sort of wondered if the makers actually have any reverence for the genre at all, or if they are cynically aware that idiots like me will keep paying money as long as there’s some nostalgia involved.
I'm generally a fan of the Platinum Dunes remake series. Sure, they're a little too formulaic and polished to really capture the gritty nastiness of the originals, but they're clearly made with some degree of reverence to the legacies that spawn them.
Freddy, more than other monsters, succeeds or fails based on the actor who plays him. Jackie Earle Haley is a pretty good fit. From the limited dialogue he has in the trailer, it sounds like he's playing Freddy Krueger with a speech impediment. This adds a certain creepy weakness to the character, the kind of personality tic you'd expect from a child murdering pervert janitor. He seems less confident, less obviously malicious, and more creepily evil. The trailer starts with a powerful man chasing a scared Freddy into the boiler room and we get the sense that he's a damaged and weak man, preying on kids, and the Elm street parents are a little too eager to see justice done. Maybe I'm wishful thinking here, but I really hope that the death of Freddy Krueger isn't as cut-and-dry as it was in the original.
The Platinum Dunes monsters have mostly been confined to the real world. This has worked well in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th but it may work against them for the Elm Street remake. Given the flair and visual artistry of the previous entries, there isn't a lot of razzle-dazzle in the trailer. The dream sequences look brightly lit and barren and vaguely post-apocalyptic. The film makers have a lot of nods to the original, particularly with the bathtubs and the levitating bodies and the corpses dragged down hallways, but I'm hoping that the dream sequences keep that disjointed, creepy vibe from the originals.
I've been hacking away at this blog for about a year now and I haven't said much about Freddy Krueger, the dream slasher from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. If I were being honest with you, it's because I never connected to him as much as I did to Jason.
A passion for horror seems to be the flower that grows from the loamy soil of early adolescence, particularly troubled ones where a person feels powerless. I know I developed a certain degree of sympathy for Jason because of what was going on in my own life. I felt like an ugly outsider who couldn't connect to people and I used to imagine that Jason felt the same way, only he had the power to lash out against that. It made logical sense to my crazy 14-year-old head; no girl is ever going to sleep with me, no group is ever going to accept me, so they might as well fear me.
In commenting about an essay I wrote on the ordinariness of my street name, my writing instructor observed that I treat it like a cipher I can inhabit. To a large extent, that's true about the character of Jason. He's a cipher. You can make of him whatever you want, because he doesn't do much but lumber around and kill. Freddy is an actual character, with his own quirks and foibles, and doesn't have the same kind of role-playing possibilities. It's not to say I didn't love his movies, but when I started getting into the genre I was looking for heroes as much as stories.
Time has given me new respect for the series.
I think that everyone goes through period of bad taste, a point theoretically contained in their formative years where they enjoy the vulgar and the obvious. Watching The Hangover yesterday (or, indeed, most of the dreck that passes for "comedies") I'm inclined to believe most of us never bother to outgrow that stage. I know I was deep in that particular worldview when I started getting into horror and I favored the wilder, more ostentatious later entries in the series than the modest, restrained film that started it all.
Perhaps I'm giving the movie too much credit. Perhaps it was simply a new idea and they hadn't completely felt their ways around the borders of Freddy Krueger. But the fact remains that NoES feels almost completely different from the rest of the series, even beyond the budgetary constrictions. Freddy (or "Fred", as the movie calls him) isn't center-stage in the movie, which instead finds its scares through a really uncomfortable sense of surreality. As the movie goes on, we start losing track of when Nancy is asleep or awake, the bizarre effects Freddy causes start leaking into the real world, and the movie begins to take the shape of a non-linear, too-clever-by-half, foreign film.
I'm not going to pretend this is a perfect movie. The disco-club soundtrack is completely ridiculous, Nancy's dead mother sinking into the disco-ball bed while waving is laughable, and the notion of Nancy tricking out her house strikes me as part Vietcong, part Home Alone. Most of these quibbles are specific to the era, and are kinda petty given the pleasure I received from the work. Still, gotta pretend I'm not COMPLETELY fawning over it.
There is a remake coming up, and the new Freddy has been cast. It's done by the guys who did the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th remakes. I liked their previous work, but I worry that they're going to miss the potential with this franchise.
A big part of the reason Freddy appeals to people is that the movies are so much more visual and imaginative. Killing someone in the delirium of a dream is such a wonderful, wonderful concept, but most of the actual dream sequences are very literal and structured and shallow. The video game fan gets killed in a video game while working out his previously-alluded father issues, the gamer nerd gets killed pretending to be a wizard, etc.
If I could get the budget and the clout to hire my dream team, it would be either Michel Gondry or Neil Gaiman. Both men have created beautiful, surreal stories set in the dream world, and a chance for either of them to play in that particular sandbox would give me the biggest geekgasm ever. When all is said and done, Jason is completely formulaic. With Freddy there's potential to create something amazing.
As a side note, it's sometimes challenging to write this blog because I often find myself poking delicately at the bruises of my psyche. For me (and I'm sure for a lot of other fans) horror becomes inexorably tied to the strange sides of our souls.
I once met graphic novelist and personal hero Adrian Tomine and he told me that one of the hesitations he had in being honest with his work was a powerful desire to be liked. Sometimes I think about the way my audience will view me when I talk about idolizing monsters. It doesn't mean I am a particularly unpleasant or sinister person. I'm quite affable in public, truth be told. But my passions don't necessarily come from a place many people will understand or be comfortable with. I think that some of you understand where I'm coming from, though.
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