Second installment of my reviews of the "A Nightmare On Elm Street" series. If you want to see my first entry you can find it here. I'm afraid I have as yet to get hold of "Freddy Vs Jason", but you can expect this to be followed up with reviews for Parts 6 and 7 fairly shortly.
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A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Having decided to watch Part 3 first, naturally I already knew this wasn't expected to be as good and I'd heard that there weren't vital plot elements carrying through the series in this one too. What surprised me was finding just how much this film veers off the normal formula.
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This time, it turns out, Freddy isn't just attacking in dreams. In fact, the film messes with you towards the beginning, making you think you are watching a dream when actually something is happening in real life. Essentially though, there is only one actual "dreamer" and that's the protagonist Jesse.
One thing that this film did add to the series is the importance of Nancy's house on Elm Street with bars on the windows. While in the first film Nancy was just one of the victims, in the second film the suggestion appears to be that Freddy's previous defeat means that he is confined to the house.
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Through Jesse, Freddy is attempting to pull his powers into the real world, which is a little odd seeing as it was previously suggested that if you pulled Freddy out of the dream he would lose his powers. However, I guess that this is Freddy escaping on his own terms.
Freddy is actually scary this time around. Not quite as scary as in the 2010 remake, but scarier than in the first movie and definitely scarier than in "Dream Warriors" (the third film). There's one line where he's looking at a whole bunch of teenagers and calmly but gleefully says: "You are all my children now!" That was seriously creepy.
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The main reason to watch this film however is the transformation scene. Jesse has a (literal? metaphorical?) transformation INTO Freddy Kreuger. In the trailer you can see the blades of Freddy's glove coming out of his fingernails. I wouldn't say that it was as good as the transformation in "An American Werewolf In London" but I think I could say it is in the same league.
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Sadly the film as a whole is very campy and, most importantly, the boy playing Jesse is a horrendous actor. I don't know whether the lines were awful or whether they only seemed particularly bad because of their delivery, but Jesse annoyed the hell out of me in this film. His girlfriend is also a little unbelieveable, particularly when she's still trying to tell Jesse he might just be imagining things when he comes to her with his hands literally covered in blood. That said, one of the most interesting elements of this film is wondering which parts are real and which are imagined. The problem is that the distinction is never terribly clear (asides from towards the end of the film, where the blurring of dream and reality makes for a pretty cool final act).
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The two most confusing things about "Freddy's Revenge" are, first of all, why it's called that. There's no characters from the original film and Nancy has left the house (hence why Jesse is living there), so in what sense is this revenge? "Freddy's Resurrection" might be a more fitting title since that is what Freddy is essentially hoping for here. Secondly, why is there a homoerotic subtext? Jesse has a girlfriend, yet all through the film there are suggestions that he is actually gay. The idea that Freddy represents suppressed sexual tendencies is a little worrying particularly considering that the girlfriend is the main figure involved in saving him from Freddy.
This film is a bit wacky and of the Nightmare films I've seen so far, it's definitely the least impressive. It's really not a very good film at all. However, in spite of that there are elements that are worth checking out for completions sake.
D+
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A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
I went into this one not expecting too much, mainly because of a joke from the tv show "Roseanne". The family get a VCR and Darlene says "we can rent Lethal Weapon 2, Jaws 3 and Nightmare On Elm Street 4". The joke is partly that this is a sequence of sequels that have nothing to do with one another, partly that there were plenty of series with ridiculous numbers of sequels, but I also thought it meant that these were judged as poor sequels too (having never personally liked Lethal Weapon 2).
Since watching the film, I've listened to a few podcasts about it and I do actually get the impression that this film is looked down on, but I'm not entirely sure why.
The opening certainly doesn't set things up well. There's some cheesy eighties music on a black background before showing the heroine from the previous film wandering through "the Elm Street house". (Once again, you can blame Part 2 for the focus on the house since there was no reason to think it was terribly important for Freddy in the first film.) The scene is particularly jarring because the girl wandering through the house isn't played by Patricia Arquette anymore, however when she pulls the other survivors from the last film (who ARE still played by the same actors) into her dream, it becomes pretty clear who she is supposed to be.
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The problem is essentially that Patricia Arquette is still frightened and having nightmares. Even though Freddy is defeated, she's still appearing in the same setting only to discover that he's not turning up to terrorise her.
Naturally this wasn't going to last. Freddy's return doesn't make an awful lot of sense, but it certainly looks impressive. From that point on, in fact, this becomes a major theme of Part 4: Everything looks absolutely brilliant. After the fairly plain and disappointing first scene, every other dream sequence feels like a real step up from the sequences in Dream Warriors. The effects guys presumably have a bigger budget to play with and they are using it to full effect.
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I wonder whether the main criticisms of this might be a similar issue to the problem some people have with "Alien 3": The decision to kill off the previous survivors. When in Alien 3 Ripley's co-survivors were killed in the opening sequence many people were horrified. They asked why you would kill off those characters that were so carefully built up in the previous film. Seemingly having forgotten that the two characters were a whiney little child and a fairly two-dimensional Action Man.
I've said before how I wasn't impressed by the acting in "Dream Warriors" and the actors haven't got any better since then. However, replacing them is a whole new cast. The new characters are much better defined and I quickly found myself endeared to all of them and, unlike with the survivors from the last film, found myself really upset when some of them were picked off.
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The girl who can pull people into her dreams accidentally pulls a new person who wasn't part of the original set of Elm Street children in when she feels threatened. She passes her power on in the hope that it will help her defeat Freddy for good this time, however the power turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing. The only way Freddy can get new victims is if someone new is pulled into the dream - and who wouldn't want someone there to support them when things get frightening?
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I found this was by far the most interesting plotline in the films so far with by far the most interesting characters. Sure Freddy's powers are now completely over the top, but Freddy's limits were never very clearly defined from the start. This definitely doesn't feel like a horror movie anymore, but it does feel like things are at stake and had me rather more invested in the action than before. The dream sequences seem to play out properly this time rather than having Freddy losing in a fight at one moment and being able to fight back easily with syringe fingers the next. It generally feels like Freddy's powers are at least somewhat related to the willpower of the figure he's attacking.
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The final act has some Deus Ex Machina elements, but considering the methods used in previous films (including a pretty literal Deus Ex Machina in Dream Warriors) this is probably still the best finale to a Nightmare on Elm Street film. While I said that the return of Freddy here didn't make much sense, it tackles the problem I had with the last film where it didn't really feel like Freddy had been defeated within the actual dream world.
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I think this makes for a neat little ending to a trilogy of Nightmare On Elm Street movies. It follows on nicely from the previous entry and builds on the existing ideas really well. Starting with the first movie, then watching "Dream Warriors" and finally this "Dream Master" movie makes for a series of films which properly follow each other and gradually increase in quality.
Oh yeah, and no ghost nuns this time.
B+
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A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
A new set of friends have to be brought into this movie because so many of cast were killed off last time around and none of these new people feel like real people. We don't have the well-defined characterisation of the last movie and the attempt to show the children all casually talking to each other just comes across as overly scripted and even somewhat confusing. The parents are particularly dreadful one-dimensional caricatures.
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Our protagonist has another nightmare and this time she finds that she's a nun in a hospital for the criminally insane. Alarm bells started ringing and I must admit I was really freaked out, but not at all for the right reasons. I wasn't worried because it was setting up a scary scene. I was worried because I knew the background to the series and was desperately hoping they weren't going to do what I thought they were going to do.
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As the scene progresses we see a room full of grimy prisoners crowding in a room and we see some wards of the hospital barely bothering to count the prisoners before leaving them to attack the nun (which they do by crowding around her until we can't really see her anymore). The whole scene feels very cartoonish which, while not unusual for the series particularly by this stage, is really unsuitable for a scene about implied rape.
The nun is seen to have a baby Freddy which is an odd sort of special effects gadget that looks like a cross between Freddy as an adult and the creepy foetus from "Eraserhead". Finally lo and behold Freddy's back. It's a bit of an anti-climax to be honest.
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For the first time Freddy's mother becomes a presence within the dream world and there's some suggestion that she might be able to fight Freddy. Freddy then points out that first people would need to find her remains in the real world and this whole idea is neatly forgotten about until near the climax of the film.
Our protagonist wakes up at one stage to discover not only that Freddy has killed her boyfriend, but that she is pregnant. On the one hand we have a doctor claiming that her irrational ranting is likely to be due to her pregnancy and on the other hand we have no sign that anyone even bothers discussing whether she actually wants the baby.
I'm kinda peeved at this stage. She and her boyfriend were planning on travelling the world over the holidays and that's not something you are likely to do while pregnant. It's pretty clear that this is an unplanned pregnancy. Someone should be discussing her options with her. Only very late on in the film does anyone even suggest the possibility of abortion.
I'm also really surprised that she wants the baby. As with the psychic baby scene in Twilight, the filmmakers seem to think this should be a cause for joy while I'm really freaked out that a still developing foetus can communicate better than a 6 month old baby. The same problem occurs here where the baby is present in the dream world as a child who looks to be about 12 years old and is fully proficient in English. I would be seriously freaking out if I knew this was supposed to be my own unborn child.
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While I would have thought the budget just went up and up and up on these films, it seems to have gone downhill since the previous entry. The dream sequence effects do not look very good at all. For example, Freddy is painted black and white to appear as if he is in a comic strip, but the comic book world is just a big white room with some scaffolding in it.
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The acting is bad, the new characters are flat, the plot involving the nun mother is poorly developed, the whole element involving the unborn baby is just REALLY badly handled and just generally this film is no fun.
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This is by far the worst entry in the Nightmare On Elm Street series that I've seen so far.
E+
A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
Having decided to watch Part 3 first, naturally I already knew this wasn't expected to be as good and I'd heard that there weren't vital plot elements carrying through the series in this one too. What surprised me was finding just how much this film veers off the normal formula.
This time, it turns out, Freddy isn't just attacking in dreams. In fact, the film messes with you towards the beginning, making you think you are watching a dream when actually something is happening in real life. Essentially though, there is only one actual "dreamer" and that's the protagonist Jesse.
One thing that this film did add to the series is the importance of Nancy's house on Elm Street with bars on the windows. While in the first film Nancy was just one of the victims, in the second film the suggestion appears to be that Freddy's previous defeat means that he is confined to the house.
Through Jesse, Freddy is attempting to pull his powers into the real world, which is a little odd seeing as it was previously suggested that if you pulled Freddy out of the dream he would lose his powers. However, I guess that this is Freddy escaping on his own terms.
Freddy is actually scary this time around. Not quite as scary as in the 2010 remake, but scarier than in the first movie and definitely scarier than in "Dream Warriors" (the third film). There's one line where he's looking at a whole bunch of teenagers and calmly but gleefully says: "You are all my children now!" That was seriously creepy.
The main reason to watch this film however is the transformation scene. Jesse has a (literal? metaphorical?) transformation INTO Freddy Kreuger. In the trailer you can see the blades of Freddy's glove coming out of his fingernails. I wouldn't say that it was as good as the transformation in "An American Werewolf In London" but I think I could say it is in the same league.
Sadly the film as a whole is very campy and, most importantly, the boy playing Jesse is a horrendous actor. I don't know whether the lines were awful or whether they only seemed particularly bad because of their delivery, but Jesse annoyed the hell out of me in this film. His girlfriend is also a little unbelieveable, particularly when she's still trying to tell Jesse he might just be imagining things when he comes to her with his hands literally covered in blood. That said, one of the most interesting elements of this film is wondering which parts are real and which are imagined. The problem is that the distinction is never terribly clear (asides from towards the end of the film, where the blurring of dream and reality makes for a pretty cool final act).
The two most confusing things about "Freddy's Revenge" are, first of all, why it's called that. There's no characters from the original film and Nancy has left the house (hence why Jesse is living there), so in what sense is this revenge? "Freddy's Resurrection" might be a more fitting title since that is what Freddy is essentially hoping for here. Secondly, why is there a homoerotic subtext? Jesse has a girlfriend, yet all through the film there are suggestions that he is actually gay. The idea that Freddy represents suppressed sexual tendencies is a little worrying particularly considering that the girlfriend is the main figure involved in saving him from Freddy.
This film is a bit wacky and of the Nightmare films I've seen so far, it's definitely the least impressive. It's really not a very good film at all. However, in spite of that there are elements that are worth checking out for completions sake.
D+
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
I went into this one not expecting too much, mainly because of a joke from the tv show "Roseanne". The family get a VCR and Darlene says "we can rent Lethal Weapon 2, Jaws 3 and Nightmare On Elm Street 4". The joke is partly that this is a sequence of sequels that have nothing to do with one another, partly that there were plenty of series with ridiculous numbers of sequels, but I also thought it meant that these were judged as poor sequels too (having never personally liked Lethal Weapon 2).
Since watching the film, I've listened to a few podcasts about it and I do actually get the impression that this film is looked down on, but I'm not entirely sure why.
The opening certainly doesn't set things up well. There's some cheesy eighties music on a black background before showing the heroine from the previous film wandering through "the Elm Street house". (Once again, you can blame Part 2 for the focus on the house since there was no reason to think it was terribly important for Freddy in the first film.) The scene is particularly jarring because the girl wandering through the house isn't played by Patricia Arquette anymore, however when she pulls the other survivors from the last film (who ARE still played by the same actors) into her dream, it becomes pretty clear who she is supposed to be.
The problem is essentially that Patricia Arquette is still frightened and having nightmares. Even though Freddy is defeated, she's still appearing in the same setting only to discover that he's not turning up to terrorise her.
Naturally this wasn't going to last. Freddy's return doesn't make an awful lot of sense, but it certainly looks impressive. From that point on, in fact, this becomes a major theme of Part 4: Everything looks absolutely brilliant. After the fairly plain and disappointing first scene, every other dream sequence feels like a real step up from the sequences in Dream Warriors. The effects guys presumably have a bigger budget to play with and they are using it to full effect.
I wonder whether the main criticisms of this might be a similar issue to the problem some people have with "Alien 3": The decision to kill off the previous survivors. When in Alien 3 Ripley's co-survivors were killed in the opening sequence many people were horrified. They asked why you would kill off those characters that were so carefully built up in the previous film. Seemingly having forgotten that the two characters were a whiney little child and a fairly two-dimensional Action Man.
I've said before how I wasn't impressed by the acting in "Dream Warriors" and the actors haven't got any better since then. However, replacing them is a whole new cast. The new characters are much better defined and I quickly found myself endeared to all of them and, unlike with the survivors from the last film, found myself really upset when some of them were picked off.
The girl who can pull people into her dreams accidentally pulls a new person who wasn't part of the original set of Elm Street children in when she feels threatened. She passes her power on in the hope that it will help her defeat Freddy for good this time, however the power turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing. The only way Freddy can get new victims is if someone new is pulled into the dream - and who wouldn't want someone there to support them when things get frightening?
I found this was by far the most interesting plotline in the films so far with by far the most interesting characters. Sure Freddy's powers are now completely over the top, but Freddy's limits were never very clearly defined from the start. This definitely doesn't feel like a horror movie anymore, but it does feel like things are at stake and had me rather more invested in the action than before. The dream sequences seem to play out properly this time rather than having Freddy losing in a fight at one moment and being able to fight back easily with syringe fingers the next. It generally feels like Freddy's powers are at least somewhat related to the willpower of the figure he's attacking.
The final act has some Deus Ex Machina elements, but considering the methods used in previous films (including a pretty literal Deus Ex Machina in Dream Warriors) this is probably still the best finale to a Nightmare on Elm Street film. While I said that the return of Freddy here didn't make much sense, it tackles the problem I had with the last film where it didn't really feel like Freddy had been defeated within the actual dream world.
I think this makes for a neat little ending to a trilogy of Nightmare On Elm Street movies. It follows on nicely from the previous entry and builds on the existing ideas really well. Starting with the first movie, then watching "Dream Warriors" and finally this "Dream Master" movie makes for a series of films which properly follow each other and gradually increase in quality.
Oh yeah, and no ghost nuns this time.
B+
A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
A new set of friends have to be brought into this movie because so many of cast were killed off last time around and none of these new people feel like real people. We don't have the well-defined characterisation of the last movie and the attempt to show the children all casually talking to each other just comes across as overly scripted and even somewhat confusing. The parents are particularly dreadful one-dimensional caricatures.
Our protagonist has another nightmare and this time she finds that she's a nun in a hospital for the criminally insane. Alarm bells started ringing and I must admit I was really freaked out, but not at all for the right reasons. I wasn't worried because it was setting up a scary scene. I was worried because I knew the background to the series and was desperately hoping they weren't going to do what I thought they were going to do.
As the scene progresses we see a room full of grimy prisoners crowding in a room and we see some wards of the hospital barely bothering to count the prisoners before leaving them to attack the nun (which they do by crowding around her until we can't really see her anymore). The whole scene feels very cartoonish which, while not unusual for the series particularly by this stage, is really unsuitable for a scene about implied rape.
The nun is seen to have a baby Freddy which is an odd sort of special effects gadget that looks like a cross between Freddy as an adult and the creepy foetus from "Eraserhead". Finally lo and behold Freddy's back. It's a bit of an anti-climax to be honest.
For the first time Freddy's mother becomes a presence within the dream world and there's some suggestion that she might be able to fight Freddy. Freddy then points out that first people would need to find her remains in the real world and this whole idea is neatly forgotten about until near the climax of the film.
Our protagonist wakes up at one stage to discover not only that Freddy has killed her boyfriend, but that she is pregnant. On the one hand we have a doctor claiming that her irrational ranting is likely to be due to her pregnancy and on the other hand we have no sign that anyone even bothers discussing whether she actually wants the baby.
I'm kinda peeved at this stage. She and her boyfriend were planning on travelling the world over the holidays and that's not something you are likely to do while pregnant. It's pretty clear that this is an unplanned pregnancy. Someone should be discussing her options with her. Only very late on in the film does anyone even suggest the possibility of abortion.
I'm also really surprised that she wants the baby. As with the psychic baby scene in Twilight, the filmmakers seem to think this should be a cause for joy while I'm really freaked out that a still developing foetus can communicate better than a 6 month old baby. The same problem occurs here where the baby is present in the dream world as a child who looks to be about 12 years old and is fully proficient in English. I would be seriously freaking out if I knew this was supposed to be my own unborn child.
While I would have thought the budget just went up and up and up on these films, it seems to have gone downhill since the previous entry. The dream sequence effects do not look very good at all. For example, Freddy is painted black and white to appear as if he is in a comic strip, but the comic book world is just a big white room with some scaffolding in it.
The acting is bad, the new characters are flat, the plot involving the nun mother is poorly developed, the whole element involving the unborn baby is just REALLY badly handled and just generally this film is no fun.
This is by far the worst entry in the Nightmare On Elm Street series that I've seen so far.
E+