(1994) ****1/2
Wow. After a trio of really mediocre movies, Wes Craven returns to the helm and shows us that the Kreuger/Craven team is totally money, yo. This might have been the first time I've watched this movie from beginning to end, and I was impressed. Damn impressed.
Wes obviously thought really hard about how to make the character interesting again, and he came up with a doozy of an idea. Well, actually it was the same idea, just moved to a new place: here. Starring as themselves are the key players of the (good) Elm Street flicks, and Craven too, trying to come to grips with the strange emergence of a new, darker Freddy who is crawling out of their nightmares.
One feature that makes this work is the balls-out level of the self reference, which crescendos with a closeup of the script Craven's writing. It's the script for the very movie you're watching, and it reads "close-up on computer screen, fade to black" and then fades to black. This is a level of meta-ness that will make you dizzy, and it's deployed with skill (and much more smoothly than the similar bag of tricks used in Scream).
A wonderful feeling of dread settles over the sunny LA setting. Freddy's manipulations run concurrent with a series of earthquakes, putting everyone on edge. After the first major death (Heather Langenkamp's husband - gutsy move), her young son carries the bulk of the encroaching fear as he tells how "the mean man" is trying to climb up to the foot of his bed every night. The wrong kid can sink any movie, but this kid pulls it off amazingly. The moment I realized how well it had come together was when Heather asked him where he learned the Freddy chant, and he says "little kids singing...under my covers." Atchi matchi, it's giving me the willies right now.
Despite all that good stuff, the best thing about this flick is Freddy. When Heather is telling Robert Englund about her nightmares, he asks "is it me?" She says "no, darker" and she's right. There's a slight makeover: the claw is now part of Freddy's hand, his face is more skull-like, and he's sporting a long black coat that really makes him seem like a creature of shadow. More than his new looks, he works a menacing presence that reminds you of his scariest moments. He ain't funny this time, he's a creature made of fear. Literally.
As Horrorthon fare goes, this is a pretty rich movie, full of clever commentary about our country's often bizarre relationship to our fiction. But at its heart, like the best horror flicks, it's about what scares us.
4 comments:
I don't recall much about this film but I remember that I liked it and that it was vicious. Finally the humor was removed and Craven got Freddy back to being what made him scary in the first place.
As I recall, this one marked the beginning of the self-referential 90's horror trend that the Scream series eventually ran into the ground.
Yeah, that's the unfortunate natural law of Hollywood. No idea is good enough that it can't be eventually dragged through the mud in the pursuit of dollas. However, to inject a new, good idea into a long-running (into the ground) series like Elm St. is kind of a rarity.
I can't think of another mainsteam movie that approaches the level of self-awareness as this one does. My best guess is 1992's The Player, but NN is far more involved with its own text. (I also wonder if my dislike of The Player is why I avoided NN when it came out, with all that "Hollywood playing itself" business.)
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