Shield of Straw

 

An immensely wealthy man puts out a billion-dollar bounty on the head of the killer who murdered his granddaughter. The killer in question throws himself to the mercy of the police force and the justice system. A team of dedicated security police are forced to protect the killer and get him to court before he’s assassinated, with anybody being a possible suspect, including those within the force itself. It’s a pretty decent premise for a thriller, and one ripe for tense drama. Unfortunately none of this happens, because Shield of Straw squanders it’s potential to deliver a sterile, bland, plodding thriller devoid of excitement. This is an arduous experience, a cold picture that almost feels strangely obligatory. It was directed by Takashi Miike, but it lacks any of his flair or signature style to the point where it could have been directed by anybody.
 
The premise, as said before, sounds pretty good. Powerful, ageing billionaire Ninagawa puts out a massive bounty on the serial killer who murdered his granddaughter. Fearing for his life, the killer, Kiyomaru, hands himself in to the police, who are tasked with protecting him and getting him to Tokyo justice headquarters within 48 hours so he can be judged and sentenced according to the law. Veteran security expert Mekari and enthusiastic rookie Shiraiwa are hand-picked to personally ensure Kiyomaru’s safety, along with a detachment of police. But as the escort begins, tensions arise as the allure of one billion dollars strikes seemingly everyone, from civilians to medics and soldiers. When a website run by Ninagawa starts posting their movements and locations suspicions pass through the team as it becomes clear one of them is a traitor.

It’s a really good premise for a film, and Shield of Straw manages to completely waste it, never capitalising on the potential for tension and suspense. Instead everything is mundane and straightforward as things move from one small obstacle to the next at a plodding pace. That’s another problem with the film, it’s horrendously long and boring, never managing the frantic tension the story demands. The two day time limit is never a factor, there are very long stretches when nobody is in danger and considering the massive bounty not that many people try and kill Kiyomaru. If anything early scenes sort of lie as most of the Japanese countryside and roads are absent of people and cars.

Not a lot happens at all actually. While the premise suggests a frantic, adrenaline-pumping rush, the movie and the characters move at an absurdly slow pace, lingering far too long and building up every minor confrontation way more than they needed to be. Because that’s what they largely are; minor confrontations. While there is one ridiculous set piece involving a runaway gas tanker flipping over and blowing up on a highway (something the trailer took great relish in showing off), for the most part there’ll be one or two people who’ll try and get Kiyomaru, mostly in low key and non-exciting ways. Somebody might put poison in a syringe, or a pair of baton-wielding security guards might menacingly approach. The insane chaos of the situation is largely ignored. It's baffling how low-key and uneventful the entire film ends up being.

So if we’re not going the action route we’d be going the character-focused route instead, but that doesn’t work here either. The characters are all so overwhelmingly dull and unlikeable, almost all written paper-thin and without any real defining features. Most are unemotional and statue-like in their acting, standing around for long stretches of time without doing or saying anything interesting. A common thing that happens is characters accusing each other of being suspect, but they never go anywhere. I think every single character gets accused of having a motive in killing Kiyomaru, some a few times over. Mekari is astoundingly dull as the determined security professional, having the personality and acting ability of a shield made of straw. Shiraiwa manages to be just as dull, blindly following Mekari’s teachings. There’re also some police officers involved, most of whom use their time accusing each other of being after the money.

This all could have still worked if it had a memorable villain, but Kiyomaru is a really boring one. He’s just a regular, ordinary killer, and a whiny idiot to boot. He's no mastermind, and there's no psychological manipulation at play here. Sure he says and does cruel things, constantly antagonising the security team he relies on for protection, but he has no presence and spends most of his time cowering or yelling for help. His actions also make no sense whatsoever – he flees to the police and is desperate for their help, but then he starts to do things that put everyone in danger for no reason. It’s almost as though he doesn’t care about his survival, but then why’d he even bother heading to the police for protection? The film's ending likewise misses the mark, bringing things together in the most ordinary way imaginable, almost as though they were wilfully doing all they could to avoid doing anything interesting or unexpected.

The entire film is so cold and clinical, lacking any visual or stylistic flair. Everything is dull and grey, from the interiors of buildings and precincts, the various cars, buses and subway cars their journey takes place on and even the empty Japanese streets. Coming from a director like Miike it’s baffling, and the entire thing comes across as being some sort of contractual obligation. There’s no passion or energy put into it by anybody, as characters sleepwalk through its dull script. Shield of Straw is not only a bad movie, but a disappointing one as well since there was so much potential there. The premise in Takashi Miike’s hands sounds like it could have given us something astoundingly insane, but instead we get the most boring and bland ‘thriller’ imaginable.

Out of Inferno

Disaster movies are something I haven’t really touched yet here, and it’s a genre that seems a bit sparsely done compared to most others. We get what, maybe two or three of them a year? I guess you could say it’s because it’s an entire filmmaking niche dedicated to depicting horrible things happening to innocent people with disasters, man-made or natural, wreaking havoc on cities, towns and civilisations all for the gleeful joy of its audience. Sure, some try to depict the horrors and realities of such events, but for the most part disaster flicks are escapism as we voyeuristically witness the fate of several characters encountering some sort of horrible event. And a lot are pretty fun. While most are familiar with the big budget Hollywood-made disaster flicks, there are actually a fair few interesting ones in the rest of the world. Out of Inferno is one such film, hailing out of China.    

Tai-kwan (Sean Lau) and his brother Keung (Louis Koo) were top firefighters in China who have since become estranged. They haven’t talked in four years after the death of their father, in which time Keung has resigned from firefighting to start a company dedicated to fire safety and prevention. Tai-kwan is planning on giving up a promotion and resigning in an attempt to repair and strengthen his relationship with his pregnant wife Si-lok, which has strained due to his commitment and focus on his job.

Pure chance has Si-lok head to an ultrasound appointment in the same fifty story high-rise commercial block where Keung is having a celebratory party for the opening of his fire-safety company. A series of events cause an explosive fire to break out in the building’s basement, the flames and smoke trapping everybody within. Tai-kwan and his firefighting unit are sent in to rescue the survivors, and Tai-kwan needs to save his wife, brother and the other survivors as the fire continues to get out of control.

 

It’s a pretty basic set-up, and absolutely perfect disaster movie fodder. It’s all the sort of thing we’ve seen before. Thankfully the film improves itself by focusing on its strong main characters, and a growing sense of escalation throughout. It was directed by the Pang Brothers, the twin directing duo best known for directing the original Hong Kong version of ‘The Eye’, and acclaimed Thai action film ‘Bangkok Dangerous’ (they’re also regrettably responsible for the Nic Cage-starring American remake of the same film). They’ve got an eye for stylistic cinematography, energetic pacing and tension and it really shows here. It’s a pretty good looking movie and keeps a good sense of scale and place. As the film continues it gets more claustrophobic as the building starts to collapse and the flames and smoke close in. They keep the sense of danger pretty real, in that every time the characters get somewhere seemingly safe it is always short lived as things get worse.

Disaster movies tend to trade on the three main audience emotions they’re well suited to deliver on. The first is the sadness of seeing characters you like get killed. The second is that dirty little satisfaction of seeing characters you hate get killed. The third, following on from the first, is the triumphant relief of seeing a presumed dead character has survived after all. Out of Inferno weirdly skimps over on the first two. There are actually a lot of survivors, to the point where I don’t really think that many people died at all. Sure, a few side characters and ancillary ones get taken out in flames and rubble, and the sense of danger is certainly there and continues to ramp up ridiculously, but a lot of people make it out relatively fine. But you won’t think that – there are some really intense, panicky moments in there, some which had me squirming in my seat, so that even when nobody is killed you’ll still feel exhilarated and exhausted. That’s a strength many disaster films lack (especially the big Hollywood ones – ‘San Andreas’ was devoid of that sort of tension).

I think a big reason for all this is that Out of Inferno is a disaster film that shows the various emergency response teams as exceptionally competent. The fire-fighting and paramedic response is massive as they cordon off the area, use a variety of equipment to breach the building and get survivors out, and take care of them as well. There’s no incompetence, and also no characters with ulterior motives to make things more dangerous. I think it partly works in the films favour – two of its leads were firefighters and had that experience, so they’re better poised to knowing what they’re doing. I will say though that despite the low death count, the film does briefly look at the more grim implications and effects being in a disaster-like scenario would have on your health and wellbeing.

Things escalate big time. The opening build-up and introduction to the characters is only about thirty minutes or so before the fire starts, and from there things get increasingly dangerous. Besides the fire and smoke, there’s flaming rubble, collapsing rooms, explosions, chemical leaks and deadly falls all ready to take out the characters. Every moment has something big and more dangerous happening. It does get ridiculous, especially with the CGI at times. It mostly looks great, but there are moments where the flames are fake looking or move in ridiculous ways. In particular, one scene has a pillar of fire explode outwards like some sort of flaming snake which the firefighters counter with a blast from a hose. Otherwise it does a fine job of delivering the disaster of a disaster film. Interestingly, the film’s focus is on its central few characters, specifically Tai-kwan, Keung and Si-lok and their relationship together.

Tai-kwan is an interesting protagonist for a disaster film in that he’s part of the outside rescue force. He’s committed to his duties as a firefighter, to the point of prioritising others above his own wife and brother. It’s an oddly refreshing change from the usual sort, where the hero somewhat unheroically abandons his duties to selfishly protect his personal interests (like when Dwayne Johnson completely abandons his life-saving job in a time of crisis to go rescue his ex-wife in ‘San Andreas’). It’s also ripe dramatic material, which Out of Inferno wisely centres the bulk of its character drama around. It also makes up the bulk of their relationship, with Si-lok struggling to understand Tai-kwan’s commitment to his job and his priorities, but her experience in the inferno makes her at least understand why he’s the way he is.

Keung is a great juxtaposition to Tai-kwan, in the sense that he wants to help but in a different way, especially since you can understand his perspective and how it affects his actions and behaviour. His frustration at losing lives as a firefighter despite doing everything according to protocol leads him to resent his by-the-book brother and lead him to strive and focus his efforts in fire prevention. Initially I was afraid he’d end up being that sort of idiot executive character that shows up in disaster movies, the sort who refuses to accept the amount of danger in order to protect their own interests, but the moment the fire breaks out he instantly starts helping people out and does all he can to keep Si-lok safe.

The side characters are, sadly, very lacking and a weak point for the film. Most disaster films line up a wide cast of characters, ostensibly to start killing them off, usually giving them a little bit of characterisation so the audience know who is who. There’s the obnoxious, mean, unlikeable ones whose purpose is to die for the audience’s satisfaction, and the innocent, funny, pleasant ones the audience doesn’t want to see die (so their deaths hold more impact as emotional bullying). Out of Inferno weirdly lacks this. Most of the side characters are exceptionally thin or forgettable, to the point that you won’t remember or care about them. Here we have a doctor, a husband-wife-daughter family, and a security guard and his security guard trainee son. The absolute weakest are the characters operating out of a shifty-looking diamond cutting outfit. When the fire breaks out they resort to theft and murder, and just blindly end up exacerbating things. They’re absurdly underwritten and useless, and just get in the way.

The movie absolutely excels in building up danger and tension. Initially it doesn’t seem too bad. As the flames break out and smoke starts to cloud out the lower levels, the massive firefighting response team seems to be handling things pretty damn well – people are being rescued, protocol is being followed to a T and the fire seems relatively contained. Then there’re explosions, a growing conflagration, massive plumes of deadly smoke, a toxic chemical spill, flooding, collapsing roofs and floors, burning furniture, and even more – by the time we get to flooding, the threat of drowning and an emergency tracheotomy I was almost exhausted. It certainly delivers on the danger and panic you want from a disaster movie, especially as it continues to grow as the film continues.

It’s a good film all things considered, and while it might be a little lacking in certain respects and lacked the kill count most disaster movies tend to have it was exciting and exhilarating enough to keep me engaged the entire time.

The Editor

 

Horror parody films are dime a dozen these days, and unfortunately they’re almost all exclusively garbage. While we have had some classics, like Mel Brook’s spot-on Frankenstein spoof ‘Young Frankenstein’, the last few years have seen opportunists quickly churn out poorly made, low-rent ‘comedies’ that show no effort, care or understanding of the things they’re meant to be parodying. They’re usually lazily patched together low-budget/low-effort messes that, in lieu of talent, effort or actual comedic insight, simply throw in often gross-out spoof version of famous scenes from a variety of contemporary horror movies for barely ninety minutes and then calling it quits. A true horror parody would go further than that.

In comes Astron-6, a Canadian indie filmmaking production group of several friends whose output is made with minimal budgets (their first feature ‘Manborg’ apparently had a four-figure budget), a lot of off-key humour and an intense passion, love and understanding of genre filmmaking. Manborg took the piss out of eighties sci-fi robot/apocalypse stories, while their second film ‘Father’s Day’ was a gloriously gory and insane exploitation film about three oddball characters hunting down a serial killer who rapes, kills and eats fathers. Both movies are fun and ridiculous, full of explosive gore, bizarre humour and startling creativity, especially considering their almost non-existent budgets. They’re also perfectly on-point parodies of the genres they inhabit, to the point of obscurity at times. They don’t recreate scenes or make fun of specific movies, they encapsulate entire genres

The Editor is their third film, and might be their best from a purely filmmaking standpoint, boasting a more assured and consistent style compared to their last two films, and a thorough understanding of its subject matter. The Editor is Astron-6’s take on Italian ‘Giallo’ thrillers, the stylish but schlocky horror films from the seventies known more for their visual flair and abundance of blood and breasts than their simplistic plots and shallow characters. The Editor peerlessly imitates and holds true to the style, techniques and conventions of Giallo movies, for good and bad. It’s a great, funny movie, but really only for those who are familiar with Giallo movies.  It’s full of homages and loving nods to the movies by Lucio Fulci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava and others. If you aren’t familiar with any of those names, then The Editor will likely fall flat in places, so specific are its inspirations and the well it draws its inspiration from. It still works well as a comedy horror movie, though one that fits a specific niche.

 

Rey Ciso is our titular editor. Once a world-class award winning film editor with a magic touch when it came to piecing film together, Rey lost it all in a horrible editing accident. He not only lost the fingers on his right hand (now replaced with finely crafted wooden prosthetics), he also lost his former editing skills, his passion for film, the respect of his peers, the love in his rocky marriage to failed actress Josephine (Paz de la Huerta) and, momentarily, his mind, becoming unable to tell the difference between real-life and film.

After a short stint in an insane asylum, Rey is stuck editing schlocky low-rent horror films for a sleazy producer, unappreciated and disrespected by all apart from his assistant, the enthusiastic Bella. When the stars of the film are brutally murdered, Rey is considered an obvious suspect, especially by lead investigator Inspector Peter Porfiry. As the body count of actors, actresses and crew continues to rise, Rey finds his sanity slipping while Peter’s investigation into Rey’s past takes him from the surviving cast and crew to the director of the insane asylum (a cameo by Udo Kier) and even a mysterious priest whose knowledge suggests a deeper, darker secret behind the killings.

Rey’s character is played pretty much to perfection by co-director Adam Brooks. He captures the sort of distant, confused protagonist stuck in the middle of the killings, unsure if he’s the murdered himself. It’s an oddly restrained performance compared to the outlandishness of most of the other cast members, but it still perfectly captures and parodies that sort of sad sack character type, with the poor, downtrodden Rey constantly lamenting the fact that his wooden fingers make it near impossible for him to light a match. He becomes a little bit detached from the main plot, with his scenes having an eerie feel of their own (especially towards the end).

 

The instant standout character is Peter, played by co-director Matthew Kennedy, the no-nonsense, hard-core Italian detective who brings intensity and stupidity to ordinary situations. He’s a parody of not only detective characters, but the casual aggression and ridiculously exaggerated misogyny of Italian men in films from the seventies. Peter routinely slaps women for no reason whatsoever, adamant that it’s what women need. Besides that, he has a loving wife (suddenly struck with hysterical blindness after witnessing a gory murder scene) who he has some ridiculous sex with, and also gets an oddly homoerotic fixation with Cal, the new star of the doomed film (and a very obvious suspect, though Peter’s growing obsession with him makes him oblivious to things like Cal loading his car with murder weapons, is conspicuous appearance at almost every murder scene and his growing part in the film).

The rest of the cast is pretty great, especially those who seem to understand they’re in a parody. The aforementioned Cal is fun as an obvious red herring, but is a bit odd as the outlier American character – while Rey and Peter are acted with bad Italian accents, Cal just seems to use his normal voice, which sort of breaks the immersion the parody sticks to. He’s played by another Astron-6 member, Conor Sweeney, who co-directed ‘Father’s Day’.  The rest are great, from the sleazy producer, the various actors and actresses who end up dead, Peter’s poor blind wife and even the small cameo roles like Udo Kier’s asylum director. The one oddity is Paz De La Huerta, if only because I can’t tell whether she knows she’s in a parody or not. She does decent as Rey’s distant, disinterested wife, with some bizarre lines (‘Who is going to pay for this $500 Beta machine?’ comes out of nowhere). She also has no problem getting nude though. Actually most of the female cast get nude or have some sort of sex scene.

After a great opening, the movie slows a little and has a pretty lax pace in its middle, moving from one ridiculously bloody murder to the next while Rey slowly loses his mind and Peter’s investigation gets stranger. It’s still a lot of fun, especially as the character’s interactions and absurdity continues to build, and a lot is still happening as characters meets grisly, hilarious ends, but it feels like it’s just doing the same thing over and over again. Which, as a parody of Giallo films, is basically the point; those movies tended to just be a series of grandiose murders strung together with a loose, simple plot, the only issue here being that it begins to wear a bit thin. The final twenty minutes are just about as perfect as they need to be though, masterfully combining both parody and earnest homage for the sort of endings Giallo films had.  If the entire film was made forty years ago but played straight and had a little more polish it’d actually really work as a great Giallo film. And I’d even argue that, earnest and endearing parody or not, it is a pretty great Giallo movie on its own accomplishments.

Visually it’s fantastic, evoking the saturated colours, fluorescent lighting and stylistic conventions of the Giallo movies. Most murders involve seeing through the killer’s perspective, as their gloved hand raises a knife to strike while the victim screams. Some nightmare sequences and more trippy moments are fantastic, mixing colour and lighting to great effect. The music is fantastic, a mix of creepy synth and more upbeat disco funk. It also parodies Giallo films in other ways, with characters that have been overdubbed poorly on purpose. It’s all quite an earnest. The set design is also great, with the various locations, rooms and furnishings feeling ripped straight out of 70s horror movies.   

 

The gore is bloody and ridiculous, involving massive gushing sprays of blood, severed body parts and copious organs. The masked killer wields everything from knifes and straight razors to chainsaws, and the blood is a vivid red, as it slashes onto everything. Some of the more outlandish stuff is goofy in how fake and obvious it is, but that’s all part of the charm. In keeping with Italian Giallo conventions, the film is also full of abundant nudity and sex, almost entirely played for laughs heeere. Some characters are just randomly nude, and breasts have a habit of slipping out of shirts. But the sex scenes are absolutely hilarious and over the top. The best involve Peter and his wife, with the near psychopathic detective turning every lovemaking scene into an intense experience. He’s the sort of man who, after coitus, will grab giant fistfuls of dirt and smear them into his face while letting out a primal yell.

The ending is absolute brilliance, simultaneously parodying and perfectly capturing the essence of those old Italian horror movies. It manages to both make zero sense and perfect sense, with a random twist leading to a nonsensical revelation. In particular it brings to mind some of Lucio Fulci’s films. It’s really the only way the movie could have ended. Speaking of Fulci, I was surprised at how many nods there were to his films. There are visual motifs to a lot of Giallo films and nods to Mario Bava and Dario Argento, but Lucio Fulci seems to be the main source of inspiration, with several scenes and moments being homages to the man’s over the top horror movies.

I had a lot of fun with The Editor. I enjoyed the other two Astron-6 releases, and I really enjoyed this one as well. My appreciation of the film is largely rooted in my love and understanding of Giallo tropes and conventions, but outside of that it’s still a solid, entertaining film. It will sit best with those familiar with Giallo films, already niche in this day and age which might limit the movie’s appeal, but it’s a lot of fun regardless.

Freddy vs Jason

Here we are. We’ve taken a long road to get to this point, covering both her Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. And now get go to the point where they intersect – Freddy vs Jason, the horror movie equivalent of a title fight where the two horror icons Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees come to blows. It was directed by Hong Kong director Ronny Yu, a veteran director of Hong Kong action movies who also helmed the fourth Child’s Play movie, Bride of Chucky. Bride of Chucky was notable for being over the top and silly, the entire film being an almost cartoonish change of tone and pace to the first three straight horror movies. Freddy vs Jason, in comparison, is actually surprisingly more horror-focused, or at least as horror focused a film with that title could be.

I like it, and have a soft spot for it. It’s dumb as hell, sure, but it does exactly what it promises to do – it gives us an epic showdown between Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees. It’s actually a pretty good mix between a Friday the 13^th movie and a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, mixing ideas from both. The plot progression and dark visuals are more like an ANOES movie, while the more gung-ho pace and kills are more like a F13 movie. It’s a silly movie that doesn’t take itself seriously, being as ridiculous as you’d expect a combination of ANOES and F13 might be. That’s not to say it’s ineffectual or lazy – they manage to not just pay homage to both series but largely combine the two styles into one movie. For me it all worked.

 

The story for our dream match is simple but does a decent job of linking the two series. Freddy Kreuger is in hell, defeated and forgotten following his series of defeats in the first six ANOES movies. Freddy’s power came from fear, and now that nobody remembers him he’s powerless. He has a plan to get his power back by using slasher Jason Voorhees, undead and in hell. He manipulates the eternally resting Jason into resurrecting and stalking Elm Street, killing teens and spreading fear, with the panic bringing back the fear of Freddy Kreuger’s return, giving him more power. But Jason is doing too good a job of killing, taking Freddy’s victims before he has a chance to murder them.

The teen’s plot largely involves surviving both Freddy and Jason. Our heroine Lori and her friends are in shock after the violent deaths of some of their friends at the hands of Jason. Freddy begins to appear in their nightmares, growing in power and trying to kill them. They can’t sleep or Freddy will get them in their dreams, but Jason is stalking them in the real world – there’s no safe place for them. Together the teens have to survive and fight back, finding a way to get the two killers to fight each other. The movie is actually intricately written for what it needed to be, taking more cues from the original ANOES film. Lori in particular has memories about Freddy that make him target her specifically. There’s also Will, Lori’s missing ex-boyfriend who was institutionalised and is kept drugged up with Hypnocil (The dream-suppressing medication from ANOES 3) because he witnessed Freddy in action. He escapes to try and warn the teens, and together they try and find a way to pull Freddy out of the nightmares.

Freddy Kreuger looks pretty menacing this time, especially compared to the original six ANOEs movies. He’s got the burnt skin and freaky bloodshot eyes, and towards the end he shows up looking more devil-like in a nightmare, with sharp teeth. Robert Englund plays the role exceptionally well, with exactly the sort of menacing creepiness it needs. This is a far better Freddy than the last few sequels had. It’s a fitting swansong for Englund, as this is the last time he’s played the role. He also gets a nickname for his work as a pre-burnt child killer, the ‘Springwood Slasher’. We get more of an inside look at Freddy and his scheme, with the movie beginning with Freddy narrating his story – how he was a child killer, how the parents killed him in revenge, how he returned to kill teenagers in their dreams and his plan to use Jason.

Speaking of whom, Jason is also an imposing figure, more in size and frame. He’s the iconic version, the hulking slasher who stalks his victims, never moving faster than a casual pace, yet always managing to catch up to fleeing victims. This film goes a little deeper into his character, going into his past and what the inside of his mind might be like. It humanises and characterises him a lot more than his own series did. The film positions him as the ‘good guy’, or at least the lesser of the two evils, which is really strange because out of the two Jason does the most killing by far. I guess it makes sense as Jason is just about killing teenagers – he’s almost animalistic in his instinctual  simplicity, whereas Freddy is far more malevolent.

Lori is ok. She’s a bit too shriek-prone, panicky and wild eyed, and while she ends up pretty headstrong and willing to put herself in danger to kill Freddy she also has some dumb lines (at one point she says “Jason was killed by water and Freddy was killed by fire. Maybe we can use that!” Use what exactly? And how? What the hell was she talking about?). Will is an idiot, and basically responsible for Freddy getting more powerful because he runs around freaking people out about Freddy and making them fear him. Kelly Roland is actually not bad as Lori’s friend. The Destiny’s Child singer took the role because her former bandmate Beyonce told her she has fun in her acting gig in Austin Powers: Goldmember. She’s fine here as the sassy friend, and I’m surprised she didn’t get into any other horror movies. Other than that we have the slutty one (who just seems drunk all the time), the nerd, the stoner and Will’s mentally unhinged friend. They’re mostly fine actually, not enough to care whether they live or not but enough that they aren’t so annoying you’d wish they’d die sooner.

The parents and police are, in true ANOES style, covering up Freddy’s existence to a ridiculous degree. It makes sense – they know that Freddy’s power is drawn from people believing in him, so they try and cover things up to avoid panic. This means they dump two of the nightmare-prone teens in an insane asylum and keep them drugged up, and quickly try and pass off two deaths as a murder/suicide and close the case (despite Jason still wandering around).

It’s a well-made movie, shot well with a technical polish that comes from a director with a few decades behind the camera. It’s nicer looking than most of the films in both series. More importantly, it has the right feel – that sort of post 2000 horror movie that we don’t really see anymore. The effects are ok, though there are some bad special effects in there. A shadowy version of Freddy looks dated, while a CGI Freddy caterpillar that smokes a bong and gets high (in the stoner’s nightmare) is ridiculous. The gore effects though are great, seemingly all being practical effects, which is always a good thing, though the kills are fairly straightforward. This is a bloody movie, with plenty of the red stuff gushing from just about every cut, slash and stab wound. The kills aren’t particularly creative – there’re no nightmare kills – but they’re very swift, bloody and brutal. Jason slashes a bunch of people at a cornfield rave, sending sprays of blood through the air. One of the earliest kills sums it up best; a douchebag guy lying in bed is stabbed repeatedly through the stomach by Jason, his intestines beginning to spill through the sheets. Then Jason pulls the mattress up, snapping the guy in half. Now this is a bit of a fanboy issue, but the kill distribution is very much in Jason’s favour. Freddy spends much more time terrorising them in nightmares, but most of the kills are attributed to Jason’s handiwork. It makes sense in terms of both series – Freddy spent more time haunting and harassing his teens before killing them, whereas Jason has always killed his victims within seconds of bumping into them. I know some ANOES fans were annoyed that Jason got the bloody limelight, but I think its fine.

Nightmares scenes are appropriately freaky, but have a better visual representation than some of the others. The usual suspects are here – creepy houses, hellish factories and furnaces. The nightmares have either a green or red tint to them, making them stand out more. While the creativity might be toned down compared to some of the more outlandish ANOES movies (like 5 and its MC Esher realm), this works better for the film. For the first time though, Jason gets dragged into a nightmare. As part of his plan to get rid of Jason, Freddy drags him into a nightmare (Freddy’s home turf – he’s largely unstoppable there), and actually manages to get into Jason’s head, digging into his mind and memories where he’s haunted by his memory of drowning at Crystal Lake as a child. So we go to Camp Crystal Lake in a nightmare. It’s pretty good stuff. I do like how Jason Voorhees just dreams about killing horny teenagers.

And so we get to the titular showdown, Freddy vs Jason. And it’s awesome. It’s not long, but it’s brutal and ridiculous and absurdly bloody, with massive spurts of blood and gore. The two rivals get up close and personal – Jason’s bigger and stronger, but Freddy’s faster and smarter. In its final stages it slows down as each killer takes grievous bodily harm, the spurting of blood getting more ridiculous. The entire fight is at Camp Crystal Lake, which is exactly where it needed to be. The fight feels pretty definitive in its brutality actually, and though the end suggests both will be fine (you can never really kill off a popular horror icon) the entire enterprise plays out as you’d expect.

 

Freddy vs Jason pretty much delivers on its title, but I’d say it attempts to do more than that. While the titular fight to the death is enough to sell the movie, the rest of it is a strangely effective mashup of the two series, though I’d say it takes more influence from the ANOES movies – but that makes sense, those were the more plot and character-focused films. The movie is as silly as you’d expect it to be, and the acting for the supporting cast might be weak, but you can tell a lot of effort and passion went into this. And both Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees are in fine form here, giving us some of the better versions of the two characters ever seen. It’s a fun movie and better than most give it credit for. In many ways it was a last hurray for both horror franchises which, to this point, had largely been considered over. As both a reunion and a tribute for both series, this does its job well.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010 Remake)

And so we get to the remake. Some sixteen years after the last of the A Nightmare on Elm Street film, it got the remake treatment from Platinum Dunes, Michael Bays’ horror remake studio, responsible for the Friday the 13^th remake. That movie was watchable, but brought low with bad writing, horrible characters, stupid decisions, weak kills and a few other issues. This remake however has all those problems and more, sapping all the fun and fear out of the horror movie in an effort to be grim and gritty. This is closer to a straight remake than Friday 13^th remake was, keeping mostly to the original film’s plot, only changing the detail around. It’s a movie full of problems, but there’s a major one: it’s boring. You won’t have nightmares at all. Instead you’ll fall into a deep, black sleep, entering a void of nothingness where ninety minutes of your life will be swallowed up. Why even bother? It’s an exercise in tedium, so devoid of passion and creativity that the entire experience feels like a waste of time. This is a remake almost made to a template, doing what other contemporary horror remakes had done before, throwing in the same technical polish and visuals, the same grit and seriousness, the same adherence to what executives think will make money because it’s been done before. The movie does have a few things going for it – it has the sheen of money, with a good technical polish and some nice visuals. This is a bad movie and a bad remake.

 

They try to go for a change in Freddy. He’s no longer a child murderer. No. Instead he’s a paedophile. All of the teens were bad touched by Freddy in his secret lair (a small crawlspace room in a kindergarten janitor’s room). Every single one of the characters had repressed the memories. This is a bad decision, since it gives the iconic Freddy Kreuger a dirty feel and the entire film a horrible unpleasantness. I know that sounds a bit of an odd thing to say, what with him being a murdering psychopath, but the implications of him being a paedophile take things down a route the film isn’t equipped or capable of traversing. The kids were meant to be five years old, which makes it even more gross and uncomfortable (especially the implications of his ‘secret cave’). It just cheapens Freddy’s character, if you could believe that. For a very short period of time they try to put some ambiguity – was Freddy guilty? The answer is yes of course – this sort of movie isn’t going to play with hard moral concepts.  

The visual redesign is good though. He still has the sweater and fedora, but now he actually looks like he’s been severely burnt, a combination of make-up and special effects giving his face the appearance of somebody with horrible, flesh-rending burns. I like it actually. Jackie Earle Haley does a decent job at making this version of Freddy his own – he doesn’t try to imitate Robert Englund, he goes his own route with the character. It’s not a scary route, or even a memorable one, but at least it was different. He actually gets more screen time and lines than original Freddy ever did – he talks a lot actually, taunting his victims before killing them. I will say that while he looks freakier, as a character he’s not as menacing – he doesn’t run after his victims, he spends more time slowly advancing on them or conversing with them. It’s a big change from original Freddy, who basically made a beeline for you and tried to kill you. There was an urgency and panic. This time you seem to have a fair amount of leeway in getting away from him. There are times though where they try and make him imitate old Freddy, giving him some of his classic lines, but this doesn't feel natural. His Freddy isn’t memorable or impactful – really the redesign is the only thing good about it. The role didn’t really do much for the actor though, since Robert Englund will always be Freddy Kreuger forever and always. It also contributed to Jackie Earle Haley’s typecasting. Family Guy said it best about Jackie Earle Haley. Do you remember him from Little Children, Watchmen or A Nightmare on Elm Street? He played the paedophile, the serial killer and the serial killing paedophile.

You probably know the story in advance – a bunch of teenagers, including our dour heroine Nancy, are having horrible nightmares about a horribly burnt man with a clawed glove who stalks them. They begin dying in their dreams and have to stay awake to survive. It’s mostly the same, though the details have been changed to give it a more serious edge. This time all of the teens find out that they used to know each other years earlier – as five year olds they played together at the same kindergarten, which is where Freddy, the janitor, molested them, especially his favourite Nancy. The parents found out and went after Freddy, burning him alive. Now, over a decade later, Freddy has returned to kill the kids in their dreams as revenge for ratting him out.

The cast is horrible, with characters largely being dull and unlikeable and the actors sleepwalking through their roles. Nancy is played by Rooney Mara, the sister of actress Kate Mara, who also played Lisbeth Salander in the American remake of ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. She’s said in an interview (after getting the Dragon Tattoo role) that she didn’t want to be in the ANOES remake, that she didn’t want the part (but knew she would get it) and, as a result, purposefully did a bad job. Besides being a show of bad professionalism and acting ethics (a good actor gives 100%, even when they know they’re in a bad movie), it’s par for the course for the Mara sisters apparently, riding the publicity train for a movie they star in, but once the negative reviews come in they suddenly switch sides and badmouth it (Kate was happy to ride the publicity for the Fantastic Four Remake, but once the negative reviews came in she switched into defensive ‘I didn’t want to do it’ mode). Her version of Nancy isn’t likeable – she’s a waitress and she likes to draw, and that’s all she has going on. The other teens aren’t any better – there’s Kris, who fills the Tina role from the original (seemingly the main heroine, then gets killed in the first third). There’s her boyfriend (who is arrested for her murder and killed by Freddy in prison), and her ex-boyfriend (who is killed in the opening scene). Then there’s Nancy’s friend/boyfriend Quentin, who just looks like a stoner. None are likeable or memorable. These characters are actually a lot more angsty than the teens from the original, which is weird but fits into this movies ‘everything must be gritty’ mantra.

All of the characters are trying not to sleep, so they all look like zombies barely able to open their eyes. Some are heavily medicated, others are just sleepy. We get a stupid new concept – micro-naps, which are exactly what they sound like. Apparently with intense sleep deprivation the brain starts to have times where it shuts down for a few seconds. This means that nightmares can happen at any time for stupid jump scares. So whenever a character is walking, swimming, sitting in a chair or even just remaining motionless they can suddenly have Freddy jump out at them. It doesn’t stop them being stupid though. Nancy knows she needs to stay awake and avoid sleeping or she’ll be attacked in her dreams, so what does she do? She draws herself a warm bath and falls asleep in it, just so we can re-do the scene from the original with Freddy’s claw emerging from the water. We also get the scene of Nancy seeing her dead friend in a body bag.

The first kill really sets the tone for disappointment – one of the youths is having a nightmare of Freddy attacking him in a dream, struggling to prevent him slashing his neck. In the real world he’s actually holding a knife to his throat, and when Freddy wins in the dream he slashes his throat with the knife himself. The effects are as low-budget and untechnical as possible – he’s holding a prop hilt that’s like a marker – he basically just draws a red strip on his throat. You can clearly see there’s no knife connected to the hilt – it’s like that scene in the Friday the 13^th remake where the spike clearly doesn’t enter the guy’s neck but goes next to it. Kris’ death, meant to be a more modern and horrific version of Tina’s death from the original film, plays out more like something from a parody horror movie, like Scary Movie. She’s spinning and cartwheeling around on the ceiling before she’s slashed to death. Nancy watches a Youtube video of one of Freddy’s victims get killed – he just falls forward onto the camera. It’s as un-scary as you’d imagine – of special note, the kid is the same Asian guy from the Friday the 13^th remake who got the neck spike. Considering this had a bigger budget than the original you’d think they’d deliver some better kills and gore effects but no, this is amateurish stuff completely lacking in both creativity and originality.

The parents are lying to their kids and covering things up not to protect themselves (they did technically murder somebody), but to prevent their children from remembering they were abused. It makes sense, but gives things a bit of a weirder bent, since the characters keep finding physical evidence everywhere all the time that they were all in the same school as children and the parents have to unconvincingly lie. Nancy’s mom is even more annoying here than the drunk version in the original – she tries to lie to Nancy even when Nancy is holding evidence. At least the reason makes more sense. I do find it strange how every single one of the teens forgot everything about it – they all repressed the memories simultaneously, and somehow didn’t remember when they met again in high school. It’s also funny that the parents would do what they could to collaborate and make sure the kids wouldn’t remember, yet still leave all this evidence around. Seriously, there are photos of all the teens as kids playing together everywhere.

The movie has the requisite modern polish and sheen these factory-made remakes tend to have – it looks good, but that’s part of the problem; this is as superficial as remakes come. The nightmares have one of two themes to them - an industrial theme, made up of rusty factories, furnaces and vents full of steam and flames, and a dilapidated school. They also have a yellow tint to them, making them more otherworldly and differentiating them from the blue tinge the real-world scenes have. The switch is good looking, but I can’t say it has an original feel – this is all stuff we’d seen before. If anything, the adherence to the first ANOES movie is to the films detriment, and to attempting to be scary again means they squander any potential creativity new technology affords. It’s a remake made solely to cash in on the series’ and characters’ past popularity.

In the end Nancy and Quentin head to the old abandoned kindergarten and find Freddy’s secret molestation chamber, where he has a stash of photos of him abusing Nancy. They then decide to take the fight to Freddy, so they do Nancy’s plan from the original, where Nancy falls asleep and tries to drag Freddy into the real world. But in Nancy’s plan she prepared first and laid traps – these idiots don’t do that. They both end up in the dream, Freddy attacks both until they manage to pull him into the real world, and then they fight him. Nancy uses a paper cutter as a makeshift machete and cuts off Freddy’s hand and slashes his throat open, and then they set the entire room on fire for good measure. Quentin goes to the hospital and Nancy heads home, then in a requisite final scare Freddy appears in a mirror and kills Nancy’s mother while Nancy screams and the credits roll. Big fucking deal.

 

This is a bad movie and a bad remake. It’s so thoroughly boring and unlikeable, only surpassing the original in unpleasantness and lacking in every other quality that made that movie as popular and enjoyable as it was. The ANOES Remake is just unpleasant. The characters are unlikeable, the acting is awful, the new ideas are horrid and the tonal change from making Freddy a paedophile makes it all uncomfortable. The call-backs and references to the original feel out of place. It’s all so forgettable as well – this is not a movie you’ll be remembering Really the only thing this film has going for it is superficial – the manufactured sheen and the Freddy redesign. Everything else is worthless. This essentially masks the current end of the ANOES series, though another remake is apparently in the works. Now that we’ve covered both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th, we can take a look at the time the two movies combined, bringing Freddy Kreuger against Jason Voorhees.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

I’ve always considered Wes Craven to be a very concept-driven director. Instead of just making rehashes and copies of other horror films (a popular method, basically responsible for Friday the 13^th), Wes Craven forged ahead using his own ideas. In many cases he created films other directors would copy, popularising the ‘cannibal hillbilly’ subgenre with The Hills Have Eyes, and even horrific rape revenge movies with The Last House on the Left. Even past that in the later phase of his career he was trying new things, going self-conscious with the Scream series. Sure, a lot of his movies are straightforward, or aren’t the best, but he tended to try new, different ideas. And that’s the same with New Nightmare, which isn’t so much a Nightmare on Elm Street movie as it is something else. New Nightmare marks Wes Craven returning to direct and write an ANOES film, a decade on from the release of the first film.

So when is a Nightmare on Elm Street movie not a Nightmare on Elm Street movie? When it’s a movie about a Nightmare on Elm Street. Sound confusing? Well strap in, because New Nightmare is a meta horror movie. It’s not quite a nightmare on elm street movie (though some would argue that), it’s more a movie about a nightmare on elm street movie, the actors and filmmakers involved and the influence being in a horror movie might have on their lives. Sort of. Or at least that’s what the concept is.

New Nightmare is bad. It’s long and slow, and it gets a bit too meta. It’s a high concept film, but the execution is lacking and the ideas themselves are a bit hazy and convoluted. If you liked any of the previous ANOES films at all, any of the, then you’d be surprised to learn that you might not like this because this is nothing like any of them. It’s hard to tell who this is for, other than Wes Craven trying something vaguely new.

 

Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, lives in Los Angeles with her young son Dylan and her husband Chase. She starts having bad dreams, compounded by Dylan acting strange and receiving harassing phone calls by horror fans quoting ANOES lines. This all culminates in a TV interview where Robert Englund announces a new ANOES movie is in the works, and a film studio approaches Heather to reprise her role as Nancy. The stress of all this causes problems at home, as Dylan begins having seizures and Chase gets killed in a freak car accident. A new evil is targeting Heather, taking the form of Freddy Kreuger and aiming to take Dylan away from her. Heather needs to become Nancy once more and fight back, stopping the evil, and Freddy, and saving her son.

So we get meta. Heather Langenkamp plays a fictional version of herself, with the movie taking place in a world where the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies exist and are popular. Robert Englund plays both himself and Freddy Kreuger, John Saxon shows up as himself. Hell, Wes Craven even shows up to play himself as the director/writer of the original ANOES, and of this movie in an exposition-heavy scene where he basically explains the film’s plot. Freddy is back, sort of – technically, in the film’s logic, it’s not Freddy Krueger at all but an evil entity that has taken the form of Freddy Krueger. It’s a really weird distinction, and doesn’t amount to much other than letting Wes Craven ignore everything that’s happened with, to or about Freddy from the last five sequels, and try and make him scary again. It doesn’t really work, though the redesign can seem a bit menacing.

The movie focuses on the effect a popular horror movie and fan base can have on the actors themselves. For a short while they try and take things psychological – is any of this happening, or is it all in Heather’s mind? Is she having a mental breakdown? She’s highly strung and frazzled at the beginning, and the announcement of a new ANOES movie, and Dylan’s strange behaviour, stresses her out even more. It actually gets pretty irritating. Constant earthquakes rock the house, Heather receives harassing phone calls and Dylan becomes quiet and distant. None of these things are particularly menacing, though they stress Heather out big time, so she acts crazy, blabbering about nightmares, imagined earthquakes and Freddy. Other people notice her acting crazy and just exacerbate things. Towards the end it gives up all pretences and just becomes an ANOES movie, with Heather encountering Not-Freddy in a nightmarish lair to save Dylan. At this point it becomes much more ridiculous, and more like an ANOES movie, with Heather and Dylan trying to kill Freddy in a dungeon-esque temple lair full of pillars, flame pits, water and statues.

 

Freddy (or Not-Freddy) gets given a much more menacing redesign. His claw is now made of flesh and muscle, weaved into his hand, and his overall look is more sinewy and bloody. He now wears an overcoat, the red and green sweater is now a turtleneck, and while the fedora makes a reappearance, Freddy is mostly hanging around without it. I can’t say he’s particularly threatening, and he’s not helped with some bad special effects work. Gone too are the quips and jokes, as he’s played seriously, but unfortunately the things they make him do still come across as silly and ridiculous (his stretchy long tongue and extendable arms are back). It actually take a long time for him to show up – it’s over an hour into the film before he shows up, with everything before then largely involving Heather freaking out over earthquakes, prank calls, Dylan’s behaviour and her nightmares.

Heather Langenkamp playing Heather Langenkamp is ok, but doesn’t really have that much of an impact or importance since, to be blunt, her role in the original ANOES didn’t exactly propel her into stardom. She’s not a household name, and not somebody the tabloids talk about. I feel that they’d need somebody more famous and in the public eye for this sort of meta narrative to work. She sells that she’d be a bit annoyed that her fame is tied to a horror series she’s really only had a little involvement in. And ugh, Dylan sucks. I get that he’s meant to be playing a troubled little boy, but he’s annoying, either acting silent and creepy or shrieking and thrashing as Not-Freddy stalks him in his dreams. The kid also sleepwalks and acts creepy. I found him annoying and really didn’t like him. He didn’t act like a kid, not even for a second. The child actor was garbage as well. Not a good horror movie kid. They’re really the two main characters here, with the focus on them. The other original characters are pretty bland. Heather’s husband dies pretty soon so we don’t know anything about him, and the babysitter is only in a few scenes until Freddy kills her.

Things get a little weird with most of the other roles, which are short and really only a little bigger than cameos. Wes Craven, having written the script, gives Heather the lowdown on the evil spirit, while Robert Englund, before going missing, describes the monster in intimate detail. John Saxon loses grip on reality and begins to believe he’s his character from ANOES, treating Nancy like his daughter. That’s it for them. They could have gone so much more interesting here, particularly with Robert Englund (like having Freddy’s influence overtake and possess him or something). Instead we just focus on Heather freaking out.

For a long time not much happens. Nancy will freak out, an earthquake will cause cracks in the wall (that look like claw marks), and Dylan will scream or have a seizure or speak in a creepy Freddy voice and its rinse and repeat for a long time. It’s never suspenseful or creepy, it’s just dull overall. The special effects are somehow worse than the last few movies with cheap looking digital effects (a robot Freddy claw coming to life is awful, as are the superimposed CG green screen images for a highway chase). Even practical effects like Freddy’s mouth stretching or his arms extending look cheap and flimsy. Compared to the imagination and creativity (and, yes, silliness) of the last few movies, it’s pretty dull and unspectacular all things considered.  

We’ve got a bunch of horrible doctors and nurses. When Dylan starts having seizures, Nancy takes him to the hospital, but the head doctor is mean – she blames Nancy for Dylan’s issues (because she’d been in horror movies). They think that Nancy is causing Dylan’s issues, and outright accuse her of being high on drugs, being insane or just abusing Dylan, and start threatening to put Dylan in foster care. Knowing that her husband has just died and that she’s visibly distressed, you’d think they’d try extending a little help or care her way, but nope, instead they hurl accusations at her, treat her like she’s a dangerous lunatic and threaten to take her son away. Surely that won’t stress her and her kid out even more.

The evil Freddy Kreuger entity is defeated in a reference to Hansel and Gretel, the children’s fairy tale (and one that Heather tells Dylan). They push him into a furnace and burn him to death, defeating the evil together and waking up from the nightmare with everything ok, and Wes Craven’s new script is there with them, with a congratulatory thankyou message from Wes Craven. It’s a bit of a weak ending. There’s also still a hell of a lot of issues though – Nancy’s husband is still dead, their babysitter got murdered, the doctors and police will still want to potentially arrest Nancy and take Dylan away from her. And what? Now she’s going to make a new ANOEs movie with Wes Craven, after having lived it? And what about the horrific implications of Wes Craven writing movies based on portentous dreams of evil spirits, giving them life in the movies he makes? Does that mean the family of redneck cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes are out there somewhere?

Wes Craven appears as himself here, and he comes across as a bit awkward and strange. Apparently he gets his scripts from dreams, which is how he learns about the evil entity. As he explains to Nancy, the evil is an ancient entity that exists to make innocence suffer. It can, however, be trapped in a form, where it can’t do any harm. That form was the ANOES movies, where Wes Craven wrote the evil into Freddy, trapping it on the screen. For ten years the evil had been trapped, but with the end of the ANOES series it’s free. It has gotten used to taking Freddy’s form and wants to cross over to the real world, but first it wants to enact vengeance on what it considers to be its enemy, Heather’s ANOES character Nancy. It’s all a bit of nonsense, and since we just see Freddy the evil entity aspect goes nowhere. The scene does allow Wes Craven to take digs at the last few entries in the series, saying they watered down and cheapened the series. Everything that’s happened is in a script Wes has written for a new ANOES film, which means he’s responsible for Heather’s misfortunes – he apologises, and says “it’s just a script”, but as Heather picks up that means he wrote that her husband would die horribly in a car accident and that her son would have seizures. He shrugs it off and deflects blame, and then Heather goes about trying to solve things herself (but not really).

While it’s a movie based on ANOES, there really aren’t many call-backs to the original film. One of the very few deaths (really only two actually), of Julie the babysitter, is a reference to how Tina died in the original (dragged onto the ceiling and slashed to death), but with the exception of Freddy and having the actors play themselves there’s not much of a connection there. Wes Craven had originally wanted to have Johnny Depp cameo, but was too nervous to ask him since he’d gotten so popular – Depp later said he would have been happy to do it.

I’m not fond of New Nightmare. It’s a high concept horror movie, and while I think the idea was interesting the actual end results are anything but. The movie drags and can be a slog to get through. Wes Craven had originally planned for this to be the sequel to the original ANOES, but I can’t see this having done very well back then. If anything it probably would have killed the series right at the beginning. With ten years and six films behind it, the idea stands up better, but the execution is still underwhelming and plain not interesting. There was one good thing to come out of this – the meta-ness of this movie pretty much directly lead to Wes Craven going on the make Scream, a horror movie savvy to horror movie rules. Say what you will about the series, but it did reshape horror movies for a while by acknowledging horror movie tropes and audience expectations. New Nightmare essentially marked the end of the ANOES series, and would be the last time Freddy would be seen until Freddy vs Jason almost a decade later, and the last ANOES movie until the awful remake/reboot sixteen years later. Speaking of that awful remake…

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare

 

And so we reach the absolute silliest point in the franchise. Freddy’s Dead is the shortest, silliest ANOES movie in the franchise. It’s more a comedy than a horror movie, turning Freddy from the frightening nightmare stalker into a mugging, fourth-wall breaking jokester, a cartoon character in a movie that seems to enjoy being silly and taking the piss out of itself. The kills are all played as jokes, the ideas tend to be silly, the tone is corny and cheesy and while there are a few good ideas and dark moments it’s too self-conscious and ridiculous to take seriously. It’s a 3-D movie, with a theme song by Iggy Pop and a cameo by Alice Cooper. Freddy’s Dead is too self-aware, not just of the series but of the humour and popularity of Freddy Krueger. They know he’s popular and people like him so they spend the entire film mugging about it, being more a comedy than a horror movie. For a film meant to be the end of the series, they don’t approach it seriously at all, almost gleefully taking the piss out of itself with its comic book styled hijinks.

 

Ten years after the last film, Freddy Kreuger has won – he’s killed every child and teenager in Springwood, his evil spirit looming over the place and cursing the residents with madness. One child was rumoured to have escaped. The mysterious John Doe, a teenager with amnesia, is attacked by Freddy in a nightmare, and ends up ends up at a shelter for troubled, juvenile teens. Lead by two counsellors, the lucid dreamer Doc (played by Yaphet Kotto from Alien) and Maggie, who is having horrible nightmares of her childhood, the teens end up in Springwood to try and piece together John’s memory. It turns out to be a trap, and Freddy has drawn them to Springwood so he can kill them and grow more powerful, and spread his influence outside of Springwood. There’s also a revelation – Freddy had a child, and all the signs point to it being John.

The opening eight minutes are an extended nightmare for our initial main character, the amnesiac John Doe. It opens with him having a nightmare on an aeroplane, where his seat falls out of the plane and he falls through the sky. He wakes up in bed, only to find the entire house is in the sky falling. They do a ‘Wizard of Oz’ parody scene, with a house caught in a tornado and Freddy dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West, riding a broom and cackling maniacally, yelling ‘I’ll get you my pretty, and your little soul too!’. It’s funny, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Freddy isn’t scary anymore, he’s funny, a joke. After landing, rolling down a hill and getting hit by a bus (driven by Freddy), John wakes up with amnesia having hit his head. This entire sequence is pretty much indicative of the rest of the movie. It’s silly, it’s blunt and it’s ridiculous and impossible to take seriously. It’s also not scary, and Freddy is a joke.

They do another main character bait and switch – John isn’t Freddy’s kid, Maggie is. They actually make it pretty evident early on. While John has nightmares of being chased/used by Freddy, Maggie is the one who dreams of a childhood with a twisted father. It also makes no sense in terms of time – John, a teenager, is way too young to have been Freddy’s kid considering he’s been a marauding nightmare monster well for over a decade. Maggie, an adult, makes sense. Her real name is revealed as Catherine Krueger (something she’d forgotten). She gets some creepy memories of Freddy at home, when his wife finds out that Freddy is a child murderer and he kills her. She ends up in his torture room, where he has a whole bunch of different claw gloves. This makes sense actually, Freddy having a daughter, since it makes his child killing (and the constant, recurring use of little girls in dresses as spooky images) work along with criminal psychology. The reason he killed children in Springwood is revealed to be because they took Catherine away from him, so he got revenge. It’s a bit inconsistent, since technically he was a child killer before then.

As for the characters themselves, John is pretty forgettable. Having amnesia will do that, but he’s also not smart. He tries to confront Freddy on his own, and is adamant that he’s Freddy’s son, theorising that Freddy won’t kill him. Well he’s wrong, as Freddy does kill him in a pretty ridiculous way – while John is falling through the sky (after Freddy cuts his parachute off), Freddy pushes a bed of spikes underneath him, impaling him to death. So much for John. That’s when we switch focus more to Maggie. Maggie is surprisingly tough – she isn’t scared of Freddy at all, and is determined to kill him once she gets her memories back. She doesn’t waste time and is never victimised, she’s headstrong and determined. Doc is barely in the movie at all. He’s also overpowered – he has dream powers (he can enter and exit dreams at will) and knows everything about everything. The teens are mostly there to die. There’s the deaf kid, the stoner and the tough girl who lives until the end.

The few kills are played as jokes. The deaf kid gets a lot of ear based horror. Freddy forces a giant stick into his ear, before cutting his hearing aid (and ear) off. He replaces it with a mutated, fleshy hearing aid that makes all sounds thunderously loud, and Freddy makes the kid’s head explode by running his claw down a chalk board. The stoner kid gets high and watches TV, where we get a quick cameo from Johnny Depp! (before Freddy quickly dispatches him with a  frying pan). The tv starts playing psychedelic colours as ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida plays, then the stoner gets sucked into a videogame in the television, where he’s being chased by a 2D cartoon version of his disappointed tennis-playing father and a giant Freddy. Freddy grabs a controller and starts playing the videogame, trying to kill him. As the stoner jumps around the house like a videogame character, his friends grab the controller from Freddy, thinking they can stop him. Nope, because Freddy has the Powerglove! ™, the ill-conceived, ‘radical’, unwieldy Super Nintendo controller glove. Stoner kid ends up dying in the videogame, and falling into a chasm to hell in the real world.

The teens end up trapped in Springwood, which has become a weird trash town, where the adult residents are all unhinged and crazy, the houses and streets are dirty and dilapidated and the entire place is a trash heap. Freddy’s evil influence controls the place, making its streets a maze and preventing the group from escaping. They end up in his old house, a trashy shack of sorts, where they split up (because of course they do) and two of them fall asleep and get killed. When the survivors manage to escape the town and Freddy’s grasp, they find that nobody but them remembers the dead teens, as though Freddy killing them and stealing their souls somehow erased them from existence. I have to say it’s pretty inconsistent with its nightmares, since Freddy seems to exist both in the real world (at least within Springwood) and the dream world. There’s an inkling of an idea there (that nightmares have seeped into Springwood that you’re drawn into a communal one when you go there) but it gets no traction.

Freddy is basically a cartoon character here. They’ve completely given up on making him scary or threatening, with the entire movie playing out more like a joke than a horror movie. And Freddy is no exception. He mugs for the camera, pantomiming for the audience, making exaggerated gestures and being more of a jokester than a threatening menace. He’s funny, sure, and I like him, but he’s not menacing or terrifying, he’s just silly. He’s seen constantly, always in full light, so he’s never mysterious. We get an explanation for Freddy’s nightmare powers: ancient dream demons, which roam the dreams of the living until they find an evil, twisted host who they give the power to cross over into nightmares (I’m serious). Why do horror movies do this? It’s like when Jason Voorhees had that demonic worm thing or when Halloween got bogged down in the ‘Curse of the Thorn’ stuff (I’ll get to that at a later date). We also go into Freddy’s mind, where we learn about his childhood – he was bullied as a child, and beaten by an abusive father (played by Alice Cooper!). Then we get the dumbest thing ever – Freddy, while being burned by the vengeful Elm Street parents, meets the dream demons who give him their nightmare powers. It’s dumb as hell.

They really sell the ‘Freddy’s Dead’ part of the title, since he’s constantly getting the crap beaten out of him. They pull him into the real world, like Nancy did in the original ANOES (nobody’s done it since then actually, not counting the possession in 2), and then they do everything they can to try and kill him. Doc beats him with a lead pipe, the anger issues chick punches him, and even Maggie lays the smack down on him. He get kicked in the balls as well, which completely deflates any threat he might have had.  So how does Freddy ultimately die? They blow him up with a pipe bomb on of the kids happens to have. He explodes, the dream demons flying out and Freddy's screaming head flying towards the screen (in 3D!). It’s exactly as dumb as it sounds.

The film has a pretty polished look actually, though it’s far too bright. It has a technical polish to it, and a more modern feel to the previous films. The effects are actually pretty great, though most are cartoonish. Since it’s not trying to be a horror film anymore, all the effects and gore are silly and ridiculous. OF course, there are also some completely awful 3D effects to endure. Stuff comes flying at the screen (like Freddy’s glove) but for the most part it’s not too noticeable…unless those stupid dream demons turn up. They’re like giant floating sperms, poorly animated and flitting across the screen. The tone is definitely comedic. At one point John, having continuous nightmares of getting out of bed and then immediately falling through the air, sits firmly on his bed and states “Nothing’s going to get me out of bed”. A second later and the bed has suddenly caught fire, and John exclaims a knowing “Oh, great”. That’s the sort of film it is.

There are some cool ideas. I like the concept of Freddy having won, but needing more teens to draw in more victims and spread himself out of Springwood. It’s a bit strange for him to be tied down to one place, but I like the concept of his influence cursing the town and its inhabitants. Unfortunately the way it’s been shown is silly. There are some really dumb ideas as well (seriously, ancient dream demons is the stupidest thing ever). There’s also occasionally some heavy stuff here, particularly with parents (what is it with ANOES movies and horrible parents?). The stoner is under huge pressure from his successfully dad, the deaf kid is deaf because his overbearing mother jammed cotton tips in his ears. The creepiest is the anger issues girl, whose father molested her. I feel like they could have gone deeper or darker with these aspects and if the movie was more serious then perhaps they might have.

Freddy’s Dead is a strange case where a series’ popularity folds onto itself. The entire movie seems like a weird celebration of what the series, and main villain, had become known for. Gone was the effective scares and chills of the original, or even the darker tone of the previous film, and instead it’s an ode to the silly, jokey weirdness the character and series had devolved into. That’s not to say Freddy isn’t fun, he is, and there are certainly laughs to be had watching Freddy’s Dead (be they intentional or not), but Freddy’s Dead seems too smug and silly, parading its villain and characters around too knowingly. It’s certainly a different way to attempt to end a series, turning to comedy-horror. The film actually did effectively end the series in a fashion. After the death of Freddy the end credits play a montage of scenes from the entire series as we send off Freddy Krueger. While there are a few more films technically in the ANOES franchise, this marks the end of the original run. Up next, Wes Craven returns and takes the series in a strange direction.