★★★★½ Rewatched 14 Oct, 2014
At one point, sleep-deprived Nancy reaches to her face. "God, I look like I'm 20". After getting over my initial reaction of "oh, fuck you", I realized it was a pretty clever little reminder how young everyone's supposed to be.
What sets this movie apart from the sequels is that pervasive feeling that everything matters. Not that the others have low stakes, people are still getting knifed to death, but Nancy grows and changes until she's forged in steel by the time she's the final girl. At the end, she's more alone than ever before.
Also, it's fairly impossible for me to watch this movie without zeroing in on the image on the wall of the sleep institute. It's a pair of cats wearing hawaiian t-shirts on a San Francisco Cable Car. I gladly welcome the Room 237-esque documentary decoding the subtext behind that.
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge 1985
★★ Rewatched 15 Oct, 2014
Freddy's Revenge has a lot of problems. I find myself liking it more with each watch, though. Part of the bizarre and just completely different nature of the movie must have come as a refresher while watching the first 6 or so of these movies in a row.
One of those quirks that works well in this movie is the constant heat. Our hero Jesse is constantly sweaty, even when sleeping nude (more on this later). This somewhat culminates in the regrettable part where a killer bird terrorizes the family until spontaneously combusting. But until that part, it somewhat adds to the atmosphere of the heat and terror constantly building.
If this movie was shot the exact same way, with the genders flipped, it would become lesbian softcore porn very fast. Jesse and Grady are constantly sweaty, naked, wearing short shorts, and in various states of embrace throughout the movie. An early "prank" is just Grady pantsing Jesse in front of some girls during recess. The guys are relentlessly objectified, with Lisa and her friends' conversations about sex sounding much like the guys in American Pie and other high school sex comedies.
More of the scary stuff works in this movie than I remember. The opening school bus sequence is really effective and scary, and starts that unbearable heat motif rolling for the rest of the movie. Lisa sees Jesse's face bulge out in Freddy's stomach saying "Kill me, Lisa" before her chase through the boiler room. There are dogs running around with baby faces.
Unfortunately, the scary stuff is undercut by the rest of the movie's weird tone. It's weird enough to be worth a watch, but it's still mostly a mess of a movie.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors 1987
★★ Rewatched 16 Oct, 2014
The narrative veers sharply back to the Nancy story (she's back) and the normal Freddy rules (he kills you in your sleep). It's a pretty nifty twist to have this take place in an insane asylum, surprisingly realistic. Despite the cooler and more varied death / dream sequences, this is still mostly a mess. Freddy gets called "the bastard son of 100 maniacs". And the goalposts of "how to kill Freddy" gets moved to "bury him in holy ground".
The kids getting superpowers in their dreams works in the movie's internal logic, I'll admit, but it still comes across mostly lame. There's no way to make lines like "I'm the wizard master" and "You found your dream power, man" work.
"Welcome to Primetime, bitch!" - still an angry misogynistic classic.
It feels a little short-sighted to sweep the table clear so to speak and kill off Nancy and her Dad and pin their hopes to the new girl. It looks even worse when the character is played by a different person in the next movie.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master 1988
★½ Watched 16 Oct, 2014
The fourth entry gets even meaner, moving on to kill off the two most likeable characters from the last movie (albeit in really cool dream sequences). There's not much else going on here, this is a kind of bad example of a horror movie just lining up people to kill and exploiting their one personality trait in the dream.
"How's this for a wet dream?" - RIP Joey.
"I wanna draw some blood" - Robert Englund in drag, call it Mrs. DoubtFreddy.
"How sweet, fresh meat" - This line makes the "how sweet, dark meat" part of Freddy vs Jason a little less gross since it's partially a reference?
"You flunk"
"Sayanora, sucker"
"I love soul food"
"No pain, no gain" - Actually a Cronenberg-esque cool body horror sequence when she
"You've got their power, I've got their souls"
That last quote reminded me - the whole thing with her gaining parts of her dead friends was really weird and didn't make sense, even for this series. Just stop thinking and wait for the Freddy Rap over the closing credits.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child 1989
★½ Watched 17 Oct, 2014
So, now we've evolved to - the only way to kill Freddy is to have his dream child and have the baby kill him? Okay, fine, dream murder baby, whatever.
There are some one liners and alright dream sequences here, but this movie veers way darker. The lead girl is pregnant, and somehow sees her baby's dreams? Freddy is using the dreaming baby to somehow attack everyone. Abortion is even brought up, albeit not directly.
"It's a boyyyyyy!"
"Bad year, Dan! Buckle up!"
"Fuel Injection! Better not dream and drive!" - There are not one, but two motor vehicle related dream sequences.
"Bon Appetit, bitch!"
"Things to do today: Die, bitch!" - Glad to see angry Men's Rights Activist Freddy is back.
No quote, but there's another pretty cool sequence where Freddy kills a comic book nerd in a dreamy comic book. The dream baby merging / destroying Freddy at the end is kind of lame.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare 1991
★ Watched 18 Oct, 2014
"Every town has an Elm Street!"
The most horrifying line maybe in the entire Elm Street series comes in the most overtly comic entry yet. Anyone masochistic enough to marathon these (hi) shouldn't be surprised by this, though. There's always been an uneasy balance between evil Freddy and wisecracking Freddy. The backstory gets laid on thick throughout this movie. Freddy's only living relative is mixed up with a Foster youth group home, and he's terrorizing them to get more victims.
This setup gives the movie an extra sadistic twist. Freddy kills all the kids using their fears and circumstances that got them homeless in the first place. He takes the forms of abusive father (twice), abusive mother, and makes a deaf kid's hearing aid explode his brain. The video game dream sequence is completely played for slapstick laughs, though. The last ~10 minutes of the movie go into "Freddy Vision", a 3D gimmick of sorts. Even in the movie, the character puts on goofy 3D glasses to "activate the memories". Then this hellish nightmare landscape shows all the horrors other people put on Freddy Krueger before he turned into the monster of Elm Street. This is supposed to be the last word on Freddy, so some going back to the beginning is kind of expected. But there's just no reason really to try to humanize him at this point, some 30 dead kids later.
Despite all the supernatural bents of the previous few movies, and even earlier in this movie (see everything Yaphet Kotto says), the real only way to defeat Freddy is, of course, putting a dynamite stick in a gaping chest wound. "Happy Father's Day!" chirps the blood-soaked heroine that just saw everyone she knows butchered. "Kids." deadpans Freddy as he looks at the camera. Then Freddy's body parts fly at the camera in the last gasp of 3D Freddyvision. Freddy's Dead, indeed.
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