WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE

1994/15/108m

“This time, staying awake won’t save you.”

A.k.a. A Nightmare on Elm Street 7

Director/Writer: Wes Craven / Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Miko Hughes, Matt Winston, Rob LaBelle, David Newsom, John Saxon, Wes Craven, Tracy Middendorf, Fran Bennett, Robert Shaye.

Body Count: 5

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Been a bit Elm Streety round here recently, hasn’t it? Well, after this I’ll give it a rest for a while. Promise. The remake just got me hankering for the originals.

You know when you don’t like a song that everybody else does but it’s “just not you” but you’re well aware it’s good, A). that happens to me loads and B). that’s kind of how I am with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. It’s a stupendously good film, anyone can tell that but to me it’s merely a bit better than good.

Understandably peeved with the way Freddy Krueger went from frightening villain of your dreams to campy sell-out within a few short years, his creator Wes Craven decided to have the last word on the subject with this looking back into the box from the outside sorta deal.

There’s talk of making a new Freddy film around LA, which coincides with a series of localised earthquakes and actress Heather Langenkamp’s freaky dreams and those of her young son, Dylan, who watches old Elm Streets in zombielike trances and chants “one, two, Freddy’s coming for you…” She’s also getting prank calls from an obsessed fan and things get worse still when her special-FX department husband gets clawed driving home one night.

Car crash, everyone says with the exception of Heather, who things something else is afoot. She catches up with Robert Englund, Wes Craven, John Saxon and various New Line representatives who try to convince her it’s all in her mind. Dylan is taken to hospital for testing, where suspicion falls on Heather until there’s another murder witnessed by hospital staff.

Eventually, Heather and Dylan take on Freddy in a dream and put an end to him once and for all. Well, until Freddy vs. Jason nine years later anyway.

The self-referential aspect catapulted into the stratosphere by Scream two years later is what makes the film. It’s smartly written, with a context of Freddy existing beyond the constraint of his films and crossing over into the real world plus some chucklesome little nods to the old films (as well as cameos), including that fabulous “screw your pass!” moment, and the wounds of Krueger’s razor fingers cropping up all over the place.

What holds the film back – for me, at least – is the low body count (two of the murders are merely referenced to in a news report) in ratio to the nearly two hour running time and drawn out scenes about Heather’s fears of her own madness. It’s just lack that re-watchability that a 90 minute quality slasher flick has: I’ve watched it twice in about 12 years. But, if anything, New Nightmare reasserted Craven’s directorial prowess and was probably a massive contributing factor in him landing the Scream films.

Blurbs-of-interest: Englund was Freddy in all the other ventures until the 2010 remake and was also in Behind the Mask, Hatchet, Heartstopper, The Phantom of the Opera and Urban Legend; Langenkamp played Nancy in the first and third Elm Street movies; Rob LaBelle was in Jack Frost; Craven also directed Deadly Blessing and The Hills Have Eyes Part II.

Those who know me well will vouch for my high tolerance of crap. Crap music, crap TV and crap films. But every now and then there’s that straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Here are five films I couldn’t deal with. I may have fast-forwarded to the end but the whole experience was out of the window for one reason or another…

FIVE ACROSS THE EYES (2006)

It looks like a slasher film. It sounds like a slasher film. Slasherpool gave it five stars… I can only hope that AnthroFred was on crack that day because this is a sure fire candidate for biggest waste of time EVER!

A quintet of high school girls go to a sports event at a school…. theirs, someone else’s, I really didn’t care. On the way back, she who is driving their mini-van knocks into another  vehicle at a bar and they unwisely flee the scene.

By this point, the camcorderiness of it all was becoming too much for me to take and thumb circled the fast-forward button like a vulture eyeing a carcass.

The driver of the other car chases and catches them and turns out to be a thirtysomething woman who’s evidently got the decorators in as she holds them at gunpoint, makes them strip and let’s them leave, only to chase them again, probably to kill them, I don’t know, it was well into x4 territory now.

A girl craps in her own hand and tosses it at the trailing car, nobody gets murdered and eventually the five girls gang up and kill the psycho bitch. What are The Eyes, you ask? It’s the name of the back country where this all takes place. Yay, relevance. Fucking dreadful.

EDEN LAKE (2008)

Here’s an oddity, a film which was quite obviously good enough but I made one of my rare sensible decisions to stop watching.

A city couple head off camping for the weekend and cross paths with some horrible teenage scrotes who begin a campaign of terror against the outlanders after they accidentally kill their dog.

I reached the point where it looked like I was going to get very angry with it – before the dog-o-cide – as I do about the subject of the don’t-give-a-fuck teenagers in society and opted to have a quick peek at the end, which only served to prove that it had in fact been a good idea to discontinue.

Yeah, so it’s “real” horror or whatever, but people call Radiohead “real” music and I don’t listen to that either. I want a Belinda Carlisle level of horror: big hair, strong predictable melody and commercial appeal, not downbeat state-of-society stuff. Film is supposed to help me escape all that BS, not take me on a trip back to it for entertainment’s sake.

I AM THE RIPPER (2004)

I only have hazy memories of what can only be a described as a French student project filmed on a Nokia.

At a Paris party, a skull masked killer turns up and kills a load of people. Okay, fine – this occupies about 15 minutes worth. Then they all come back to life (I think) and it becomes some bizarro Matrix-horror film with super powers or something? I don’t even remember.

But it was shit in its purest, distilled form.

THE NEW YORK RIPPER (1982)

Just how this film has a 6.1 rating on IMDb is beyond my understanding. It’s SHIT!!!

The New York Ripper has garnered a reputation for hefty misogyny, which was fairly common in early 80s horror. Yes, it’s there but I expected that.

What I didn’t expect was how boring it would be. Fulci made the film look relatively professional, the murders are drippy and gross and very brutal but so little else happens. The gap between slayings grew as my patience shrank until I could take it no more and scurried to the end to see who the killer turned out to be and what the deal with the mad quacking was.

I actually had to watch the end twice to try and get it straight – some girl in a hospital bed with no arms or something. Zzzzz.

SEASON OF THE HUNTED (2003)

Muse Watson is in this. The Fisherman from I Know What You Did Last Summer wouldn’t lower himself to a camcorder tripe-fest would he? He was in Prison Break, damn it.

It turns out that yes, he would. He needs money too, y’know.

In this tale of some hunters becoming the hunted, I made it about twenty odd minutes in before x4-ville took over and I realized that this over-long film was not going to gauge my interest. Ever.

I can’t tell you what happened later in it but it wasn’t the slasher film the box art made it out to be.

There, see? Vegan Voorhees can’t promise to give you a fair rundown of everything because sometimes it’s just too damn shite to make it through. It becomes the unscratchable itch. Turn it off! Turn it the hell off now!

To this end there can be no real winner or loser this month; four of these films are irredeemably crap and the other is likely to induce a killing spree of my own. It being the odd one out, let’s pretend Eden Lake is the only good one.

RIPPER 2: LETTERS FROM WITHIN

2004/86m

“Back from the grave to redeem his soul.”

Directors: Lloyd A. Simandl & Jonas Quastel / Writers: Evan Taylor, Jonas Quastel, John Sheppard & Pat Bermel / Cast: Erin Karpluk, Nicholas Irons, Richard Bremmer, Mhairi Steenbock, Jane Peachey, Daniel Coonan, Colin Lawrence, Myfanwy Waring, Andrew Miltner.

Body Count: 6

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My BFF Grace auditioned for a role of “black girl with attitude” in this movie. “Cool!! Ripper‘s a really good little film!” I cawed. She didn’t get it. We were sad. Sometime later, sadness blossomed into a joy of relief. And there was no sign of “black girl with attitude” anyway.

The 2001 Anglo-Canadianian original was a neat little knock-off of Urban Legend with a confusing ending that sort of nodded in the direction of a possible sequel, which resulted in this dismal British feature, the quality of which is alluded to by virtue of the fact it’s never been released in the UK in any way, shape or form to date.

This hackneyed marriage of ideas from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and the left over jetsam from the previous film sees Molly Keller (now played by Karpluk) in an institution following the intangible twist ending(s) from the first round. Her shrink recommends her for a trip to a specialist clinic near Prague where Egor-like doc Bremmer carries out questionable treatments on a group of troubled youths by exploring their subconscious while they sleep – how or why he does this is something we’re apparently not meant to ask about.

Molly’s schizoid brain transmits a cloaked fiend – possibly Jack the Ripper, who we’re told is an ancestor of hers – into the groups’ collective dozing and he begins doing away with them one after the other while they roam about in their fantasies / nightmares.

Even with two directors and four scribes, the creative team fail to even muster the most basic of chills given the gothic castle setting and while away the running time with endless ‘dream’ sequences, including some sexual deviant ambling around a fetish club, serving no purpose other than to visualise soft-core lesbianism and an excess of tits.

Otherwise, criminally undeveloped sub-characters are blandly killed off before Molly confronts the dream stalker (though not before aping Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “what are you waiting for?” moment from I Know What You Did Last Summer) and the film ends as confusingly as the first one did, with absolutely no confirmation of who did what or if any of it happened at all to a group of people who might not have even existed.

Nothing but a mass of empty shells and no gun powder, Ripper 2 is the equivalent of Root Canal Surgery: The Musical, starring Justin Beiber.

Boo-frickety-hoo, no blurbs for this one.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

1984/18/87m

“If Nancy doesn’t wake up screaming, she won’t wake up at all.”

Director/Writer: Wes Craven / Cast: John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri, Robert Englund, Lin Shaye, Charles Fleischer, Joseph Whipp.

Body Count: 4

Dire-logue: “I had a hard-on when I woke up this morning, Tina, had your name all over it,” / “There’s four letters in my name Rod, there’s not enough room on your joint for four letters!”

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There are no perfect films (with the possible exception of Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion) in the same way that there are no entirely merit-less films, even more so in the realm of the slasher flick, so it’s a rarity when something excellent comes along. By 1984, I’d imagine most people were sick of masked killers hunting down teenage prey until the last girl saves the day – and then came Wes Craven’s low-budge indie flick with a bizarre little name – shouldn’t it be called Suburban Sleepover Massacre??

Everyone should know the twisted genius at the core of the Elm Street model: Don’t…fall…asleep. It’s perfect in the way that the lore of Jaws was don’t go in the water. Sleep is something even more impossible to avoid and when you’re a hormone-riddled teenager, your parents aren’t going to believe your tales of recurring nightmares about the claw-fingered madman who really is trying to kill you. Mom…he, like, really, really is!

High school BFF’s Tina and Nancy discover they shared the horrible dream of the toasted guy in the Christmas sweater who freaked them well and truly out. Nancy’s boy-toy Glen tells them that’s impossible but, from his reaction when the girls describe their tormentor, he’s had the nightmare too. When Tina is brutally slain during a sleepover party, her dodgy on-off boyfriend Rod is blamed by Nancy’s Lieutenant dad and soon tossed in prison.

While parents and authority figures simply accept that Rod killed Tina, Nancy becomes convinced that it was the man in her dreams and resolves that to avoid becoming his next victim, she needs to stay awake. Cue parental meddling, peer-disbelief and a memorable trip to a sleep clinic and Elm Street‘s Ace is thrown into play – Nancy has to stay awake by any means possible: pills, bad late-night TV and a helluva lotta coffee from the percolator she hides in her room.

There’s no point in me going through the rest of the story – if you’ve not seen it, what the hell are playing at!? I avoided this film until I was 19 thinking it would scare the hell out of me and, curiously, it was during my second viewing that the film left its frightening imprint: this means it rocks!

Heather Langenkampenschultzenfuss is more than your average slasher flick heroine: she is the centre of the film, far more so than Freddy, who became the linchpin of later sequels (in accordance with Robert Englund’s ascent to top billing), and so a lot rests on her shoulders. As the girl next door type, Nancy is nothing but convincing and her descent into the nightmare (both literal and figurative) is the essence of the story, although things trip over themselves somewhat when she rigs her house with countless Home Alone-type traps, has a heart-to-heart with her mother and falls asleep to battle with Freddy inside a twenty minute window.

Let's get phallical...

Johnny Depp’s debut is a much-fussed element: as the leading guy, his job amounts to little more than standing around and looking pretty whilst not taking Nancy’s claims seriously and, eventually, dying. But he does fine in the role although we never get to see into his nightmares, nor that of any other male character as a matter of fact.

Craven’s creative streak peaked here, packing in so many great themes and ideas from the genuinely creepy skipping rope song – which has become an anthem of its own – to the allegorical subtexts of the Vietnam War: apparently Craven was riffing on untold truths which return and kick the younger generation in the ass. Here, the sins of the parents are revisited on their kids.

Very little hasn’t already been written about Elm Street in the quarter century since its release, so why even bother reviewing it? I could’ve just given it five stars and written “Awesome!” next to it. It is a classic, the nightmare imagery still stands (I love the squishy staircase) and only some of the technology and Nancy’s ever-increasing hair mass date it, elements that, compared to the flaws in the remake, are minimal, proving that it never required re-booting at all.

Craven never wanted Freddy to become a franchise and while some of the sequels sucked a bit (5 and 6 I’m looking at you!!) I’m glad it did; of the three major slasher franchises, A Nightmare on Elm Street has the best story arc, bucked in Part 2, but back on track all the way through the 80s films until FK became a caricature and the films drifted further away from the sleep = death goldmine of a premise.

In 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was made for about $1.8million and a lot of love. In 2010, It’s CG-heavy remake was made for $35million. Which one do you think people will remember in another quarter of a century?

BIG-blurbs-of-interest: Englund returned to his career-making role all the way up to 2003, starring in eight Freddy films and his own syndicated TV series (which was crap, by the way) and has cropped up in many a slasher flick including Behind the Mask, Hatchet, Heartstopper, The Phantom of the Opera and Urban Legend. John Saxon returned for Elm Street 3 and the New Nightmare and was also in The Baby Doll Murders, the original Black Christmas, Tenebrae and Welcome to Spring Break; Heather Langenkamp also came back for 3 and 7. Nick Corri, under his real name Jsu Garcia, was in Teacher’s Pet; Charles Fleischer was in The Back Lot Murders (which also had a cameo from Ken Sagoes from Elm Street 3); Depp has starred in big budget variants From Hell and Sleepy Hollow; Craven also directed Deadly Blessing, The Hills Have Eyes Part II and the Scream trilogy.

By the finale, Nancy grew her hair so big that even razor blades couldn't penetrate it

Vincent the dog from Lost.

With the show now on the brink of its end, I was thinking about characters past and have mourned the lack of Vincent in these last two seasons when he’s quite clearly the best of the lot.

No moaning, no stupid flashbacks (although, how awesome would that be!?), no “woe is me, I am Dr Shepherd, the most lazily-drawn hero going…Wah wah wah…”

Vincent is where it’s at. He can survive plane crashes, find decomposed limbs and find hours of entertainment in a tennis ball. Even cooler that he is, in fact, a she!

With two episodes left, I’m hoping Vincent will return, unveiled as the guardian of The Island, claw that annoying Ben bloke to death and bounce through the woods in a parade of gleeful happiness.

LONELY JOE

2009/97m

“Stay off the tracks.”

Director/Writer: Michael Coonce / Cast: Erica Leerhsen, Peter Speach, David Fine, Matthew S. Harrison, Jaclyn Walsh, Robert Krigbaum.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “Why don’t you bring someone in?” / “Who – fuckin’ Ghostbusters?”

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When a cheap film begins with a stoic declaration that it’s based on true events, my heart dies a little – post-Chainsaw, has there ever been one that was any good? Maybe Lonely Joe will break the curse…

It didn’t.

Erica Leerhsen, ironically from the Chainsaw remake, plays Michele Connelly, a New York journalist who is tormented by flashback dreams of her brother’s murder years earlier at the hands of a psychotic farmer who slaughtered countless locals. Now, disappearances are still occurring and Michele grabs a week in her hometown of Solvay, New York, to look for answers.

To be honest, I was ill when I watched it and so found myself losing interest quickly and had no patience for endless dialogue that didn’t lead to anything and under-lit scenes of people traipsing around in the dark. The low budget was off-putting rather than endearing and, Leerhsen aside, the cast provided nothing remotely entertaining and what scant murders there were took ages to begin and were either void of action or off-camera completely and the killer hardly appeared in it.

Things turn out to be more of detective/ghost story than a slasher flick and by the time the twist is unveiled so little had happened and 97 minutes had tick-tocked by so slowly that it felt like I had been there all week with Michele. Painfully slow and boring.

Blurbs-of-interest: As well as the TCM remake re-imagining, Leerhsen was also in Wrong Turn 2: Dead End; David Fine was in Sweet Insanity.

STEEL TRAP

2007/18/89m

“Surviving each floor is the name of the game.”

Director: Luis Cámara / Writers: Luis Cámera & Gabrielle Galanter / Cast: Georgia MacKenzie, Mark Wilson, Julia Ballard, Pascal Langdale, Joanna Bobin, Adam Rayner, Annabelle Wallis, Frank Maier.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “Living well’s pretty good but I’d say killing people is the best revenge, really.”

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At a New Year’s Eve party for media types in a skyscraper, several people receive a text message inviting them down for the “real party” on a lower floor. They attend and find insulting place names that call them loser, two-faced, pig, heartless etc and clues that send them off on a scavenger hunt.

Amongst the group are a TV chef, a failing rock star, a sycophantic agent and a bitching couple and they begin to fall victim to a shiny-masked killer who slices, hangs, axes and stabs them one by one.

Much of the content of this German production is lifted right out of the Saw franchise with TV monitors galore, cryptic clues left by the killer and would-be ‘sensational’ twist ending, which becomes more and more predictable as the cast is shrunk down to the last few stragglers, most of whom begin to suspect each other – is one of them in on it, or is it all part of some bigger game?

Well, the Dire-logue should clue you in on the motives of the villain when things finally unravel – it’s all a big revenge scheme for an ex-nerd who is offing all the people who made their life a misery before they found success. To be fair to it, I quite enjoyed the exposition, ridiculous though it was and the actual ending is something you don’t see all over the place.

Steel Trap is let down by uneven performances from a chiefly British cast affecting American accents, unlikeable characters and some really stupid dialogue. At one point, a guy attempts to dial out on his cell phone to find that the signal is blocked: “Signal is blocked! What does that mean!?” to which his whiny girlfriend replies – in all seriousness, you understand – “it means he blocked the signal!” And it’s this kind of idiocy which sums things up perfectly.