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

Copyright: New Line Cinema

Halloween's closing in, and we have this year's Nightmare entry.  I believe this was the first Nightmare I saw in the theater, a drive-in in this case.  If you ever get a chance to go to a drive-in, I highly recommend it.  Getting to watch a film in the comfort of your own car is pretty fun.  They're sort of rare nowadays, but if you look, you should be able to find one.

So, on to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4!  This is the second of the Dream Trilogy, with Kristen and her friends from the previous film returning to deal with Freddy, alongside a new group of friends.  The film starts with Kristen dreaming bout the house again, and a little girl drawing in chalk on the front porch.  Going inside, and being trapped there, she calls in Kincaid and Joey for help.  The two, not too pleased with being drawn into her dream, show her that the place is abandoned, and Freddy's furnace is cold.

Unfortunately, their assertions prove invalid, as Kincaid awakens in the trunk of a car in an old junkyard.  Freddy arises from his grave and dispatches Kincaid, then goes after Joey, as well, in his own dream.  Kristen knows what's happening, and tries to warn Alice and the others about the undead killer.  But, with Freddy tearing through the group, can Alice stop his rampage as her own set of dream powers increase in strength?

This film was really good.  It has a nice pool of victims, good special effects, a pretty good storyline, everything worked out for this one.  Patricia Arquette was west to reprise her role as Kristen here, but she had to bow out due to a pregnancy (she had to leave another role in a different film for the same reason).  The new Kristen, Tuesday Knight, did well with the role, showing the right amount of paranoia at times.  She was also in The Fan and The Babysitter.  Playing Alice, the heir to Kristen's experience and Freddy's new target, is Lisa Wilcox.  She's also been in Watchers Reborn, the Fear Clinic series on FearNet, and the recent film The Church.

Another excellent entry in the Nightmare series, and a pretty good entry in my list of articles.  I give it a 5 out of 5.  Next up, I'll be tackling the third and fourth entries in the Friday the 13th series.  Until then, this is Red Hawk signing out!

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987 film)

Copyright New Line Cinema.  Ever notice Freddy's eye always bulges out on these posters?

Before we get into today's article, a bit of an announcement.  My originally schedules Week 4 event (1981 Week: Revisited) is going to be postponed until a later date due to schedule slip.  I am way behind on posting several of my other articles, as well, so I decided to just shift my focus to the month's end.  And so, we go from one slipped schedule over to rectify one from last year!

When I was working out last year's October, I had rewatched this and Friday the 13th 3D in anticipation, but never got around to rewatching the third Halloween.  Even worse, I never posted my reviews of the two films I had watched, which just isn't right.  I reviewed the Elm Street series documentary, at least, but I should have been more on the ball there.  I always pride myself on, if nothing else, keeping my Big Three reviews consistently posted, and I flubbed the ball there last year.  So, time to correct that!

Nightmare 3 follows the story of Kristen who, after a seeming suicide attempt after a Freddy nightmare is locked away at the Westin Hospital.  She's put together with other similar cases, all teenagers having problems with nightmares and seemingly suicidal.  Supposedly safe within the facility's walls, Freddy starts focusing in on the small group, picking them off in ways that look like suicides.  It's up to newly hired therapist Nancy Thompson, a survivor of Freddy Krueger's night time attacks, to help them harness their dreamland abilities and take the fight to Freddy himself as the Dream Warriors.

Returning as Nancy Thompson from the first film is Heather Langenkamp.  She also plays herself in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and is appearing in an upcoming Hellraiser film, Hellraiser: Judgment.  Patricia Arquette made her film debut as Kristen Parker.  She wouldn't return for the fourth film, but she did go on to star in a lot of other films, including True Romance, Ed Wood, Stigmata and the television series Medium.  Laurence Fishburne plays Max, an orderly at the Westin Hospital.  He's made a lot of movies, including Event Horizon, The Matrix series, Predators, and the television series Hannibal.

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time Freddy lets his sense of humor out.  It's sadistic humor, of course, but it helps!  You also get a bit more creativity in the kills.  In the original films, he more or less relied mostly on his glove to kill off someone (outside of the sheet hanging and blood fountain in the first film, of course).  Here, you get puppeteer Freddy, faucet handle Freddy, TV Freddy and the ever-popular Freddy Snake.

This film starts the Dream Trilogy, as I call it.  Three films with an ongoing storyline and characters to tie them together.  After the slight "oddball" that was Freddy's Revenge, it's nice to see Freddy get back to doing what he does best: invading dreams and causing carnage.  I give this film a 5 out of 5.  Next up, we'll be checking out A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.  Until then, this is Red Hawk signing out!

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010 documentary)

So, I'm a long-time fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and when I heard about a documentary about the series, I was extremely excited to hear about it.  Flash forward these few years and I spotted the film on Netflix as I was looking for some ideas for this month.  I knew I had to cover it, I just didn't know where to slot in a movie that was close to four hours long!  I got it watched today, so here's my thoughts on the film.

The documentary takes a look at each individual film, from A Nightmare on Elm Street up to Freddy Vs. Jason (nothing about the remake in it, though).  It features interviews with various actors, crew, makeup artists, etc., that were involved in the creation of each film.  Almost every Elm Street kid is represented, with the exception of Johnny Depp, Patricia Arquette and Breckin Meyer.  They even had Jason Mewes in for a joke about his resemblance to the Freeburg stoner character in Freddy Vs. Jason.  There's also a segment regarding some of the Freddy merchandise that came out, plus the TV series Freddy's Nightmares, with footage from that included.  Finally, it also covered the rise and fall of New Line Entertainment.

Now, I'm not normally a fan of documentary films.  I usually find them somewhat slow and boring.  However, this one kept me pretty riveted to the screen.  The stories the actors told, the footage included from behind the scenes or storyboards, some of the revelations I found out from the people on the movies themselves was just amazing.  I was happy to sit through it, and I really didn't want it to end.  I also got a laugh at the end credits, as the actors recited some of their best known lines from the films they were in.

This movie gets a 5 out of 5 for me.  It's not the usual fare for me at Happy Horror, but I definitely liked it.  It was well worth the almost four hours of running time.  If you get a chance to see this one, definitely go for it!  As always, take care of yourselves and this is Red Hawk, signing out!

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

Mommy?  Why can't Jesse wake up like everybody else? - Angela

So, we come to the first of what would have been last October's big finale trilogy.  I like to finish the month's articles with a look at the big three franchises, a tradition I started with my original site.  Today, we'll be looking at the second installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street film series, Freddy's Revenge.

Did you ever notice how there's usually at least one film early in a series that doesn't quite fit in with the others that come after it?  Usually, this will be the second or third film.  Puppet Master 2 didn't quite fit with the earlier film, or later established canon.  Halloween III: Season of the Witch was an effort on John Carpenter's part to move away from using the Shape again by basing the series off of different aspects of Halloween (it didn't work).  We'll look at the oddness of Friday the 13th: Part 2 tomorrow.  And so, we have this film, the oddball of the Nightmare series.

After a nightmare of Freddy Krueger stalking him and a pair of girls on a school bus, our protagonist, Jesse (Mark Patton) wakes up screaming as his parents and sister eat breakfast.  Seems the family just moved into Nancy's house from the first film (which was empty for five years!).  At school, he runs afoul of, then later befriends, tough guy Grady (Robert Rusler).  But at night, he keeps dreaming of Freddy who, instead of trying to kill him, asks him to help him kill others.  Jesse's obviously not on board with the idea, but will Freddy give him the option to say no?

So, this film has Freddy killing people differently from how he did in the previous film, as well as the rest of the films to come: rather than striking in their dreams, he uses Jesse as a conduit to manifest in the real world.  From what I read online, the script started as a standalone film not connected to the first Nightmare on Elm Street, but New Line waned a quick sequel so they changed things to put Freddy in.  Wes Craven bowed out because he wanted the first film to stand alone.  They also almost lost Robert Englund due to a pay dispute, but the replacement for him, seen in the shower sequence, didn't bring any life to the character.

My thoughts on the film: while different from the others, and sort of a black sheep with some fans, I did like this one.  There was some suspense built up, and the mind games Freddy plays with Jesse's girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers), are up there with some of the stuff he pulled with Nancy.  However, in my opinion, Freddy works best in dreams and the next film brings him back to his roots, and also introduces the more wacky, fun-loving, sadistic Freddy we're used to.

I give this movie a 3 out of 5.  Good acting, great special and make-up effects, but overall, just too different from the others for my taste.  Tune in tomorrow for my coverage of Friday the 13th, Part 2, where we get to see, as Horror Hound magazine called it, Jason's "fashionable head bag".  Until then, this is Red Hawk signing out!

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984 film)

Whatever you do, don't.  Fall.  Asleep. - Nancy

Welcome to the first of the Big Three reviews.  I will be covering the original films for the three biggest horror franchises of recent times: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween.  These three films are synonymous with horror, due in large part to the efforts of their major antagonists: Freddy Krueger, Jason and Pamela Voorhees and Michael Myers, aka The Shape, respectively.  While other icons of horror, such as Leatherface, Chucky, Pinhead and Jigsaw, to name just a few, have "carved" their own nich (no pun intended), it's these three film series that stand out above and beyond the others.  Let's start with our celebration of the very first A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I never got to see the first three of this series in the theater, having to wait until they came out on video to see them (or, in the case of the third film, cable).  The first one, I remember watching it when I was probably 8 years old with my mom and my cousin who was living with us at the time.  I enjoyed the movie then, but I remember my cousin having a couch cushion in her lap and every time something scary would happen, the cushion would come up and hide her from what was happening.  Needless to say, she was not a horror fan!

The basic premise of the film is this: The teenaged children of Elm Street in Springwood, Ohio, all start dreaming of the same strange sweater-clad man with burns on his face and a knife glove on his hand.  This mysterious figure stalks them through their dreams, inevitably leading them to a boiler room.  As far as the teens know, these are just strange dreams, but when Nancy's friend, Tina, meets a seriously gruesom end, Nancy begins to wonder if her death isn't more than what it appears to be.

As I said, I enjoyed this film as a kid and it's only gotten better since.  The pacing is good, there's some very fine acting, the special effects are amazing... everything lines up for this film.  From the arm stretching gag to Freddy's face coming off to something simple like a burn makr on Nancy's arm, everything came together well.

Heather Langenkamp played Nancy, our main lead of the film and the one who realizes that the scarred killer in her dreams is really stalking her and her friends.  Her first film was The Outsiders, and she's gone on to reprise the role of Nancy in the third Nightmare on Elm Street film, as well as playing herself in Wes Craven's New Nightmare.  Other than the Nightmare series, she also did a cameo on Shocker and was in Star Trek Into Darkness.  John Saxon makes his second Happy Horrorween appearance (his first was in Blood Beach) as Lt. Don Thompson, Nancy's father.  Besides Blood Beach, he was also in The Night Caller (aka Night Caller from Outer Space), Queen of Blood and Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 classic Mitchell.  Robert Englund plays mystery man Freddy Krueger.  This was his first outing as the madman, of course, and hadn't developed Freddy's later characteristic joking manner (though he does play around with his victims somewhat).  Englund's become known primarily for his horror roles in such films as Eaten Alive, Galaxy of Terror, Phantom of the Opera, and the host of Shadow Theatre, one of my favorite horror showcase shows.  Johnny Depp made his film debut here, as well.  He went on to major stardom with such films as the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, Dark Shadows and tons of others.  Also look for cameos from Lin Shaye (Dead End, 2001 Maniacs) as a high school teacher and Charles Fleischer (Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, voice of Roger Rabbit) as a specialist in sleep disorders.

All in all, a fun viewing was had, and I gladly give this film a 5 out of 5.  Tomorrow, we go back to the woods to Camp Crystal Lake.  It's Friday the 13th!  Until then, this is Red Hawk signing out.