Census Bloodbath: Etruscan Raiders

Year: 1982
Director: Sergio Martino
Cast: Elvire Audray, Paolo Malco, Claudio Cassinelli
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

The Italian giallo genre was in pretty dire straits by the time the Americans picked up the reins of hacking and slashing in the early 80's. While the countrymen still had some juice left in them (we were still five years off from Michele Soavi's delightful StageFright: Aquarius), post-Friday the 13th Italy had mostly produced forgotten dreck from clean-up hitters like Gianni Martucci's Trhauma and Riccardo Freda's Murder Syndrome, or unrepentantly nasty permutations from more well known shlock directors like Ovidio G. Assonitis' Madhouse and Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper.

When Sergio Martino (the director of Your Vice is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key, which is actually almost as good as its title) jumped into the fray in 1982 with The Scorpion with the Two Tails, I hoped he would bring some of his 70's bravado to deliver something the was at least stylish and watchable.

And as usual, my hopes were gutted with a butcher knife.

The Scorpion with Two Tails begins, as so many Italian genre riffs do, in New York City, where Joan Barnard (Elvire Audray) learns of the death of her archaeologist husband Arthur (the John Saxon), who recently discovered the ruins of an Etruscan tomb in Italy. She flies to Italy to attempt to solve his murder, bringing her friend Mike (Paolo Malco of The New York Ripper) along with her.

There she gets mixed up with a variety of colorful persons, including a mysterious Contessa (Marilù Tolo) who was housing Arthur, a rival archaeologist named Paolo (Claudio Cassinelli), and a troop of mafiosos/grave robbers/nude photographers who it turns out were engaged in illegal drug trade with Joan's father. She has lots of dreams about Etruscan rituals involving the tomb, and her increasing hysteria would led us to conclude that she is most likely a reincarnation of an immortal ancient priestess.

This has almost nothing to do with the plot, but it's what we spend at least 60% of the movie focusing on, so it's probably worth mentioning.

The supernatural genre elements here are pretty, well, generic. Usually with a plot like this, the Italians have to rely on their lurid stylistic sensibility and sensational murders to goose things up a bit. Unfortunately, the one factor that makes The Scorpion with Two Tails unusual also ruins any chance it had to be interesting: it was originally produced for television (conflicting reports say either a TV movie or a miniseries that was chopped into feature length). I can't say I'm intimately familiar with the broadcast standards of Italian television in the 80's, but it seems to have been pretty comparable to the U.S., considering every ounce of the requisite blood or lurid sexuality of the giallo has been removed from this movie.

As you'll see at the bottom of this review, Scorpion has an unusually huge body count, but more than fifty percent of the kills use the exact same M.O. (twisting someone's head around backward, sometimes in a cool special effect but mostly offscreen), and the ones that don't all take place in the flurry of a two minute shootout. It's boring is what it is, and robbing a giallo of its slasher elements removes any reason to be interested in talking about it. The plot certainly doesn't step up to the plate, because it really deeply concerns itself with having the characters search for a crate of drugs they already found earlier in the movie.

All that we're left with is a heaping helping of overbaked giallo dialogue, a bunch of dreams where random things are covered in maggots, and Mike being a lecherous drag chasing after a woman so recently widowed there's still a chalk outline on the floor.

Maybe it would have been more interesting if John Saxon hadn't departed the movie after five minutes.

Warning: SPOILERS abound for the remainder of the review, not that you should watch this movie anyway. 

Our lead isn't particularly fun to spend time with either. Even though she is revealed to be an immortal Etruscan priestess, she still spends all of her time shrieking and fainting and being incapable of doing anything but wait for her narrative to be pushed forward by a man. A character this doe-eyed and helpless would be irritating under any circumstances, but especially when she's explicitly magical. Call up a swarm of rats to devour your enemies or something. Anything!

There are only two things I liked about this 94 minute gauntlet called a motion picture. First, the production design of the ancient tombs was actually pretty good, avoiding any fakey, obviously foam rocks or anything. Every chamber felt appropriately dusty, weighty, and old.

The second is that the final five minutes go absolutely batshit, with the out of the blue proposal that the true treasure of the tomb is an antimatter diamond surrounded by an antigravity force field that controls the balance of the universe, a fact which introduces no conflict whatsoever because the killer's neck is summarily snapped anyway. Oh, and also Mike was undercover for the DEA and faked his own death, but now they're in love. It's a whole thing.

If the movie had been operating at this wild telenovela register the whole time, it might have been a 10/10, but as it stands I had to sift through cubic kilometers of packing peanuts to find anything worth caring about in this empty shipping crate of a movie.

Killer: Paolo (Claudio Cassinelli)
Final Girl: Joan Barnard (Elvire Audray)
Best Kill: All the kills are exactly the same, so I'm just gonna have to go with the John Saxon one for the novelty of him being Janet Leigh-ed early on in the movie.
Sign of the Times: The ancient Etruscans apparently shopped for makeup at Bonnie Tyler's local drug store.
Scariest Moment: Mike's corpse starts walking, with its head still turned around backward.
Weirdest Moment: Anti-matter diamond, motherfuckers!
Champion Dialogue: "I certainly wouldn't talk in Etruscan to you at night."
Body Count: 17; but it certainly doesn't feel like it - I included deaths that occur in dreams that are most likely flashbacks to another life.

1. Husband has his neck snapped in a dream.
2. Wife has her neck snapped in a dream.
3. Woman #1 has her neck snapped in a dream.
4. Woman #2 has her neck snapped in a dream.
5. Arthur has his head turned around backward.
6. Mr. Forte has his head turned around backward offscreen.
7. Old Man has his head turned around backward offscreen.
8. Eva has her neck snapped.
9. Joan's Dad is shot.
10. Contessa is shot.
11. Security Goon #1 is shot.
12. Security Goon #2 is shot.
13. Mafioso #1 is shot.
14. Mafioso #2 is hit with a falling rock.
15. Mafioso #3 is hit with a falling rock.
16. Anducci hangs himself.
17. Paolo has his neck snapped.

TL;DR: The Scorpion with Two Tails is an exceptionally dull giallo that doesn't even muster the energy to compete with its American slasher counterparts.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1177

Census Bloodbath: Brae Yourself

For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Anthony Franciosa, Giuliano Gemma, John Saxon

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Although the Italian giallo genre had started to peter out by the time the American slasher boom began in earnest, you can’t keep a good killer down. This deep into the 1980’s, the genre still had a thing or two to say, and the man to say it was Dario Argento, Italy’s premiere purveyor of beautiful murder and inscrutable nonsense. His 1982 offering was Tenebrae (also known as Tenebre for no discernible reason other than the fact that it’s required by law for Italian movies to have a half dozen alternate titles), which more or less automatically became the most interesting movie of the year by virtue of his stylish, idiosyncratic nature.

And his eagerness to expose breasts in ways no human has ever done before.

In Tenebrae, American author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) arrives in Rome with his agent Bullmer (John Saxon of A Nightmare on Elm Street) and his personal assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi, frequent Argento collaborator and his wife at the time; she also co-wrote Suspiria), to promote his new murder mystery novel, also titled Tenebrae. More or less immediately he is swept up in a real-life murder mystery as various vixens around town begin to be murdered with a straight razor, just like the victims in his book. Can the author solve his own mystery before the killer turns their sights on him?

And how young counts as TOO young for a sexy victim?

Tenebrae is the most typical giallo I’ve seen from Argento. Although he brings his usual flair to the murder setpieces, he indulges in altogether too many tropes of the dormant genre, including the black-gloved killer and a literal giallo novel actually incorporated into the plot. That’s not necessarily a problem. I dig the giallo clichés, but it just feels like his personal style is a little bit muffled here, at least in the way the plot and the basic imagery play out.

However, the same can’t be said for many other aspects of Tenebrae, especially the score, which is an electrical cacophony of beautifully catchy synthwork provided by the reliably frenetic band Goblin. It rivals the Suspiria score for pure operatic lunacy, though at least it’s performed in what are recognizable as “keys and “octaves.”

Argento also lets himself loose in the murder sequences, which find the director settled comfortable into his manic, off-kilter editing patterns. There’s a jagged beauty to his kills, which are executed with clockwork precision and a calculated flair. What is perhaps the most memorable kill scene (a double bill with a lesbian couple being murdered) is prefaced by a gorgeous tracking shot from outside a window, traveling over the roof of the apartment and down the other side. It’s a gloriously pointless shot, but it’s such a triumph of technical execution and sublime stylization that it almost doesn’t matter.

Except it does matter, at least a little bit. Argento’s nasty habit of halting a film dead in its tracks for an unrelated, dishwater dull sequence right when the tension is due to ramp up hits an all-time high here, clogging up multiple key moments with useless interludes.

The man does like to keep us on our toes.

Unfortunately, outside of the gonzo death scenes, the murder mystery plot is pretty rote. Argento falls back on his usual theme of exploring the fluidity of memory by having a character struggle to recall a vital detail of a scene he witnessed. Although this is cinematically interesting, it prevents us from getting a key clue toward the identity of the killer, and a murder mystery you can’t solve yourself isn’t worth the celluloid it’s printed on.

There are only two non-murder sequences that are remotely thrilling, and they both immediately precede a killing. The first is a slick reversal, where a dangerous hobo who is menacing a girl accidentally becomes a witness to her murder at the hands of someone else. The second depicts John Saxon waiting for a friend in a busy plaza. It’s a quiet moment, lazily watching the goings-on about town until increasingly bizarre shots of incredibly mundane tasks ratchet up the tension. These scenes are great, but Tenebrae is hardly scarier than your average stilted giallo.

Probably the most exciting aspect to Tenebrae is how chillingly self-aware it is. Peter Neal is so clearly a stand-in for Argento that he might as well have been played by a mirror. An author skilled a writing murder, Neal faces criticism of misogyny in his work. [SPOILERS The fact that he himself is driven to murder is both a thrilling twist and a bizarre case of cognitive dissonance on the part of Argento, whose life and work is full of these odd little conundrums.]

Overall, I’m glad I sat down with Tenebrae. It is a work of horror art. It just doesn’t show Argento challenging himself, and he’s at his best when he’s his weirdest.

Killer: [Christiano Berti (John Steiner) and Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa)]

Final Girl: This isn’t really applicable, but Detective Altieri (Carola Stagnero)

Best Kill: It can’t possibly be described. You just have to watch.

Sign of the Times: A woman shoplifts a book, because people actually read in 1982.

Scariest Moment: That hobo thing. We’ve already discussed it.

Weirdest Moment: In a flashback, a beautiful woman presses the back of her head against three guys’ crotches on a beach. A fourth guy slaps her and the others pin him down so she can stick her red heel in his mouth.

Champion Dialogue: “So passes the glory of lesbos.”

Body Count: 12

1. Shoplifter is choked with paper and has her throat slit.
2. Lesbian #1 is stabbed with a razor.
3. Lesbian #2 has her throat slit.
4. Maria is axed in the stomach.
5. Christiano is axed in the head.
6. Heels Lady is stabbed to death in flashback.
7. Bullmer is stabbed in the gut.
8. Gianni is garroted.
9. Jane has her arm chopped off and is axed to death.
10. Anne is axed in the back of the head.
11. Detective Germani is axed in the back.
12. Peter Neal is impaled on a statue.

TL;DR: Tenebrae is a typically stunning giallo from Argento, even if it's a little too generic in its plotting.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1064

Just Like The Ones I Used To Know

For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Merry Christmas! Once again, Santa Claus has snuck down our chimney to deposit a bloody good holiday shocker under the tree. I hope you left out cookies, because at Popcorn Culture, Santa gets a little axe-happy.

Year: 1974

Director: Bob Clark

Cast: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1974, man. In a year nowhere close to the landmark dates of slasher history (roughly 1960 with Psycho, 1978 with Halloween, and 1980 with Friday the 13th), two enduring classics of the genre came into fruition. I, of course, have already spoken at length about the former, Tobe Hooper’s sweaty masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But our second proto-slasher is one that gets significantly less admiration but deserves perhaps even more: Bob Clark’s Canadian thriller Black Christmas.

Now, before you ask, yes that is the same Bob Clark who directed the seminal holiday classic A Christmas Story.

Isn’t film history fun?

In Black Christmas, the Phi Kappa Sigma sorority is beset by obscene phone calls from a menacing stranger, whom we the audience have just seen climbing the trellis into the attic via a nifty POV shot, four years before Halloween officiated the marriage between slashers and Steadicam. One of the sisters, Clare (Lynne Griffin) is shortly smothered with a plastic bag and dumped in the attic the day before the girls leave for Christmas vacation.

The remaining sisters are Barb (Margot Kidder), the lascivious drunk; Phyllis (Andrea Martin), whose perm is her most dominant character trait; and Jess (Olivia Hussey), who is pregnant and wants an abortion despite the objections of her angsty pianist Jim Henson-haired boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea). As the girls and the police search for Clare (nobody thinks to look in the attic because the movie needs to reach feature length), the phone calls and murders continue, much to the chagrin of Lt. Ken Fuller (A Nightmare on Elm Street’s John Saxon, already well on his way to being typecast as a cop).

I guess it’s better than being typecast as a garbage man.

The things that make Black Christmas a classic are almost the exact opposite of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Where Hooper’s film was unpolished dynamite, Black Christmas is a tensely coiled, glistening piano wire. Where TCM was a visceral gut punch populated by cardboard archetypes, Black Christmas is a sophisticated slow boil filled with characters that aren’t exactly complex, but at least shaded and human. And while Chain Saw remains my favorite with is raw brutality, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Black Christmas is a better made film by such a margin that it puts wide-ruled notebook paper to shame.

Actually focusing on story rather than torturing the audience, Black Christmas is a much more layered film. The tension it creates is built around characters, who are forging a path through a story that is still deviously simple but has quite a bit more drive than TCM’s nonentity. It’s the Range Rover to Hooper’s Prius. There are plenty of unique features of the plot, but two stand out above all else, the first being the film’s genuinely fun sense of humor. It’s not often that a slasher film elicits chuckles on purpose, but Black Christmas does so with aplomb, peppering the door murders with sweet holiday mayhem that makes the transitions between the two even more jarring. I hate to give jokes away, but let’s just say you’ll never look at your pet turtle the same way ever again.

The second key element of the script is that, piggybacking off the already extreme (for the time) nature of the horror material, Black Christmas seizes the opportunity to weave in a very controversial discussion about abortion and how it affected men and women in the 70’s. The film brings with it a stunningly solid sense of female reproductive rights while presenting a chilling parallel to the ironic viciousness of radical pro-Lifers in the unhinged Peter (who stalks around sulking, hair all in a tizzy).

Tell me this guy couldn’t star in a Davy Jones biopic.

But even more than the plot, the film is a masterfully crafted piece of cinema. The cinematography and editing are superb, but the truly striking feature of Black Christmas is its sound design. Eerie nondiegetic tunes and dissonant in-scene sounds overlap and interplay in an exquisitely composed aural tapestry. In my favorite moment, the sound of Peter angrily smashing his recital piano becomes the score for the next scene, providing a crackling current of unhinged fear. There are dozen of innovative, chilling moments like this suing everything from electric generators to repurposed Christmas carols as an integral part of this sonic puzzle.

Partially because of the soundscape, partially because it’s just overall a damn good film, Black Christmas still has the juice to tingle the spine. Though there is some semblance of backstory for the killer stuffed in the cracks, he remains unexplained. Plus, the more we see of his actions, the more we learn that he’s utterly unpredictable, which lends the film an extra frisson of tension because it’s truly impossible to predict what he’s going to do or say next. His kills are filmed with kinetic artistry, so despite their lack of gore (a typical complaint for films of this vintage) they still strike a nerve with their visceral impact and the unsettling juxtaposition of their sheer beauty, especially in a pivotal scene with a glass unicorn-cum-impaling device.

Black Christmas is a nasty, unrelenting film that actively fights the cheery festivity of its set design and soundtrack. The combination of Christmas and bloody murder would be made again and again to varying degrees of success, but never would there be a holiday horror flick so admirably crafted as Black Christmas. The yin to Texas Chain Saw’s loud, rusty yang, Black Christmas is a deranged masterpiece that make me proud I chose to live my life within the slasher genre. After all, there’s no place like home for the holidays.

Body Count: 7

1. Clare is suffocated with a plastic bag.
2. Mrs. Mac has a winch hook swung into her face.
3. Janice is killed offscreen.
4. Barb is stabbed with a unicorn figurine.
5. Officer Jennings has his throat slit.
6. Phyllis is killed offscreen.
7. Peter is beaten to death with a poker. 

TL:DR: Black Christmas is a chilling, stunning holiday horror classic.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1074
Reviews In This Series
Black Christmas (Clark, 1974)
Black Xmas (Morgan, 2006)

Census Bloodbath: Night Terrors

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1984

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This entry was due to come up much later in my Census Bloodbath series, but I've been cravin' some Craven. Also I'm writing an essay in my horror class about him (!!!) so I've been screening his movies all week.

So before we get into this film, let me take this opportunity gush for a little bit, please. Wes Craven is my favorite director of all time, not just of horror. The man started off as an English teacher, made the wildly depraved The Last House on the Left (Could you even imagine? I want you to picture your high school English teacher directing a grindhouse flick where a criminal gets his penis bitten off. Things just got very un-Pride and Prejudice.), reinvented the slasher genre twice with A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, and is the only 74-year-old alive who is actually good at Instagram.

He even made a Game of Thrones reference! I can't even with this guy...

But you'll get more and more Wes Craven history as we go along. For now, our concern is his first foray in changing an entire film genre as we knew it. Slashers, which had been going strong since Friday the 13th opened the floodgates in 1980, had begun to run out of steam. The well of ideas had already run dry by the first whispers of "Part 2" and increasing opposition by the MPAA (and the horrors of diminishing returns) meant that the slice-and-dicers were considering closing up shop permanently.

In fact, Paramount had already put a stake in their tentpole franchise, announcing that the next Friday the 13th film would be their last (it was not). But just after Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street blew in like a hurricane, sweeping up the desiccated husks of slasher cinema (Splatter University and Murder Rock: Dancing Death also came out that year) into its whirlwind of dazzling imagery and twisted,  quasi-European sensibilities.

Craven's first masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street is an aggregate of influences as far and wide as the cinema of Dario Argento, newspaper articles about a mysterious dream disease, a study on primal fears, Val Lewton, and a childhood experience with a menacing vagrant. With his literary background and vast intelligence, Craven did what others could not: create Freddy Krueger, arguably the single most iconic villain in horror history.

The rush of creativity and the introduction of paranormal elements to the slasher formula initiated the second wave. Suddenly the supernatural was in vogue, and cheapie filmmakers traded in their machetes for high concept brain-throbbers. Late-to-the-game sequels like Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II and The Slumber Party Massacre II saw massive restructuring and even Jason and Michael got in on the fun, the former by becoming an undead behemoth resurrected by lighting and the latter by something something druid curse.

But let's not think too hard about that, here's a sheep.

People remember Freddy as the cackling prankster of the later films, but most forget what a menacing presence he has in the original. He might get more hoots than hollers these days, but the first Nightmare is still utterly terrifying.

The story goes like this: Plucky teen Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp, who'll return to Census Bloodbath in several other Wes Craven flicks) and her three friends - jock boyfriend Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp, in his first ever film role), best friend Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss), and her juviebait boyfriend Rod Lane (Nick Corri). 

The fact that there are so few characters - and that each of them have last names - reveals the essence of Nightmare's horror: Nobody is disposable. Each of these characters has a distinct personality, worldview, set of life goals, and relationship with each other member of the group. This is not merely a body count movie where the only draw is watching teens get killed in outré manners. Yes, the kills are exceptionally awesome in this film, but each one of them packs a punch.

These are characters we don't want to see die, and I don't know why more filmmakers haven't realized how scary that concept is.

Anyway, these four have all been having the same nightmare - being stalked through a boiler room by a man with a burned face, a battered fedora, a dirty red and green sweater, and a glove with razor blades for fingers. It doesn't take Nancy long to realize that they're in danger. Unfortunately she realizes this too late to save Tina, who is sliced open during her postcoital slumber in her parents' bed (Why do teenagers in 80's movies have such a fascination with the parents' bedrooms? If I were trying to sneak around and boink my dreamboat boyfriend, I couldn't think of a worse place.).

Tina's death scene is, in a word, glorious. It encapsulates everything Nightmare is about as the wounds she receives in her dream manifest themselves in reality. She is clawed open, dragged up her bedroom wall, and pulled onto the ceiling in a crescendo of blood, shrieks, and despair. It is brutal and affecting no matter how many times you watch it, visceral and powerful yet at the same time ethereally beautiful.

I could talk about Italian influence here but come on, just look how cool this is.

The lines between dream and reality begin to blur as Nancy attempts to discover the secret behind Freddy's rampage and save her friends - and herself - from a rendezvous with the business end of a manicure gone bad. What follows is a surreal phantasmagoria in which it is never absolutely clear what is or isn't a dream. 

Craven's masterfully delicate handling of imagery keeps one immersed in the dreamworld better than Inception ever could (I went there). With scenes pulled directly from the audience's own nightmares, centipedes and snakes pour out of a corpse, the staircase turns to gelatin, and claws stretch through a plaster ceiling. The longer Nancy goes without sleeping, the more danger she puts herself in, both in the real world and the dream world.

Nancy fights her way through Freddy's taunting, more beautiful and awe-inspiring murders, the supernova of heartburn she must have gotten from all that coffee she's been drinking, and the resistance of her policeman father (John Saxon) and her alcoholic mother (Ronee Blakley), who just don't understand why she refuses to even take a nap. What can she say? She's into survival.

Also featured: The medium from Insidious (Lin Shaye) as a schoolteacher.

and glorious glorious Johnny Depp midriff.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is beautiful because it is a slasher movie. It has everything - the (mostly) silent killer, teen victims, inept cops, a terrible 80's score, sex = death, the murders occuring as revenge for some long ago crime, and a virginal Final Girl. The fact that it manages to work within these well-established parameters and still be the elegant and surreal masterpiece of horror that it is is nothing less than a triumph.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is scary because it hits close to home. Our nightmares might all be different, but we have one thing in common: We all sleep. And in that sleep of death, what dreams may come must give us pause. 

Sleep is necessary for survival. We can only stay awake for so long before we expire. Just straight up death. And the longer we go without it, the easier it is to fall asleep. But with that sleep comes certain death. It's a lose-lose situation and the ticking of the clock makes for immense tension, even during the non-scary scenes. 

Not to mention that, during sleep, we are totally defenseless. That's bad enough in the physical world of violence and murder, but if the murderer is in your head? Chilling.

It's even worse when he's in your mouth.

I've already raved about the gorgeous savagery (call me a gorehound, but when you need over 50 gallons of blood onscreen for a single person's death scene, I am sold) that almost entirely holds up today despite a few effects that show their seams, but nearly every aspect of Nightmare works at full steam.

The sound design is superb, but it's altogether impossible to describe the immeasurable way that this enhances the film's dreamlike qualities. Just trust me on this one. Same with the production design. Yeah, all that stuff.

What I really want to talk about is the cast. For once the cast all look like actual teenagers, a rare accomplishment in a film like this. Although I'm still on the fence about whether Langenkamp's acting is charmingly incompetent or believable for her over-the-top predicament, the cast brings their characters to life in a totally believable way.

They're believable, they're likable, and they all have realistic reactions to the deaths of their friends. What is this? It's almost like we're watching a movie or something. One of the things I love the most is that Nancy isn't played by some teen starlet in a low cut top (cough cough Rooney Mara in the remake COUGH). She's just a kid, and that enhances the impact even more than everything else already had. 

I'd also like to do a dance of gratitude to the Casting Gods for picking an actual actor to play Freddy as opposed to an anonymous stuntman. Robert Englund is Freddy Krueger and without him at the wheel, this movie would have been nothing. That wicked glimmer in his eye as he hunts down his prey is as unsettling as his diminutive stature.

It's weirdly terrifying to watch a short man tear somebody apart.

Although the film does have flaws (it was created by a human man, after all), none of them are fatal or even mildly damaging. In fact most of my complaints are highly personal and miniscule, like the fact that I think the poster is weird or that I'm annoyed by how many fade-outs there are.

The two biggest flaws are the studio mandated ending, which is just plain peculiar and Ronne Blakley as Nancy's mother. With her caked-on pancake make-up and line delivery so stilted that it seems like she's reading off of a Russian teleprompter, she seems like she's a soap opera star who was on a break and just happened to wander into the Thompson household and get lost.

Aside from that, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a rousing success. And as if the whole concept wasn't showing off enough, Craven displays his intellectual vigor and filmmaking prowess in moments big and small, my favorites of which are the incorporation of a rose trellis to suggest an intermediate stage of Nancy waking up from a dream (you'll just have to watch it, but it's incredible), and the fact that at one point she hits Freddy in the face with a coffee pot, which is metaphorically what she's been doing the whole time - defending herself with caffeine.

OK, maybe those moments are just for me. But Nightmare is the work of an egregiously underappreciated auteur who would soon go on to become one of the most important figures in horror cinema. A showstopping practical effects extravaganza, this franchise starting film is one of the best slashers of the decade, one of the scariest horror films ever released, and one of the most creative American films on the market.

And that's good enough for me.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp)

Best Kill: No contest: Fountain of Blood.

Sign of the Times: Johnny Depp is an itty bitty baby; the soundtrack would have been dismissed by Duran Duran as "too cheesy."

Scariest Moment: This. Nope Nope Nope.

Weirdest Moment: Nancy rejects the advances of Johnny Depp. I bet she regretted that later.

Champion Dialogue: "He's dead, honey, because mommy killed him."

Body Count: 4; proving you don't have to have a slew of corpses to be a great slasher film.

1. Tina is slashed with the glove and pulled onto the ceiling.
2. Rod is strangled and hanged by his bedsheets.
3. Glen is dragged into his bed and explodes into a fountain of blood. 
4. Mrs. Thompson is burned in her sleep. 

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street is an eerie masterpiece that teeters delicately on the precipice of reality and singlehandedly resurrected the moribund slasher genre.

Rating: 10/10

Word Count: 2074

Reviews In This Series

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)

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

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

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

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

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)

Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)