A Scream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

Year: 1997

Director: Robert Kurtzman

Cast: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Robert Englund

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's that time of year again, folks! Every October I begin a brand new deep dive into a franchise I've never covered on the blog before. Now, consider this fact: Sergio and I are now doing a lot of franchise marathons on our podcast Scream 101. So when I was picking out what series to do this year, I had to select one that was flat-out vetoed from being on the show, so the quality of these movies (which have in the past included infinite Amityville and Children of the Corn sequels) might be dropping precipitously. Pray for me. 

I hope against hope that I have struck a rich vein this year, because at the very least my favorite director Wes Craven is the producing entity that launched the franchise. I'm not saying I have any faith in the man's producing (he also made Dracula 2000, lest we forget), but at least his work is something I have a vast amount of context for and interest in. So. The Wishmaster quadrilogy. I guess we're doing this.

Here goes nothing!

Wishmaster tells the tale of an immortal djinn, so of course it starts off in a wildly misguided ancient Middle Eastern sequence. Nevertheless we learn that the titular master of wishes (Andrew Divoff) is not the babbling blue Robin Williams you've come to expect from genies in bottles. For one thing he's trapped in a gemstone. For another thing, he is a malevolent force of ancient pure evil, and if he grants three wishes to the person who releases him, he will break the veil between the human world and the djinn world, causing the apocalypse I guess. It's not super clear what the djinn would do to our world, but I'm pretty sure they're not just here for the sightseeing.

Oh, also the djinn is powerless unless somebody makes a wish, which he can then misinterpret to accomplish his desires. Upon which point he also steals their soul, which powers up the gemstone. There sure are a lot of rules for a movie about an evil genie. Anyway, jewel appraiser Alexandra Amberson (Tammy Lauren - who some people thought was too controversial to star in a horror movie about genies) releases the Djinn by... rubbing the gem on her shirt? Had nobody done this in millennia? He bursts from his gemstone prison, in the process killing her best friend/wannabe lover Josh (Tony Crane), then wanders around granting random people's wishes in a bunch of slasher setpieces before setting his sights back on her.

All while being dressed to the nines.

It is perhaps now I should mention that director Robert Kurtzman is much better known as one of the makeup effects gurus behind the KNB EFX group, a special effects company that has dominated the horror world from Elm Street 5 to Scream to The Walking Dead. As with most films directed by a special effects wizard, Wishmaster is packed to the grim with drippy, practical gore gags that still look phenomenal.

The two party scenes that bookend the film, in which all hell breaks loose during the Djinn's final bid for power, are pure, unfiltered movie mayhem. Glass shatters faces, skeletons burst out of their bodies and run around, creatures emerge from people's chests to devour other people, statues come to life and smash ancient weapons into skulls... It's chaotic, but an excellent built-in reel for KNB's next pitch meeting. 

These scenes (as well as most of the slasher setpieces that have no bearing on the actual plot) are going to be pure candy to any gorehound. Ditto the endless slew of cameos from horror icons like Robert Englund (given the meatiest role - thanks, Wes! - as a rich collector who orders the statue containing the Djinn's jewel), Kane Hodder (as a security guard, the role he was apparently born to play when not smothered in latex), Tony Todd (as a doorman, which is insulting), Angus Scrimm (as the narrator, which is perhaps less insulting because at least it's a cool trivia tidbit), Ted Raimi (as, guess what, a weaselly assistant), Reggie Bannister (as a pharmacist who gets "cancer" AKA boils that explode and kill him) and (for true devotees of cult film) George "Buck" Flower (as a bum, which he has extensive experience playing considering he's done it over 25 times since the early 80's).

Do you think he's just mad he's constantly forced to face off against people who played villains more famous than him?

And the detail in the Djinn design is something to behold. He's grotesquely organic, full of squishy parts that wiggle and move of their own accord (my favorite moment is when he's facing away from the camera and you can see a pulsing heartbeat in his back), counteracting the slight stiffness of his latex face with pure, realistic nightmare fuel.

Unfortunately, other than appealing to the basest lizard-brain instincts of the horror fan (the Where's Waldo of Horror game continues with an Easter egg Pazuzu statue in the background, etc. etc.), Wishmaster just doesn't quite have the juice to go anywhere. There's a little bit of fun to be had when the Djinn is in disguise trying and failing to trick Alexandra into making wishes, and Andrew Divoff has a blast chewing the scenery into tiny little splinters ("If you can't beat 'em, burn them... baby"), but their interactions are mostly dull as dishwater. When the film's budget briefly cools its heels late in the second act and they're required to match wits in some anonymous apartment, my interest wanes severely.

You see, there's almost nothing compelling about Alexandra as a protagonist. She's trapped in a bland Friendzone Love Story and does nothing but stumble ass backward into revelations about the Djinn despite having a convenient psychic link to him every time he makes a kill. This element is the most Wes Craven-y of a movie that quite openly suckles at the teat of Craven's filmography, and it is the most poorly handled. When a dude gets his jaw ripped off, I don't want to waste time cutting back to Tammy Lauren bulging her eyes, pursing her lips, and fainting left and right. All the interstitial bits between the horror scenes needed a punch-up or two or three before they hit the silver screen, because connective tissue isn't supposed to be tissue paper.

But there's a scene where a dude gets his jaw ripped all the way the fuck off, so who's complaining, you know?

TL;DR: Wishmaster is fun as far as turn-your-brain-off practical effects movies go, but it doesn't have too much to offer beyond its baseline pleasures.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1131
Reviews In This Series
Wishmaster (Kurtzman, 1997)
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (Sholder, 1999)
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (Angel, 2001)
Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (Angel, 2002)

Census Flashback: Double Dipping Devilry

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Deadpool 2, which sees Josh Brolin returning to the world of Marvel as the villain Cable mere weeks after his universe-threatening appearance as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, I'll be exploring an 80's slasher where the lead villain also played double duty. In 1989 Robert England continued his landmark role as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, but he also played another infamous villain in that same year's The Phantom of the Opera, which we'll be discussing today.

Year: 1989

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Robert Englund, Jill Schoelen, Alex Hyde-White

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what it is about classic French literature and pop culture, but two of the most adapted novels in the world are Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Both books have received the movie treatment more than a dozen times apiece, not to mention TV specials, comics (seriously), and modernizations, as well as one extravagantly popular Broadway musical apiece. 

Phantom is pretty explicitly a horror novel (though certain people choose to highlight the romance over the monstrous element), so it's not shocking that the genre got its grubby little hands on it, as early as 1925. But what's even less shocking is that 80's horror got a swipe in at the property, because if there was one thing genre filmmakers of the time loved more than a new concept for a slasher movie, it was a well-known property already in the public domain. And why not get Robert Englund, for whom playing a man with a hecked-up face was his bread and butter, and who could at least get some literary cred from playing the role? Toss in the director of the exceedingly solid Halloween 4, the special effects guru behind Chucky, the Crypt Keeper, and Freddy himself, plus 80's shlock mega-producer Menahem Golan, and it's a match made in heaven.

Or hell, if you will.

So, the plot should seem pretty familiar, give or take a couple little embellishments. We start off in the 80's for no clear reason other than to gently ease its viewers into a period piece slasher film, following Christine Day (Jill Schoelen, the queen of late 80's/early 90's B-horror, who at this time was fresh off The Stepfather and Cutting Class) as she scours a rare bookstore for material to use during her opera audition. She stumbles across a battered copy of Don Juan Triumphant, and during her audition is hit on the head with a sandbag (?), which sends her back in time (?) to nineteenth century London, when the piece was first written by Erik Destler (Robert Englund, who was by that point a worldwide cultural phenomenon - that very year he was appearing in Freddy drag on MTV left and right).

Christine doesn't seem to realize that she has been transported back into the past, so this whole thing is pretty pointless. I guess they're going for a Mummy-esque reincarnated love thing, but let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it makes a lick of sense. She is a young soprano understudy for the diva La Carlotta (Stephanie Lawrence), but she receives voice lessons from a mysterious angelic figure known as the Phantom, who murders the piss out of anybody who gets in her way. Anyway, it turns out the Phantom is Erik (duh), who has sold his soul to the devil (?), as portrayed by a little person (?), which has made his face all burned and scarred (??). Cue a lot of bad opera and mediocre slashing.

And makeup that's even frightening when it's supposed to seem normal.

Yup, this is one of those cases where the slasher stars seem to have aligned, but alack, those stars got crossed somewhere along the line and it was not meant to be. Phantom of the Opera wants to be a legitimate adaptation of its literary source material and the trashy B-slasher it was always meant to be, but it can't have its cake and stab it too. The slasher elements undercut any ability to take it seriously, and the serious elements make the slasher a bit of a tedious slog.

At every opportunity, Phantom cuts itself short. You can tell it wants to have the quippy punnery of a Freddy Krueger adventure, but then it would tip its hand too far in the "stupid slasher" direction, so it contents itself with some light, playful japing that glances right off the scene and immediately out of one's memory. And it very clearly desires to be an icky, gross-out horror flick, at which it only intermittently succeeds.

Thanks to Kevin Yagher, the moments where the gore comes to the forefront are spectacular. Especially any time we see the Phantom either assembling or dismantling the false skin he wears to get around in the world, it's stomach-churningly gooey grue that lights up the screen. This sensibility is also applied to a certain number of the deaths, especially in the early going, but for some unfathomable reason the bulk of the murders are rendered as run-of-the-mill gut stabbings that completely lack flair and barely shed a drop of blood.

It's telling that this is about the most dynamic screenshot I can find.

That lack of flair isn't isolated to the murder scenes, unfortunately. Although Halloween 4 did sometimes have the tendency to look a bit like a TV movie, at least it had atmosphere. Here, the lighting scheme wouldn't be out of place at a community center bar mitzvah. See, a huge production is made out of candlelit rooms, and the fact that the Phantom lurks in the shadows to hide his twisted visage. But whenever he blows out a candle to hide his face, the room is still so blasted with light that it looks like he's on the set of King of Queens. If anything, the room seemed darker before the candle blew out. The lighting is so conspicuously inappropriate that it drags you cornea-first out of the movie, undermining the character to a ruthlessly extreme degree.

This is a real shame, because Robert Englund clearly cared about this character. The apathy that defines his Dream Child performance is completely absent here, and he's trying his darnedest to assemble something resembling pathos from the role. It all falls apart like a sand castle too close to the tide, but it's not his fault. There is hardly an inch of plot to hang this performance on within the repetitive (yet somehow infrequent) slashings and endless scenes of Jill Schoelen lip syncing to a deeply milquetoast opera track with English lyrics that feel like they were ripped from a seventh grader's songwriting journal.

I dearly wish The Phantom of the Opera had been much better than it was. Period piece horror films aren't exactly a dime a dozen, and when one gets a chunk of change significant enough to make that a reality, I always hope for the best. Unfortunately for the slasher genre in 1989, "the best" was never really an option. It's Robert Englund's best film of the year by a country mile, but that's praise so faint it can't even muster up the energy to damn anything.

Killer: Erik Destler (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Christine Day (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: Most of the kills are pretty bog-standard, but during the Phantom's first kill, blood covers his face as it contorts with orgasmic delight, which is pretty intense. Also eventually the body is hung up in a closet, sans skin, which is likewise rather intense.

Sign of the Times: When she returns to present day, Christine discovers the completed version of Don Juan Triumphant on a floppy disk.

Scariest Moment: When Christine first discovers the pages of the opera and sings them aloud, the notes on the page turn into drops of blood.

Weirdest Moment: Christine's best friend in the framing sequence is played by Molly Shannon in her first film role.

Champion Dialogue: "Better submerged in bathwater than mediocrity."

Body Count: 10

1. Joseph is gutted with a knife while being winched up into the air.
2. Ruffian #1 is stabbed in the gut.
3. Ruffian #2 is decapitated with a knife.
4. Lead Ruffian is stabbed in the gut.
5. Harrison has his head crushed with a towel.
6. La Carlotta is beheaded offscreen, and her head is boiled into a soup.
7. Rat Catcher is impaled on a spike.
8. Morris has his throat slit offscreen.
9. Davis has his heart pulled out of his chest.
10. Richard is stabbed with a candle holder and burned alive.

TL;DR: The Phantom of the Opera is an admirable effort, but grafting a slasher onto classic literature rendered both of those things not particularly interesting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1493

Docu-Mental

Year: 2006

Director: Scott Glosserman

Cast: Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals, Scott Wilson
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Scream changed everything. For better or for worse, Craven's teen horror masterpiece revitalized slashers with a postmodern spin. But droll self-awareness and a jokey attitude began to choke out the genre. That kind of tone-hopping is best left to the masters and the inept handling of its knockoffs meant that the horror of the late 90's began to wane once more until the emergence of The Blair Witch Project in 1999.

By the mid-2000's, torture porn was occupying cinemas for the time being, allowing Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon to slip by unnoticed. And it's a darn shame, because Behind the Mask is the single best meta slasher this side of Kevin Williamson, combining the satirical tone of Scream with the low budget visual impetus of Blair Witch.

And, seemingly, the face of Spencer from iCarly.

Behind the Mask is a found footage movie like you've never seen it before, comprised of documentary footage shot by a grad student crew led by go-getting Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals). Their subject is one Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel - who has since moved from behind the mask to behind the camera as an editor on Storage Wars), an aspiring slasher villain.

You see, this is a world in which the cinema of the 80's has come to life. Freddy, Michael, and Jason are all real killers, notorious across the country. Their brand of terror has inspired new killers to take up their mantle, providing the evil backdrop against which the good of the world can be measured, all through routinely slicing up groups of teens in remote areas.

It's a tough concept to wrap your head around with merely a two-paragraph summary, but this conceit drives the entire movie and is the element which elevates Behind the Mask to neo-classic status. Any old movie could make some jokes about its generic elements, but only writer/director Scott Glosserman has been creative and intelligent enough to take that one step further, giving us a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of the life of their killer as he prepares to stalk his virginal victim, curates spooky legends around himself, and explores the phallic and yonic imagery of his murder spree.

Carol J. Clover would be proud.

So not only does Behind the Mask bring a sense of winking familiarity with the genre, it applies a knowledgable analysis to its satire. It also beefs up the limitations of the found footage genre in a huge way, interspersing the documentary footage with staged footage of the "movie" Leslie Vernon is creating when he stalks and kills his victims.

It is so elegant and shrewd that the seams in the film's reality are only visible to the grumpiest of viewers. They are certainly present (compounded with an unfortunate use of the phrase "survivor girl" in lieu of the widely acknowledged "Final Girl"), but by that point the film has any audience member worth their horror salt wrapped firmly around its finger.

This is largely thanks to its marvelously unique approach to the genre, but it also helps that the movie is chock full of genre references both brazen (Freddy, Michael, and Jason are nigh on mythic figures in this universe) and subtle (name-dropping the producer of Friday the 13th among others that I won't spoil here). The references don't hit with the sledgehammer efficacy of a Williamson script, allowing the horror-inclined viewer to approach them in a more organic and rewarding way.

And the cameos are top notch including Robert Englund as a Dr. Sam Loomis type character, Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein as a librarian, and Kane Hodder in a blink-and-miss-it appearance at the real Nightmare on Elm Street house.

1428 N Genesee Avenue. You're welcome.

Behind the Mask gets far with its premise, although its budget proves to be a liability in the performance department. Most of the teen actors are almost unwatchably bad. Honestly, I don't even care if this was intentional. When not just one, but all of your teen actors are bad enough to the point that I, the man who is in the process of watching every 1980's slasher film known to man, woman, and turtle, take notice, something has gone very wrong.

And the criminal lack of funding renders even the goriest kills a little tame, augmented by some truly troublesome digital effects. But the fact remains that, although these flaws would send a lesser film six feet under, Behind the Mask has such a strong conceit that it hardly amounts to a scratch. 'Tis but a flesh wound, I suppose.

And Nathan Baesel is such a revelation, it would take an entire army of community theater enthusiasts to take the bite out of his performance. He truly gets the script, bringing a warm humanity to the role that jars the audience, sending the humor skyrocketing.

Behind the Mask is a slow burn, and a subtle one at that, so I wouldn't advise breaking it out at your next slumber party, but I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who deems themselves as a true fan of horror.

TL;DR: Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is wicked clever, an inspiring satire of the slasher genre.
Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 890

U Is For Ultimate Showdown

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge post is the second to last entry in the Nightmare marathon! We're almost to the end, you guys! Just the crappy remake is left and although I'll have to suffer through it, goodness knows how much I love tearing into bad movies.

Year: 2003
Director: Ronny Yu
Cast: Robert Englund, Ken Kirzinger, Monica Keena
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I gotta say, I don't hate spending time with Freddy, but it's nice to have some of my boy Jason back in my life.

For a very long time, Freddy vs. Jason was a pipe dream stuck in the seventh circle of development hell. During their heyday in the 80's, New Line owned the rights to the Nightmare franchise but the Friday-owning Paramount didn't seem keen on teaming up and the contract fell through. However, after the devastating flop of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Paramount sold the rights to New Line after which they promptly put a stake in its heart with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, sending it six feet under to join Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare.

With its two biggest cash cows out to pasture, New Line realized their mistake, but the film continued to fail to come together. In the interim, Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Jason X were released, effectively throwing a wrench into franchise continuity, but it's not like anybody ever cared about that before so whatever. After another decade of struggle, Freddy vs. Jason finally saw the light of day in 2003, making it the first Nightmare film in nine years and the first Friday film in two (although the gap between Jason X and the film before it was seven long gratuitous nudity-less years).

After all that work, it's a little surprising that the resulting product is pretty crappy, although it probably shouldn't be.

It REALLY shouldn't be.

The movie opens fairly reverently, with a sequence about Freddy (the eternal Robert Englund in his final performance as the character he made into an icon) lamenting being forgotten by the citizens of Springwood, thus sapping him of his powers. Already this flies in the face of Freddy's Dead, but the more people pretend that film doesn't exist, the better the world will be.

In order to strike fear into the hearts of Springwood teens he revives Jason (Ken Kirzinger, who is certainly not as memorable as the four-time Jason and fan favorite Kane Hodder he replaced, but whose intimidating height still makes for a good slasher villain) from the dead and sends him to 1428 Elm Street to work his magic.

Or, what passes for Elm Street, anyway. Due to budget concerns, Freddy vs. Jason was shot in Canada so the original house was unusable. The substitute house is something akin to replacing Daniel Radcliffe with Tommy Wiseau as Harry Potter and hoping nobody would notice. The film sheepishly hides its architecture behind shrubs and in the corners of shots.

The alarmingly Freddy-centric script reveals that even behind the scenes, people were picking favorites, but once Jason goes rogue and begins slicing and dicing before Freddy can even snag a daydream here and there, the two powerful forces turn against each other in an ultimate showdown, battling on each other's home turfs (the dream world and Camp Crystal Lake), swapping weapons at one point, and generally providing a lot of the fan service that was missing from the first half of the film.

And plenty of that red, red krovvy.

Director Ronny Yu hails from the world of Hong Kong action cinema, so it makes sense why the final battle would be so kinetic and dynamic but the rest of the film lackluster. Unfortunately, it is important to remember that these are both horror franchises and, no matter how anemic they may have gotten through the years, it's important to at least try to be scary, something this film fails to accomplish at any reasonable level.

The gore is great when it's around and I love myself some bucket-sized blood splashes, but the nightmare sequences and sets are far too slick and polished and (dare I say) early 2000's to really pack a whallop. The grubby and tactile worlds of the low budget 80's films were a huge part of the appeal of both these franchises and Freddy vs. Jason buffs it all out into a uniform sheen.

Speaking of uniform, it's time to talk about the cast. Bland, forgettable, and vaguely attractive, the characters all blend together to the point where I lost track of who was even an entity in the film, but as far as I can tell the main characters are Kia (Kelly Rowland), the fortunately not token Token Black Character; Gibb (Katharine Isabelle), who is female; Gibb's boyfriend Trey (Jesse Hutch), who is preparing an audition for the stage adaptation of my award-winning children's book The Douchiest Douche; Blake (David Kopp), who is male and has a dad; Linderman (Chris Marquette), a nerd who magically transforms into a main character once enough cast members have died; and Bill (Kyle Labine), a stoner who magically transforms into a main character once enough cast members have died.

Only because Jay and Silent Bob weren't available.

Our resident Final Girl is Lori Campbell (Monica Keena from Undeclared, one of my favorite short-lived sitcoms), a girl who is haunted by the death of her mother and the disappearance of her boyfriend Will (Jason Ritter), both mysteries that begin to be solved once she uncovers the Freddy Krueger secret, something the town has been trying to keep under wraps.

I'm sure genre savvy readers have noticed the Final Girl's similarity to one Laurie Strode, the survivor of Halloween. Good job, genre savvy readers!

Now look. I love characters named for slasher references as much as the next guy (in fact, considerably more than the next guy), but when it's this intrusive and her name is said so frequently, it just gets annoying, especially considering that Monica Keena is nowhere near Jamie Lee Curtis in terms of talent, charisma, or looks. In fact, she is so inconsequential an actress, there are no screenshots of her readily available despite the fact that she is nominally the star of the film. At least on the human side of things.

Although she's not the worst actress in the film, the entire cast could win the blue ribbon in a Leaden Line Delivery Competition. Even the evergreen Robert Englund finally seems to have gotten tired of saying the word "bitch" all the time. It doesn't help that his makeup has been needlessly milleniumified and is just too glossy to be threatening.

 It's like watching a Bratz doll make razor puns.

All in all the film is amusing, but it's not a particularly memorable entry in either franchise. With some work (and maybe a directing credit by one Mr. Brennan Klein), an absolutely perfect film could be made out of this premise, but as it stands, it is an only OK vehicle for two kingpins of pop culture. It's harmless, but it didn't do justice to their grand legacies.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) & Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger)
Final Girl: Lori Campbell (Monica Keena)
Best Kill: Trey is ruthlessly machete punched as he lies face down on a bed which is then folded backwards. A fitting comeuppance for the single worst character in the film.

Sign of the Times: Kelly Rowland is in this film and inexplicably doesn't die.
Scariest Moment: Jason has a field day at a cornfield rave, slicing through the crowd with his beloved machete. Side note: This is perhaps the only Nightmare film to actually show corn in the Ohio town of Springwood.
Weirdest Moment: Freddy becomes a terribly rendered bong-smoking caterpillar.

Champion Dialogue: "Dude, that goalie was pissed about something."
Body Count: Jason - 18; 19 if you count Freddy, which I do   Freddy - 1; dude's gotta step up

1. Heather is impaled with a machete. (Jason)
2. Trey is machete punched in the spine, then folded in half backwards. (Jason)
3. Blake's Dad is decapitated by a machete. (Jason)
4. Blake is slashed with a machete. (Jason) 
5. Glow Stick Raver is impaled with a pipe. (Jason) 
6. Gibb is impaled with a pipe. (Jason) 
7. Shack's Friend has his head twisted around. (Jason) 
8. Shack is impaled by a flaming machete. (Jason) 
9. Raver #1 is sliced with a machete. (Jason) 
10. Raver #2 is sliced with a machete. (Jason) 
11. Raver #3 is slashed in the shoulder. (Jason) 
12. Raver #4 is slashed in the stomach. (Jason) 
13. Raver #5 is sliced with a machete. (Jason) 
14. Mark has his face slashed with razors and is set on fire. (Freddy)
15. Security Guard is crushed by a heavy door. (Jason) 
16. Deputy Stubbs is electrocuted on a console. (Jason) 
17. Freeburg is chopped in half with a machete. (Jason) 
18. Linderman is impaled on a shelf bracket. (Jason) 
19. Kia is slashed with a machete. (Jason) 
20. Freddy Krueger gets his arm ripped off, stabbed with his own glove, and decapitated. (Jason & Lori)  

TL;DR: Freddy vs. Jason is nowhere near the nostalgic extravaganza it should have been, but it's still a delightful dumb movie.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1534
Reviews In This Series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

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)

S Is For Silly

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge post returns to actual reviews. Sorry about yesterday and the day before, sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. And things have been pretty hectic lately, but we're back on track now with the next installment of Freddy vs. Logic! And I'll have to make up for missing a day by posting both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but it's fine because my Saturday commitments are significantly reduced for the rest of the month.

Year: 1991

Director: Rachel Talalay

Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Zane, Shon Greenblatt

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After the dismal failure that was The Dream Child, New Line found it wise to cut their losses and declare the next Nightmare film to be their very last. Of course by now we have learned that in the horror world, the word "final" is about as trustworthy as one of those Nigerian prince emails. But it worked like a charm, capping off the main leg of the franchise right as the decade that nurtured it drew to a close.

And it's a good thing too, because Freddy's charm was quickly running out of steam. After the abomination that was Part 5, there wasn't much that could have made this film worse than that one, but Freddy's tragic descent from a menacing demon into a clownish buffoon couldn't have survived any further installments without the course correction of the masterpiece New Nightmare.

If you're in any way scared by this film, you probably were literally born yesterday. Congratulations on learning how to read so fast!

The film opens with my single favorite late period Krueger plot point - every single child in Springwood, Ohio is now dead, save one. He is forcibly ejected by Krueger and conveniently memory wiped so he can bring in some new prey for the demonic child killer, still played by the overwhelmingly generous Robert Englund. 

So that's a riff on the idea explored in The Dream Master about Freddy's nominal revenge being over but his lust for innocent blood fuels new attempts to expand his victim pool. But let's step back for a minute. Although it's rather unbelievable that swathes of Springwood children have been dying in their sleep for five whole installments without the adults seeming to catch on, it's stretching it a bit to have us believe that every single child has expired in a ten year span without a backlash. And that information is given in the first frame, before the story has even technically begun! 

It's a lot to swallow and it is an accurately absurd indication of where the franchise found itself at the back end of the 80's. But at least it doesn't have a Freddy fetus.

Anyway, so John Doe (Shon Greenblatt) finds himself at a halfway home in a nearby town carrying nothing but a Springwood newspaper clipping and the knowledge that, if he goes to sleep, he'll die. Unfortunately, the thing about characters that don't remember who they are is that they also apparently don't remember that they have personalities. And the "center for troubled teens" gimmick has been tried before in the infinitely superior Dream Warriors and even the surprisingly OK Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, so the screenwriters don't feel the need to spend a lot of time there, not that we want to anyway.

Not when there's so much tomfoolery afoot.

Another thing we don't spend a lot of time on is the supporting players, who are even more one-dimensional than the Dream Child cast, about whom I hyperbolized so much that I can't even adequately convey how much these new kids are even worse, lacking anything that even comes close to resembling real character traits. I never thought it could get any lower, and I have run out of words to describe them.

Anyway, here they are. There's Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane), a young doctor at the halfway home who has a recurring nightmare (that we really only see once) about a young girl with red ribbons in her hair and also there's a water tower which is absolutely not relevant but treated with all the importance of The Great Gatsby's green light; Tracy (Lezlie Deane, who had worked with Robert Englund twice previously, as co-star in Freddy's Nightmares and as director in 976-EVIL), a spunky and tough blonde; Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan), who has a hearing aid; and Spencer (Breckin Meyer) who is a pothead and is Breckin Meyer. Also Yaphet Kotto is there slumming it as Doc, the convenient exposition source and dream theorist.

But that's about all we get for Meat and three of those people see the end of the movie through living eyes. It's a real disappointment when your dumb slasher movie doesn't even have the heart to increase its victim pool, but again. No Freddy fetus.

Not like this is much better.

So these people end up in Springwood to solve the mystery of John Doe and the insane childless parents that populate the town, discovering in the process that Freddy Krueger had a child and if you can't figure out who that child is before the characters do, this might just be the first movie you ever watched. And for that, I'm very sorry.

Because it was intended to be the finale of the franchise, a lot of time is spent reflecting on the origins of the villain himself in order for us to truly understand him before his timely demise. This is unnecessary, reducing the fear factor even further with nonsensical anecdotes about magic dream demon worms, hamster murder, and Alice Cooper (the Alice Cooper part is pretty great). Much like Rob Zombie would in the 21st century, the screenwriter failed to understand that the less we know about the character, the more we are afraid of him. Also, this film is disproportionately focused on seeing Robert Englund out of makeup. Oh well, at least it's the last one. 

They're free to be as stupid as they want! It's over!

If that sentence sounds ridiculous to you, it should. Unfortunately that appears to be their filmmaking philosophy because plot, screenwriting, and even basic visual issues abound in a careless miasma of insipidity. Characters endlessly exposit to themselves, John Doe mentions seeing a water tower in his dream despite nothing of the sort showing up onscreen and the characters wonder who rang the school bells in a town that, although it is quite ghostlike and creepy, is still obviously full of people.

And I'm not even going to mention the sublimely uncomfortable way that 3D technology is lodged into the back end of the film.

No caption necessary.

Not even the effects setpieces (which were by now the de facto reason for the franchise's existence) are up to snuff. Instead of the baroque and twisted nightmare imagery that even The Dream Child got right from time to time, we get a veritable gallery of matte paintings and a nice, full, even lighting that needlessly exposes the manifold flaws in Freddy's makeup this time around. Everything is terrible, but the fact that the filmmakers obviously stopped caring allows for some truly bizarre and entertaining sequences as the line between reality and fantasy breaks down for no particular reason.

So there's some merit in Freddy's Dead, but only as a vapid popcorn horror flick and not as a lasting work of artfully crafted horror cinema like several of its predecessors (and its immediate followup) would prove to be.

This was the first Nightmare on Elm Street released in the 90's and the first to be directed by a woman (Rachel Talalay, who would go on to direct... several episodes of Unfabulous) and it gets props for surviving this far out of the comforting embrace of the 80's and breaking the long-standing gender barrier for slasher directors, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a piece of crap. A lovable, charming piece of crap, but crap nonetheless.

The film equivalent for "jumping the shark" might as well be "bringing in the worm demons."

The only obvious difference caused by a female director is the fact that two strong women survive this film, although the Nightmare franchise has always been a little more progressive and empowering than most thanks to the badassery of Heather Langenkamp and Lisa Wilcox. There's also a startlingly large amount of vicious and violent sexuality in the back half of the film that would have me believe that Talalay wanted to deepen the subtle horror of the earlier entries in the franchise. Wrong time wrong place, girlfriend, but at least you tried.

I admire that. I also admire the hilarious anti-drug sensibility of this film in which Spencer is constantly harangued for his drug use and D.A.R.E. stickers adorn every non-mobile surface. Only one year into the 90's and the slasher genre had been changed completely. This film is historically important for being the end of a major franchise and for more or less ushering the slasher film out of existence until the release of Scream in 1996, but those are dubious honors at best.

All of that is great if you open your heart, but I'd really rather be watching any of Parts 1 through 4 than this mildly enjoyable but still dumb as a doorknob film.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Maggie Burroughs (Lisa Zane)

Best Kill: None of them are great, but the one where he eventually gives in to his cartoonish influences and straight up Wile E. Coyote's John Doe by dropping him onto a bed of spikes is decently entertaining.

Sign of the Times: Aside from Breckin Meyer's presence, his ponytail and flannel make a close second.

Scariest Moment: There are heavy implications of childhood sexual abuse from several characters. 

Weirdest Moment: Freddy is destroyed with the power of 3D glasses.

Champion Dialogue: "Boing! Boing! Boing! Boing!"

Body Count: 3; 4 if you count Freddy but considering that he's still going strong a sequel, crossover, and a remake later makes that a harder judgement call to make.

1. Carlos' hearing aid is magnified and his head explodes when Freddy scratches a chalkboard.
2. Spencer is trapped in a video game and knocked down the stairs into a bottomless pit. 
3. John Doe is impaled onto a bed of spikes.

TL;DR: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is a piece of crap, but such a lovably childish one that it's hard to hate.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1750

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)

Census Bloodbath: O Is For Oh No

Today's Blogging From A to Z Challenge post is the next step in our exploration of the Freddy franchise, the final Nightmare film of the 80's!

Year: 1989

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Kelly Jo Minter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's not often that a film will immediately announce its inferiority to its predecessor, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child does during its opening credits. In a series that rarely if ever went the "boobs and guts" route of its slasher brethren (I'm fairly certain that the only breasts in the franchise are during Joey's wet dreams in Parts 3 and 4), they had the absence of mind to include a sex scene before the very first line of dialogue even began.

It's not even a good one, all shot with gender-obscuring blue light and extravagant close-ups that abstract the human form so much that you can't even tell what part you're looking at, just that it's writhing uncomfortably like it's trying not to drown in quicksand. Immediately following this scene we get a shower sequence because god forbid we think this film has even an iota of class before it commences in earnest.

As you can probably surmise, I do not like this film. It's not a good film. In fact, it's so bad that it actually retroactively ruins the quite stellar film that precedes it. The Dream Master Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), one of my personal favorite Final Girls returns and is utterly wasted, having apparently forgotten how to actually be a master of dreams and dying the crap out of her lovely ginger hair.

With only one year left to go, the 80's finally claimed her.

All of this serves to blandify (Of course it's a word. I just wrote it, didn't I?) one of my favorite characters in the entire franchise next to Nancy Thompson. It's all just a waste, compounded by the fact that the other alumnus of The Dream Master, Alice's jock boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) returns to be super hot, but he dies early on and his torso is framed out of every scene he's in.

What a tease.

To rub salt in the wound, the platter of Meat this time around is a queasy array of less than prime cuts. Forgetting the charming characters of the last film or even the one-note human-shaped dialogue puppets that populated Dream Warriors, The Dream Child opted for paper-thin characters (some of whom are literally made of paper by the end) with hardly half a note between them all.

There's Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter) who is ethnic and a swimmer and works at the hospital when it's convenient (As a nurse? This high school's extracurricular program's must be off the chain), and is kind of a douchebag; Greta (Erika Anderson) who is a model and although Anderson tries her hardest to make her likable, she's given absolutely nothing to work with; and Mark (Joe Seeley), who draws comics. That's it. The end. It's enough to make you sick.

And I haven't even gotten to Freddy yet. He made his full transition to chuckling prankster in the last film, but at least the heavy layer of 80's cheese and talented visual vocabulary kept that one going strong. In this film he pushes it even further, beyond the point of lovable huckster and into the dismal depths.

My face the entire time.

The death scenes are a rapid-fire MTV style deluge of hallucinogenic images accompanied by a machine gun clatter of nonsensical puns. Several of them are funny in a begrudging way like jokes your father makes (ie. when he turns into a car to kill Dan and says "Don't dream and drive!") but his nonstop patter eventually descends into lobbing out loosely related phrases like he's trying to beat his high score in charades. 

These "puns" are so far from threatening they might not even technically be in the script (in a continuation of the car sequence, Freddy begins to shout "Fuel injection! Power drive! Fast lane!" and I begin to cry). Perhaps they just appeared in the final cut movie as the result of some ill-advised tampering with a Lovecraftian alternate dimension of horrible jokes. And, when in doubt, the screenwriters have him end sentences with ", bitch!" like it's going out of style. Which, if this movie is any indication, was a pretty accurate assumption.

Englund is clearly hating his life in this film (Which he has subsequently claimed to be his least favorite. This is a man who was in C.H.U.D. II - Bud the Chud.) and the makeup is exceedingly subpar. Most of the time, he looks like a cross between Shrek and a particularly forlorn sock monkey. I question whether or not the visual effects artist actually watched any of the previous films. 

Or any films at all.

This is the first film where the complaints lodged against the franchise as character-less horror-less special effects extravaganzas really begin to reflect the truth. The plot is minimal and dull, so what keeps the film trucking along is a endless stream of effects setpieces that rush down the track like chocolates on the conveyor belt in that I Love Lucy episode.

By the end of the film I was too stunned into submission by the film's insipidity that it barely even registered when Freddy skateboarded across the room or uttered a line that tried so hard to be a pun that it strained itself and died or trapped Alice in an M. C. Escher room straight out of Labyrinth.

Although the film is an utter failure as horror or comedy cinema (or cinema in general - many important scenes are framed behind foreground objects and/or blatantly cross the 180 Degree line and their idea of exposition includes one character looking at her own name tag in the middle of work), it's so startlingly bad that it's a tremendous film to mock. So I wouldn't rate it down there with the dull muddy slashers that have absolutely zero merit, but this film is a disgusting pock on the remarkable legacy of Wes Craven's masterpiece.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox)

Best Kill: Mark is killed inside what could only be the music video for "Take On Me."

Sign of the Times: This guy.

Scariest Moment: Freddy returns as a shrieking melty beaked mutant child.

Weirdest Moment: Freddy's arm is apparently made of teleporting spiders.

Champion Dialogue: "Time to die, you scar-faced limp dick!"

Body Count: 3; I'm just as surprised as you.

1. Dan is fused with a motorcycle and crashes into a truck.
2. Greta is force-fed dinner until she chokes to death.
3. Mark is turned into paper and slashed into pieces. 

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is just the worst.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1152

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)

Census Bloodbath: I Is For Imagination

Welcome back to the Blogging From A to Z Challenge, which is not so slowly becoming my avenue for re-exploring the depths of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Next up is a pleasant surprise that certainly isn't as bad as it should have been.

Year: 1988

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Tuesday Knight

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street slashed onto the scene in 1984, the tides of the slasher genre changed forever. After a hasty and bizarre followup with Freddy's Revenge, Dream Warriors righted the franchise in 1987 and put it back on track. Coming just barely more than a year afterward, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master has every right to be a piece of idiotic tripe.

I'm fairly shocked and a little disappointed to say that The Dream Master is an all around tighter film than Dream Warriors, starting with a slightly more identifiable cast. Mind you, these are still as stock as 80's slasher characters can get, but you can sense that they have lives and personalities outside of the context of the film instead of merely being props helping to set up the next cool Freddy setpiece.

He doesn't need their help to be cool.

Along with the return of Dream Warriors veterans Kristen Parker (played not by Patricia Arquette, but Tuesday Knight, who manages the insurmountable feat of somehow being worse than the child actress she shares her first scene with), Joey (Rodney Eastman), and Kincaid (Ken Sagoes, who I still feel a roiling animosity toward), who all helpfully die within the first half hour (I cheered when Kincaid finally kicked the bucket. Good riddance. He could never say a sentence without mispronouncing a good 67% of the words.), we have a whole crop of new teens to play with.

First off there's Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox), a sweet redhead who has a tendency to daydream in an attempt to escape from the emotional abuse of her alcoholic father. Her gang includes her brother Rick (Andras Jones), a martial artist and Kristen's boyfriend; her best friend Debbie (Brooke Theiss), the living embodiment of the 80's with an obsession for lifting weights; Sheila (Toy Newkirk), a stereotype-busting character who happens to be female, black, a nerd, and almost universally beloved; and Dan (Danny Hassel), who is just the cutest patootie to ever patoot.

Well, hello there.

The trouble begins when Freddy (the ever-cooperative Robert Englund) rises from the grave to wreak havoc once again. After quickly and mercifully knocking off Joey and Kincaid, Freddy is down to his last victim, Kristen (the final child of the parents who murdered him so many years ago). Unfortunately, Kristen uses her dream powers to pull the hapless Alice into her dream before she is tossed the hell into a furnace in an extremely brave move on the screenwriters' part.

It seems that by dragging Alice into her dream and bestowing her power upon her in death, Kristen has provided Freddy an avenue into the dreams of Alice's friends, one which he exploits with gusto. This is the first film where it's clear that, despite Englund's still menacing performance, horror is definitively going to take a backseat in favor of darkly humorous gonzo setpieces.

We see Alice get sucked into a movie screen, a meatball pizza decorated with the souls of dead children, a nude pinup swimming in a waterbed, and puns galore.

Very cheesy puns.

But despite the more overtly comic tone, The Dream Master never loses its sense of itself as a piece of cinema. At least, in the way that effects-driven 80's slasher films can be considered cinematic. Utilizing dream logic in the best way possible, the film allows for an ecstatically creative series of scene transitions and camerawork that still manage to boggle the mind. 

The scene where Kristen is secretly dosed with sleeping pills is blessed with unforgettable whirling cinematography capturing the loopy desperation of the teen all in a single shot. And that's not the only visually stunning moment in the film, which is shockingly aesthetically literate for a horror flick released in 1988.

Not to mention, the whole thing is thematically tight.

Tight as these shades.

Lisa already lived in a world of dreams, so she can be considered a master of her domain. This gives her equal footing with Freddy and makes her a worthy adversary, especially once she begins collecting the talents and personalities of her friends as they are felled one by one. This idea is linked with Lisa taking off the photos that cover her bedroom mirror - one for each friend who dies - slowly revealing her entire face as she matures with time and becomes the Dream Master.

It sounds cheesy and it is. Especially during the final montage in which she dons leather, spikes, and a yin-yang headband to take on the dream demon. But within all of it is a heartfelt story of a teenage girl taking strength from her friends to fight back against the force that has claimed them.

The fact that it explores the sleep powers concept in a way that the clever but scattershot Dream Warriors never even could have dreamed of (pun intended) is just the cherry on top.

Shot through the heart! And you're to blame!

That last caption may have seemed like just another of my series of increasingly witty and impressive puns, but it also serves as an adequate transition to what is perhaps the films biggest weakness, depending on how you look at it.

Thanks to its wall to wall pop music, atrocious perms, deliriously colorful backgrounds, and John Hughes banter, the entire film is mired forever in the muck of 1988, inextricably tied with the decade that birthed it. For me, this will never be a problem, thanks to my love of the cheesy excesses of the time. But really, the whole thing plays out like a feature-length MTV hits show, complete with two stirring renditions of "Anything, Anything" by Dramarama.

But being full of 80's signifiers can't bring a movie this good down. With impeccable use of nightmare imagery, a surprisingly solid and consistent tonal register, and a villain who hasn't yet descended to the unbearably clownish depths that are soon in his future, The Dream Master is a darn excellent sequel, shocking me and everybody else by being more enjoyable that the general consensus pick, Dream Warriors.

I was just as surprised as you, hypothetical reader. But the numbers don't lie.

Assuming you can even see through the almost solid filter of 80's.

Although I will always hold Friday the 13th in my highest esteem among the slasher greats, A Nightmare on Elm Street has a surprising amount of pretty darn good entries in the franchise, certainly more than the notoriously inconsistent Jason flicks. I'm very grateful that I'm getting a chance to re-explore this journey through the evolution of Freddy, because I don't think I ever appreciated the amount of effort these films put into realizing their universe, however twisted and nonsensical it may have become.

Savor these precious positive comments. Because up next we have The Dream Child, a film seemingly edited by a pile of vomit.

But for now, we have The Dream Master and sweet, sweet, Alice. Happy thoughts!

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox)

Best Kill: Debbie has her arms broken by a barbell and slowly begins turning into a human-sized cockroach. It's intense.

Sign of the Times: The second Debbie walks onscreen you can taste the hairspray. It doesn't help that she immediately starts talking about Dynasty.
Scariest Moment: Freddy is torn apart by the released souls of his victims.
Weirdest Moment: Freddy is brought back to life by Jason, the Fire-Peeing Dog.

Champion Dialogue: "We have matching luggage again."
Body Count: 6

1. Kincaid is stabbed in the stomach.
2. Joey is drowned in his waterbed.
3. Kristen is thrown into a furnace.
4. Sheila has her bodily fluids sucked out during a test.
5. Rick has the glove launched into his stomach.
6. Debbie is turned into a cockroach and crushed inside a roach motel. 

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is a shockingly good third entry in a solid franchise that manages to bring something new to the table four years and three movies after Freddy's introduction.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1407
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)