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.
Okay, I know this was already broken by the fine folks at bloody-disgusting a week ago. People generally seem satisfied with the selection and I'm inclined to agree with them. I was genuinely worried they'd turn Freddy into some kinda hulking wrestler-type.
Anyway, Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller posted an entry in his blog commenting on the casting. I kinda pity the guy. Horror fans are notorious for getting weird around the subject of remakes and I can only imagine the verbal shitstorm he gets from crackpots about every decision they make. I liked the TCM and Friday the 13th remake, flaws and all. I trust they're gonna do a decent job with this one.
What? Do I have to turn in my horror card now? Am I not cooooool enough for the cool kids anymore? Whatevs.
As a little kid, my mom would take me to Diamond Video in San Francisco, which was a tiny little store nestled in the upper class strip mall a few blocks from Twin Peaks. All the original boxes were shrink-wrapped and displayed in the front. You took the box up to the surly teenagers at the front and they'd pull the cassette from a wall of black boxed videos behind them. You weren't allowed to take the original boxes home, but instead you got this ugly little boxes with the name printed on a little slip of paper.
I loved that place.
I think I was simply predisposed to escapism. I had a big imagination, and anything that sparked it could hold my attention forever. When I was really small, I watched Wizard of Oz over and over, every day, for a year. A couple of years later, it was Return of the Jedi. I wasn't necessarily a sedentary kid. Rather, exposure to fantastic worlds gave me a framework to base my imagination off of. When my parents or my au pairs took me to the gigantic playground near my house, I'd build entire games and adventures based on what I'd just seen or read about. One week, the play structure was the second Death Star's throne room, the next week it was Captain Hook's pirate ship, the next it was Voltron's battleground, and so forth.
All these bright, fun, kid-friendly stories could be found on the right side of the store, lined up bright and neat and shiny, like toy soldiers in formation for inspection. But what about the left side, behind the wall partition? What about the boxes lined up in the towering shelves, in the shadows away from the windows?
Horror.
I remember sneaking away from my mom and wandering down that aisle, looking at the boxes and their lurid cover art, studying the back cover summaries carefully, trying to get as much as I could of the story from the still photos on the back of the boxes. I remember being fascinated by the multi-sequel series, particularly the maddeningly vague, beautifully designed Friday the 13th box art. Inevitably, my mom would either come looking for me or I'd see something so scary that I'd leave the left side of the store and go back to Family or Comedy or Sci-Fi.
I didn't watch a horror movie for most of my childhood. This is probably a good thing. It took next to nothing to scare Little Creature. Scary stories, the scary songs my classmates sang in Halloween music class. Shit, I saw this scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when I was eight and it TRAUMATIZED me!
Anyway, time passed, I got a bit older, and my intense attraction/repulsion to the genre only grew. We moved, there were other video stores, and eventually I picked up Freddy's Dead.
For the life of me, I can't remember why I started with this one. Maybe someone recommended it to me, or I heard it wasn't very scary, or maybe I just had some brand recognition thing going on. But I loved it.
I just rewatched it again last night, for the sake of this posting. Freddy's Dead is, by most standards, a failure as a horror film. It's absolutely not scary, full of now-dated pop-culture references, and it has Breckin Meyer getting killed in a video game while he's banged around a cartoon version of Freddy's home.
The weakest link of the movie in undoubtably Freddy. By this point in the series he'd been essentially neutered, with his cringe-inducing puns, his drag show costume changes, and the campy, cartoonish overacting that later directors forced poor Robert Englund to do. Because he was so de-fanged, this made a perfect entry point for me to get into horror. Sure, bad stuff happened, but it was so hokey and over-the-top and completely harmless that it wasn't going to keep me up at night. Better still, the universe Freddy operated in was strange and exotic and magical. I was absolutely hooked.
Coming back to the movie years later, I still really dig about Freddy's Dead.
I really liked the dream sequences. Sure, they're completely bereft of anything even remotely scary, but they're visually imaginative and entertaining. I liked the use of sound in Carlos's dream, the creepy echoes that move through the scene as he gets killed. I liked the cheesy exploration of Freddy Krueger's memories. And, Cthulhu help me, I liked the video game death scene, especially the bit where the room changes around Spencer as Freddy appears in the TV.
I also dig the fact that the lead protagonists all come from an at-risk youth juvenile care facility. Freddy movies tend to have slightly better defined characterization, if only so the viewer can know what vulnerabilities the characters have that Freddy can attack. Granted, this idea was done better in The Dream Warriors but I still like the environment of the facility, with the overworked and understaffed councilors, the edgy, angry kids, and the decay that filled the backdrop in every scene.
I also really liked the effect Freddy's work has on the town of Springwood. With all the teenagers dead, the town is essentially haunted by the living. People speak to imaginary children, offer cryptic warning to the doomed travelers, and generally act batshit psycho. It is implied that Freddy has become significantly more powerful since the start of the series, as Dr. Billy Zane's Sister discovers when she tries to report the death of her charges, only to find that they've been erased from the universe.
I dunno if I can actually recommend this movie. The fact that I lost my horror virginity to Freddy's Dead taints my objectivity. The jokes are pretty goddamn stupid, the Wile-E-Coyote sounds that Spencer makes when he demolishes the house are as ridiculous as clown shoes, and Freddy has the poor taste to die in 3-D.
Still, the movie does have a cameo by Johnny Depp. It can't be all bad, right?
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