(1985) ****1/2
First of all, a round of table-pounding for the genius move of pretending Freddy's Revenge NEVER HAPPENED. I do love that move. Die Hard with a Vengeance would do it some years later. (Is there hope for The Ring? says a little voice inside)
After watching this, I recanted on my dis of Nightmare #1 because of the thin production quality, and bumped it up to an equal rating with this one. Freddy's imaginative cruelty goes so many places in #3. Giant Worm That Eats You Freddy! Faucet Freddy! TV Freddy! Puppet Freddy! And so on. Brilliant, gruesome and funny. But they couldn't have pulled off any of that without the leering, scampering homunculus of a Freddy that scared us in the first one. I was quite surprised the Freddy music motif (doo DOO doo DOO, doo DOO DOO doo) wasn't all over the first two sequels. On the Scary Scoreboard, A Nightmare on Elm Street is truly out of the park.
If Dream Warriors doesn't creep us out the same way, it does work a raw, mean terror to serious effect. The muscle-tendon puppet strings, the track marks that turn into tiny gaping mouths, eesh. This is the real beginning of "he uses what scares you," and it's just as nasty as having a killer in your brain would be. And ramping up from the dread of insomnia, we've got a batch of institutionalized kids who are pushed right to the edge of crazy. Along with the ever-mounting fear of being killed in their sleep, they're losing the fight to have anyone listen to their problems. It's the apotheosis of teen alienation, with knives. This makes for a fast, edgy story even before the ghost nuns and stop-motion skeletons show up.
Nightmare #3 jumped the production value gap that bugged me in the first one. Even Heather Langenkamp clearly did some work in the intervening years and learned how to act a little. I was even considering rating this higher than the original, when onto the screen walked the Wizard Master and the Sharkfin Mohawk. I realized that, with both movies, I'm better off ignoring some of the holes in the sweater.
To Dream Warriors' credit, it's those two warriors who go down in the final battle. The poor little Wizard rolls all those bad green effects over Freddy, and Freddy just rips out his heart. Sweeet.
4 comments:
Come on, this movie can't possibly deserve such accolades. I remember it being a total crap-fest!
The crucial difference between the original Halloweens and the F13th/Elm St. franchises is that in the latter 2 you're routing for the killer.
So which Elm St. had the fateful moment with Freddy on the beach in sunglasses?
I think the shades are in #4. I think you're misremembering your Freddies, this one was always good. It's got Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne. Morpheus!
Yeah part 3 is pretty good because Craven directed it and he preserved the tone of the first one. I believe Freddy puts the glasses on in 5, which is the moment 80s horror jumped the shark.
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