I’ve started digging up the movies that freaked me out as a kid and re visiting them, for no reason. Anything I saw in the video store, or on this weird free pay-per-view trailers channel that gave me nightmares is fair game. Read or don’t. Most of these will be super lame and only interesting to no one. Thanks.
So, I was going to do Popcorn, for the next installment of MTBMOAK (jesus…need a better acronym), but I had to put that one on the back burner, since the new Nightmare on Elm Street travesty is out and I wanted to catch up on the series before I went and had my hopes and dreams shattered. Thanks Platinum Dunes…you should have just stuck with Alexander Aja and the Hills Have Eyes Remake…that shit was badass.
The fifth nightmare trailer (seen above) ran in constant rotation on the free Pay Per View previews channel, and I remember being utterly horrified and excited by it. At the time, I think the only Nightmare on Elm Street I had any experience with was the fourth one, when a bunch of older kids made me watch it at a party that my parents dragged me to. Being well versed in the boxes and cover art for each Freddy Movie (my favorite being Part 3), I knew what he was about, and I even knew that he had started off scary and gradually got funnier and funnier. That doesn’t mean he still didn’t freak the shit out of me though. It was the dream sequences that did it…the first one I remember seeing was in part 4, when Kincaid (YES I know the Dream Warriors by name, thanks) gets trapped in a junkyard by Freddy, and as the camera zoomed out, we see that the entire planet is one huge junkyard. 5 minutes in, for the impatient.
Same thing with the asthmatic girl’s death scene (sorry don’t know her name because she wasn’t a Dream Warrior) while taking a test in class. The fact that she was being murdered by Freddy in a dream while everyone around her just sat there filling in their test sheets freaked me the hell out, because it nailed that weird helpless feeling you get in dreams where something awful is happening, and while there are people around, no one is doing anything. 2 minutes in.
You can imagine how traumatic this stuff can be for an 7 year old who knew nothing about surrealism, or any of the other bullshit words they use to describe those dream sequences. That shit was just scary. The trailer for the fifth movie bugged me out so bad because it seemed like they had amped up the weird in the 5th movie, with all the odd camera angles, drooling maniacs, birth canal imagery, and some freaky shit involving a motorcycle. I watched that trailer about 6 times a day, and every time, it made life feel like a living nightmare. Which has a weird attraction to a nerdy little kid with an overactive imagination. I also remember getting chills from the “Kruger, this time its for keeps!” line, because being as terrified as I was, it was cool to see someone fighting back against the terror…which is why I liked the cover to the 3rd movie so much… more on all that later.
So after getting my girlfriend to begrudgingly re-watch the series with me (I skipped Part 2 to expedite the process and I’d seen most of it when I was really young and still thought it was a little “gay”), we made it from the first (pretty damn awesome) to The Dream Warriors (still the best, but a little slow), through Dream Master (really ridiculous but had its moments and it made me go download that dramarama song), and almost made it to The Dream Child before I lost control of the Netflix queue in a sucker’s bet with my girlfriend, so the 5th movie was knocked out in favor of about a thousand Hilary Duff movies or whatever it is girls watch…I kid, she actually has great taste. So I had to open an account at the shady video store across the street to watch this one.
Everything I had read said it was a well-meaning piece of bad that got hacked up by the MPAA so it wouldn’t get an NC-17 rating and was plagued with confused writers who were still finishing the script as the movie was being shot. Freddy’s Dead is usually regarded as the worst Nightmare movie, with this one as the second or third worst. SO there you have it. As I was doing all my usual internet opinion-reading and regurgitating, I realized that 9 YEAR OLD ME DIDN’T READ SHIT UNLESS IT WAS CALVIN AND HOBBES OR HARDY BOYS. So I stopped giving a shit what the internet thought and I attacked The Dream Child with the freshest pair of eyes I could muster. This wasn’t hard since I don’t have much opinion on the Nightmare movies anyway, which should be obvious since its taken me 19 years to see even one in its entirety (apart from New Nightmare, which ruled). So here’s what happened, through the eyes of me as a kid:
The story follows Alice, The Dream Master who can pull other people into her dreams whenever she wants. In the beginning she’s doing something with her boyfriend Dan, who survived from Part 4, and they are moaning and scratching each others backs and everything is all blue and they arent wearing clothes but you dont see boobs then. Then it gets crazy, because Freddy was dead, but Alice starts having these freaky dreams, like, she almost drowns in her shower, and then she even starts dreaming when she is awake! Turns out she is pregnant, and they totally showed boobs in the shower part. Her child is named Jacob and he is dreaming about Freddy because he IS part of Freddy, or something…Freddy is trying to come into the world through Jacob…or something. But he’s not born yet, and the girls friends start dying in really crazy ways, and Freddy’s Mom was raped by 100 maniacs in an insane asylum and she is also in the dreams. Then Freddy comes alive in the dream and finds his glove and is all freaky with one of his arms extra long and he says, “Its a boy!”. Then Freddy skateboards and a dude shoots him with guns but then Freddy comes back all big like a wrestler and he is super Freddy and kills the guy with guns then Dan tries to drive his truck to save Alice but Freddy starts driving and rips off his own arm then Dan finds a motorcycle and tries to get to Alice but then the motorcycle IS FREDDY and it starts talking to Dan while they are going like a million miles per hour then the motorcycle like eats Dan and he becomes part of it, and he looks like a skeleton cyborg driving the motorcycle but it turns out he is just dreaming and dies. They don’t show any more boobs and then Alice goes to fight Freddy in the dream world and everything is all upside down while Alice’s friend goes to find Freddy’s mom’s bones and lay them to rest or something and she does and then Freddy comes out of Alice and they are like part of the same person but fighting each other then Freddy’s Mom shows up and tells Jacob to unleash the power on Freddy so Jacob barfs these souls on Freddy and they tear baby Freddy out of Freddy’s body and Freddy’s mom picks up baby Freddy who looks all crazy and Freddy goes into his Mom’s belly and then tries to rip his way out and then dies forever. It was AWESOME.
Haha, seriously it was kind of sweet. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it really does try to make something interesting, and as far as the kill scenes and the dream sequences are concerned, it succeeds. I was drawn to the bits in the asylum, where they use all these Terry Gilliam type camera angles to re-create Freddy’s gruesome conception, and the non-CGI effects looked pretty great, especially in the case of Dan, who really does become some kind of freaked out man/motorcyle hybrid. Check out the full death scene below, the original version, with a few extra moments that they cut out of all later releases. That mechanical Freddy face FREAKED me out. I’m not sure how I saw it since it wasn’t in the trailer, but I have distinct memories of picturing that damn face underneath my bed or in my closet.
Along with that scene, and the occasional boob-showing, 9 year old me would have really liked when Mark, the comic book nerd, becomes one of his superheroes and fights back. 27 year old me was kind of bummed by it because at that point in the series, there had been so many points where one of the kids uses some crazy powers to fight back, with the same results every time. The formula goes: Freddy scares them or injures them in some really personal way, they use their power, get a few hits in on Freddy, and then he kills them anyway. For once, I wanted to feel like someone had a chance, and that is where I want the remake to go, to play up the bad-ass aspect of the kids fighting back, and actually give them a shot. If these remakes go on, and I kind of hope they do, I can’t wait to see what they do with part 3. Other than that, these movies really have a chance to play up the subconscious torture and surrealism of dreams, and I think with modern budgets and effects, they could do some truly amazing things onscreen. Not that they will. AND FURTHERMORE (I’ve already taken this WAY into nerd territory, so why stop now) I want to see what its like for Freddy in the offseason, to see him brooding over his shitty little dreamworld and show him setting things in motion to return. Like that part in Beetlejuice where Beetlejuice is chilling underground bored as hell and reading a newspaper. That was awesome and a little creepy.
Alright, that’s about it. Now, with that out of the way i can go see the terrible remake and get on my with pointless waste of a Nightmare on Elm Street watching life. Ugh city. Next up is either Popcorn, or Body Parts, because Popcorn is really hard to find. Thanks for reading!