I thought it was PG-13! On the podcast, I swore it was PG-13! It's totally R. Although does it have to be "R"? Does "R" just mean, actually good? I have the feeling that "R" is a judgment call. It's borderline. It's a really mature PG-13 or a somewhat light R.
DIRECTOR: James Wan I don't know why I avoided this movie for so long. I think it was the audience. I have officially separated myself from the horror movies that seem to pull in younger audiences. Why? Because I'm a huge turd. I'm a dirty elitist who writes a blog and does a podcast and wears glasses to look smart. (Wait, what?) In my brain, I associated this movie with PG-13 garbage (which isn't even a thing. Some PG-13 horror is great!), so I ducked it out. Then I found out that there was an Annabelle sequel, so I rolled my eyes even harder. I had become the very person I hate. I was the guy who had judged way before actually seeing something. Consider this blog a confession. I often laud my own hypocrisy on this page, but this one is where I've been the most wrong. I liked this movie a lot, but probably not for the same reasons most people did. Mr. Henson is going to talk about how Ed and Leslie (?) Warren weren't really like this and it is all Hollywood. If you are watching a horror movie that announces itself to be based on a true story, get ready for some disappointment. These movies are very loosely true. If you look up the actual events of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Psycho, the true event is that there have been serial killers before. The. End. What the "True Story" trope adds to this movie is a certain aesthetic and that aesthetic is great. I don't know why a movie set in the '70s is so much scarier than something set in the 21st Century. I have to assume the lack of cell phones really goes a long way. Technology and horror are usually some tired storytelling anyway. (Sorry, Friend Request. I probably won't be seeing you either despite the fact that I just ranted about giving things a chance. Admittedly, you have terrible reviews.) Old timey analog technology, for some reason, works so much better. There's also the element of plausible deniability. By making everyone look all hip from the '70s, there's a part of me that lies to myself and says that this really happened. It grounds this ridiculous story in reality in a way that it normally wouldn't be. Also, I kind of wish I lived in the '70s because fashion was way more dope than in the '60s and the '80s. Fight me. Really, the aesthetics of this movie as a whole is what really works. I even lost my mind on The Conjuring title font. It looks good on the DVD, sure. But when it is slowly scrolling up the screen in bright yellow on black with a music crescendo, it is just the best. I will admit, it is pretty sad to fall in love with a movie over a cool font. But I like what I like and I shouldn't apologize for that. I should put that Lily Taylor in a haunted house movie is just a remake of The Haunting with the same lead protagonist. I can't help but get that in my mind while I'm writing this. I liked that movie back in the day. I was a teen when that movie came out, so I'm allowed to say that I watched teen horror back then without too much rebuke. It is so weird to see Lily Taylor play a part so different from the Lily Taylor roles that my wife loathes. While I just compared her to The Haunting, her performance is really very different than things I've seen from her in the past. I don't know why I'm giving her such kudos for playing the part as normal as possible, but I think that's a big deal for her. I'm so used to Lily Taylor playing things all weird that to see her as a housewife and a mother is bizarre to me. She's across from Ron Livingston, who managed to fall off the face of the earth. Why hasn't Ron Livingston been in everything? He crushed in Office Space and then he did a bunch of smaller roles after that. What happened? Regardless, he does his part. Both Lily Taylor and Ron Livingston's roles aren't really all that rewarding. There's a lot of reaction. Okay, Lily Taylor does have the sweet exorcism sequence. I guess that's a minor spoiler, but it's not much of one. That sequence is pretty great. Like with It, the fact that this movie shows us some genuinely scary stuff is a pretty smart move. There was a time when leaving the creature and scary stuff off camera was the best choice because it couldn't stand up to our imaginations. While I'm not the biggest fan of Blumhouse as a whole, they are extremely adept at creepy creatures. The ghost in this one is just perfect. I want to believe that the creature was created with practical effects. If you tell me otherwise, I might give a round of applause for a really creepy digital effect because it is very disturbing. I have to believe that the cast makes these moments believable...hich brings me to the stars of the film. Vera Farmiga (a woman who is known for her Ukrainianness by my mother) and Patrick Wilson, whom I dug in Watchmen, really anchor the film in something cool. I can't say that the roles are ones for the ages, but they do bring an awesome intensity. Is it weird that they stick all these cursed objects in the house with their kid? That was a weird choice. Now it comes down to the personal stuff. After watching a ton of Nightmare on Elm Street movies, I really like when a movie is more creepy than scary. I don't know what it is about a good ghost story that makes the story more interesting, but I can get behind something like this very easily. The Conjuring doesn't necessarily hit any new beats that can be seen outside other haunted house storylines, but I think revisiting this story again has merit. Like I mentioned with It, the bones (pun intended) are the same, but scares are different. The one thing that I really liked about the Nightmare movies was the playfulness with the scares. The same can be said about the haunted house / ghost story subgenre as well. There has to be something new while following the same basic formula that we've seen. The movie establishes its rules and sticks to them, having the cynicism lead to genuine fear. The house of daughters gives the parents a greater stake and their skepticism must be washed away with the introduction of the ghost hunters. It all works and there's nothing particularly special about the film itself except for the fact that it just works. It doesn't give the overly happy ending that some of the ghost stories and haunted house movies do, giving the entity rest. Rather, this treats it with a more demonic edge, which might make it cooler than other film. (I don't know why I want my demons more malevolent, but it makes the movie slightly more hardcore.) I don't know if I'll revisit this one anytime soon. It's not super scary or anything, but it was an enjoyable watch. I actually look forward to finish The Conjuring 2 and I have stuff to say about Annabelle. I hope this franchise doesn't jump the shark because I dug it more than I thought I would.
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You know what should be pretty scary? A child murderer with knife hands who invades nightmares. The guys handle this very heavy concept in this second extra long episode of October. Visit our new website, literallyanything.net or visit iTunes or Google Play!
IMDB says "Unrated." The beginning of the VHS made up its own rating system and called it "VM: Very Mature". That's pretty accurate. We're not talking NC-17 here, but the last third of the movie is pretty risque. And to think that I was considering teaching The Awakening to my AP Language and Composition class...
DIRECTOR: Mary Lambert Okay, I know myself. I know how this review is going to go. I'm going to want to stay entirely focused on the film, but I watched the movie after reading the book it is based on, Kate Chopin's The Awakening. I really didn't like the book and I hate trashing anything that is considered a classic. But I really didn't like the book. The only points I get for trashing the book is that the movie is ridiculously close in content to that of the novel, so when I'm complaining, just pretend that I'm only complaining about the film. I really wanted to like this story. I don't know what it is about the fact that I can't get behind a lot of feminist literature. I keep saying that I'm woke and then I read / watch stuff like this and I lose my mind. This is not a political statement or anything, but this is one of those stories where everyone is terrible, but the story tries to convince me that the protagonist is a good person. I don't hate her, by any means (I'm apologizing to a fictional character written by a dead author. Why can't I grow a backbone.) There is feminist literature / film out there that I really love, but few of them are real classics. It makes me seem like this huge jerk and that I'm closeminded, but I can't stop having standards for my characters. If it makes you feel better, I got into a debate with my college professor about this character which led her to imply that me finding value in my parenting was a social construct and that I was free to abandon my family. (Actually true story. Higher education is actually getting pretty creepy.) I wonder what it is about a protagonist that is unsympathetic that gets to me. I have no problem when a story acknowledges that the protagonist is unsympathetic. Heck, I even like it. I don't think that I like it when the character is unsympathetic, but is lauded as a hero. I will say, Edna's story is partially pitiable. She is a character illustrating the chauvinism of the Victorian Era. The very nature of her wanting to "awaken" from this social disease is actually a cool concept. Yo ho, I encourage it. (I'm really trying to sell that I like the movement to a certain degree, but its art is lacking!) But there is a line where the movie just goes and craps on humanity. For those who have never read The Awakening (Don't worry, I'm an English teacher who just discovered it), the story follows Edna who did not marry for love. During her time at Grand Isle (Hey, that's the name of the movie!), she meets Robert and falls madly in love. During her flirtations with Robert (who sucks, btw), she starts noticing flaws in her marriage and begins rebelling. (I'm good so far, with the exception that she's flirting with a guy despite the fact that she's married.) She is encouraged by a mysterious spinster (kind of) to pursue her talent for art. She leaves her children, takes up a lover (not Robert), and draws naked (in the movie because apparently Kelly McGillis was down for it.) SPOILER: She probably commits suicide by swimming out naked as a form of defiance to the world that shackled her. There's a line in both the book and the movie where she claims that she would give her life for her children but not her self. Part of that I can get behind. The idea that you need to maintain your sense of identity is important, but she holds on to her sense of self so hard that she abandons them. If the story is about that she can't simply live with the identity of "mother", hooray! Good for you! But it is not that. The movie does this thing about making the story about happiness and fulfillment being the ultimate goal. That feels very cheap. (I'm now just saying all the things that may have gotten me in trouble in class.) Happiness has value, but it is also an ephemeral value. I think that even the storytellers are aware of that. Edna really finds happiness in the way that she wants to. While she swims out and commits suicide under her own prerogative, she does so because she is left constantly disappointed by the world around her. (She did it! She showed everyone! Waitaminute...) The idea of happiness at the expense of others is really hard for me to justify. She looks at the women around her who have children as foolish and there is a judgmental element to this decision. I do find it funny that we use the term "woke" to describe this realization because Chopin used "awakening", an almost one-to-one synonym. But I don't know whether this was a choice by someone or just thought it was on point. (Look at me, using hip slang.) Is this entire a review of being "woke"? Hardly. Edna needs to stand up for herself and become her own individual. Rah rah, shish boom bah and all that! But I never really can get behind bringing joy and independence for yourself at the expense of others. Talking exclusively about the film, the movie is super dated. This is Kelly McGillis in her hayday. Okay, a little after her hayday. Listen, her hayday was 1986 and not even all of 1986. It was when Top Gun came out. She's in Witness and The Accused, but 1991 is the tail end of America McGillising. I don't think I have a problem with her in this role. I read a bunch of IMDB reviews during the movie. (I know, I am a bad person for being in reach of his cell phone during a film, but I was really annoyed at this movie at one point.) People attack McGillis's performance in this film and I'm not quite sure that's fair. While her performance is by no means Oscar worthy, she holds the role as well as can be expected. Part of what makes this movie a little "meh" is the lower production value that it presents. It was made by Turner pictures, but I get the vibe that this never had a theatrical release. It's probably due to the "VM" rating as opposed to the "R" rating. But the movie kind of feels chincy. Adrian Pasdar, the guy from Heroes, Iron Man (animated) and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. plays Robert and that seems about where the budget is. There are two big casting choices, but I get the vibe that they were suckered into it. In terms of someone dropping the ball, the only place I can point is the cinematography. The mise-en-scene is pretty solid for the most part. Costumes and time period deem decent. McGillis looks a little '90s, but that's true for any era's costume dramas. The only time that the costumes weren't very good was when Edna paints naked (because the scene was totally unnecessary and I feel like they just knew that McGillis would get nude for the scene.) I want to talk about how the movie wanted to be more sexual than it was. That nude scene of her working on her art was so exploitative that I wondered if the filmmakers wanted to toe that line between art and eroticism. Were they planning on selling this to late night Cinemax, but also avoid selling their souls? The sexual stuff is reserved for the final act, but it does get very graphic and non-realistic for those parts. This all ties into the idea that this movie is pretty cheap for the most part. It simultaneously defines itself as an adaptation of an important (despite the fact that I don't like it) work of fiction while trying to appeal to a viewership that wants to be aroused (the best way I can put that without needing to take a shower to get clean). It's profound and cheap at the same time and, under different circumstances, would have achieved a profoundly different tone. The movie is not a failure of the novel. Weirdly enough, it's super accurate to its source material. The problem is that The Awakening is a story told from Edna's perspective. It is a very slow burn that does not depend on plot. It is a study of her character and focuses on the details of every moment. The story moves quickly when the chapters are short, but those longer chapters really allow the novel to breathe. While the events of the story and the film are one-to-one for the most part, the very nature of filming this movie involves losing something. Could there be a great film adaptation of The Awakening? Possibly, but with that comes the same problem that Watchmen had. By trying to stay so faithful to the source material, something is lost. The only way to fix that is to give something else to think about and absorb. Instead, Grand Isle provides only an absence for what could have been. Without much of a director's vision, the story relies on what it can and can't film. The closest attempt to rectify this in Grand Isle is the use of the flashes to white and the constant image of the girl running in the fields. It's a cool decision, but it is also a band aid over a bigger problem. Every time there's a weaker moment, this film focuses on this vision which almost serves to be a highlighter for mistakes. It comes across as a little bit gimmicky and that's a bummer. I hate the fact that I don't like this book. In undergrad, I was so skeptical of great literature and I didn't give it the respect it deserved. When I graduated, I started studying these works again with a more open mind and realized that I was the idiot. The Awakening and, by proxy, Grand Isle just make me mad. I'm sure that there are people who really love this book and could defend it with their dying breath. Much of it seems to sacrifice good actions for other good actions and perhaps that is my stupid ideology getting in the way. I just don't like the central premise and wish that there was another way to explore many of the same themes without tossing the baby out with the bathwater. Pun kind of intended. It's 1921! There's no MPAA! Heck, that's an American institution. Film was a baby at the time. I will say that there's a bit of old timey racism. If I had to give a scale to the severity of racism, I don't think any of it is meant to be hateful so much as it is ignorant of what is respectful.
DIRECTOR: Fritz Lang How much do I love Fritz Lang? I'm pretty sure he hasn't let me down yet. I keep going deeper into stuff I don't think I'll like and I always seem to come back pretty happy. Per use, (pronounced "yoozhe") I assigned my students to independently watch a German Expressionist film or something from this era and I always want to do the project too. I like the Expressionists. Maybe its just because they are so to-the-wall formalist, these silent movies are interesting as all get out. Destiny is no exception. I know I'm not the target market for this movie. This movie was a German movie for people who were steeped in German culture and folklore. This movie borrows heavily from oral tradition because it is an adapted German folktale. Like Shakespeare's audience, I'm sure that the viewers of this film would have had at least a rudimentary understanding of the basic beats of this story. I, however, have never heard of it. Because you, too, are probably not in the know (what if this is where I found out that I'm not well read and fairly uncultured! No!), the story surrounds a recently engaged couple reveling in the joys of engagement. They take the personification of death along on their carriage ride. Death buys some land (this really seems like a side story that is just there for tradition's sake) and the two meet up with him at a bar. Just like the punchline to everyone's favorite premise, Death takes the gentleman and the lady must get him back. Death explains his very nature and offers her an opportunity to get him back if she can prevent three deaths from taking place. I love this idea. It is super cool. I will never encourage a remake of anything, but that's a genuinely nifty idea. The movie jumps around time and space (not like that!) and we get to see three very different cultures. We get a look into the Middle East, a peek at Italy, and a very dated examination of China. One of the things that this period in German film did well was the focus on elaborate sets, especially compared to the Americans' use of very theatrical fakeries. The movie thrives mostly when it relies on its spectacle. I'm not saying that the rest of the movie is flawed, by any means. Rather, it is just the quality of everything I'm seeing (shy of the racial makeup choices that the early 1920s would have provided) is very impressive. There's a certain disbelief that I go in with many silent films. Even The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is only really impressive if I shut part of my brain off. But Destiny looks impressive without any help. I guess I could go across the line for the mise en scene (again, except for the makeup) and looking at the casting choices. The guy who plays Death, Bernhard Goetzke, is impressive as heck. The guy looks like Death. I always thought that must be a bummer, when you look like someone horrifying. I'm watching Patriot season one on Amazon and they address that. Regardless, he fits everything. The image above is one I use in my class when teaching this film. He fits in a dimly lit room illuminated only by candles. That's a very specific look. I love most that the movie didn't cop out on one thing. The Germans were obsessed with the psychology over the sociology of a movie. The movie examines the nature and, ultimately, the value of death. The three love stories that carry out through the movie are very interesting stories, but they act almost as an anthology for love. I get it, they parallel the couple from the framing device. But these stories are just cool. It is once these stories are over that the real psychology is looked at. SPOILER FOR A MOVIE FROM 1921. Her choice about the value of a life is very interesting. She is given a chance to bring back her love if she can trade a life for a life. I honestly thought that we were going to get the Twilight Zone ending where she is taken to the afterlife and he is brought back. These moments seem obvious, but Lang makes her choices about whose life to take interesting. The end with the fire is great because it is this crescendo to an already pretty epic film. There is one moment where I thought Death was just teaching her a lesson and that he would give back the suitor, but he doesn't. How great is that? The weird thing is that the end of the movie is still kind of happy despite the fact that everyone dies. Perhaps that is the reason why we keep turning an abstract concept as "death" into a proper character with "Death." I can't think of a ton of other emotions outside of Inside Out that personify concepts like that. The odd thing is that we all know Death's personality. (I think the guy from Patriot that I was talking about actually was Death on Supernatural. Weird coincidence...or he's just typecast.) But Death is weirdly comforting in this movie. He doesn't look it and he intentionally never emotes, but he's rarely considered the antagonist in this tale. Rather, he definitely has the vibe as the tool of Heaven and that's an interesting thought. Lang presents death as comforting. He's not the only one. Even as early as this movie is, he's not the first. But the movie sells the concept very well. The deaths in the three anthology pieces are unfair, but they seem to be part of the natural order. (Yes, there's a lot of more murder in the anthology pieces, but it weirdly fits within the narrative.) I really like when I like a silent movie authentically. Sure, there are things that are uncomfortable, mostly in the Chinese and Middle Eastern sequences. I'm not even sure what is Islamophobic anymore, but the stories are great. The separation of the stories into six songs keeps the story moving, considering that silent films often require a little more investment than the films with their quick cuts today. The special effects are pretty fun and support the narrative well. I don't know if I'd watch the movie again any time soon, but it's only an hour and a half so I never know. It's The Final Nightmare! Despite the fact that Freddy Krueger became the equivalent of the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, he's still chopping up little kids. Okay, teenagers. But still, is that the line in the sand that you want to draw? Probably not. He's a murdering serial killer who makes in appropriate jokes. C'mon. Use some judgment! Hard R.
DIRECTOR: Rachel Talalay I feel like I've achieved something. I know that I still have to review Freddy vs. Jason, but I've gotten the main franchise done. That has to account for something. Sure, I've accomplished a giant waste of time. But tomorrow morning, we're going to record our Nightmare on Elm Street episode of the podcast and I now know the entire series. (I finished Freddy vs. Jason last night. I won't get to the review for a few days though. Give me a break. This is impressive enough.) I don't mean to get all clickbaity (mainly because you are already at the website reading this hypothetically), but did the final entry in the series give me closure or something that might have changed my view on the whole series? Nope. While watching this one, I realize it is the one in the franchise that I've seen the most. I was still very young when this movie came out, but it was a very overstocked VHS during Blockbuster's hayday. If you don't remember Blockbuster, they weren't exactly known for their variety of movies so much as their bulk of movies. When I went down my first horror spiral, I do remember wanting to see what A Nightmare on Elm Street was all about. The original wasn't there, but the most recent sequel always had a few copies lying around. When I started watching this one again, it all came back to me...with the exception of the ridiculously great opening. I'm not talking about the opening sequence. With the appearance of Freddy as the Wicked Witch of the West, I lost hope of this film very quickly. No, I'm talking about the establishment of the setting. That opening title card was so darned cool and I really wanted the movie that the information teased. For those not in the know, the movie opens to a late '80s / early '90s computer with a polygon map of the United States. Ten years have passed. It shows the town of Springboro (the name of the town gets referenced way more since Part 4) no longer has any teenagers because they've all been wiped out by Freddy Krueger. The adults of the town have gone mad, but there's rumors of one surviving teenager. Do you understand how much I wanted this movie? I'd love post-apocalyptic Springboro as the one surviving teen Mad Maxes his way to killing Freddy Krueger. That movie sounds amazing. Instead, the movie just plays it safe and copies much of the formula for the other movies. There's a little weirdness when they actually show Springboro, but these are done for cheap effects. I suppose the logic is that, since Freddy has now killed every teenager in the town, he's so powerful that he can affect reality. It is a lazy excuse to do some scares that couldn't (ahem...shouldn't) be done in this franchise. There's some haunted house scares that the other movies don't really touch on outside of dreams. But these moments don't really make a lick of sense. By this point in the series, Freddy can do whatever he wants regardless of the rules and you know that he's going to be beaten by the end. I have so much to gripe about, but I want to say that I was excited to see Yapphet Kotto and Breckin Meyer in this movie. Kotto is like John Saxon for me. I always wonder why he picks the projects he does. Both of these actors seem so intense in real life, but they tend to do a lot of schlock films. Kotto brings this amazing intensity to the movie. I wonder if New Line sold him on the project as "the end of an era." Like, did they pretend that he was going to be in something that would last generations. Honest to Pete, Kotto has to sell the idea that 3D glasses are going to save someone's life and he does it. He's also given permission to beat Freddy Krueger up with a baseball bat. (Again, talking about rules, since when does Freddy invade adult dreams? I guess Nancy's mom was taken and that doesn't make a lot of sense either. Regardless, I love me some rules.) Characters like Kotto's in this movie always scream a little bit silly. There is always a character who has an intimate knowledge of dreams despite the fact that their profession should only have at best a tertiary knowledge of the subject. Kotto plays a psychologist / social worker who weirdly enough has a poster of the exact dream demon that possessed Fred Krueger when he was alive. He works with Freddy's daughter. (The notion of "spoiler" is too good for this movie.) Yapphet Kotto had to play this part seriously. Boo. I mean, I'm glad to see him and he made the movie for me, but he's better than that. Does anyone find the concept of live action Looney Tunes funny, especially in the horror genre? This happens again in Freddy vs. Jason, but the idea of goofy slapstick murder isn't great. Part of what made Chaplin amazing at slapstick is the idea of there not being any consequences to the violence. One of my pet peeves in comedy is when there is wacky music indicating that something is supposed to be funny. A Nightmare on Elm Street loves this crap and Freddy's Dead takes it to a new level in this one. I don't know how, but it actually takes a step back in effectiveness with a similar kill that it presented in Part 5. The one thing I liked in The Dream Child was the use of the comic book warp inward. I called it the "Take On Me" effect. It works way better than it should. (Again, that one dropped the ball on the whole execution ((pun intended)) when Freddy showed up, but I was actually impressed that a lot of it worked.) This one has a similar bit, but dumbs it down even more than I thought it could. Breckin Meyer, who again is too good for this movie, plays a stoner watching TV. Instead of integrating him into the comic book, which seemed to take the medium seriously, does the most juvenile presentation of a video game ever. The sequence is just bad. This is the scene that stuck with me the most and it is cringeworthy. Meyer is treated like a pinball and there's nothing scary or funny about it. It's just dumb. It's odd because I've seen Talalay's name attached to a few entries in the franchise, but it is moments like these that I don't think she can judge what works in this horror movie. The movie also dates itself with the Power Glove reference. Freddy, in this case, is really overplaying the Coyote character that I mentioned in the last one. His fourth wall breaking never really allows for anyone to get involved in the story. Finally, there's a mythology that could have been cool, but I don't know if it is plausible in this story. Much of Freddy's mythology is based on Amanda Krueger, his mother who was a nun, and his fear of her. She has always been the only female character in his life. This movie semi-retcons a wife and kid into Freddy's life, which I feel we would have seen more information about before. Many of the movies show newspaper clippings about Amanda Krueger or Freddy's victims, so why haven't we heard hide-nor-hair about this family. I suppose Freddy's daughter was brought into the series to give the protagonist a sense of gravitas, but she really doesn't take the character any further than the other protagonists of this franchise. When it comes to killing off Freddy, there's nothing special about his death. There's no reason why this killing would make it permanent (even Freddy addresses this fact by listing off the ways he's been killed in the past). The movies tend to find the same answer for killing Freddy Krueger and it never sticks. It's not that exciting knowing that, if Freddy is pulled into the real world, he can die. He clearly can't and I don't know why the movie keeps pushing for me to believe that. I watched the 3D ending. I loved me some 3D back in the day and I always get excited when I find a pair of red/blue glasses in a DVD case. I may be spoiled by our actual 3D TV now, but this was some really rough 3D. I don't hate the red/blue glasses, but I think the folks at New Line / TimeWarner really phoned in the 3D transfer. It's not very good. Things are supposedly coming out at me, but there's only a small field of depth. If I'm ever forced to watch this movie again, I'd probably watch the 2D version, despite the shameless scene where the characters highlight which weapons they are going to use on Freddy. (I liked it because it WAS shameless. Friday the 13th 3D is all about these moments.) I'm glad I'm almost done. I'm ready for tomorrow. If you've been following along, I get that many people like these movies. I can just firmly say that I can't recommend them to anyone. *pinches bridge of nose to relieve sinus pressure* Okay, I don't know how to say this in a different way. Freddy Krueger is a child murderer who was burned very badly and has knives for hands. He enters people's nightmares and then murders them in horrible ways, often while referencing sexual assault. This one is about an even younger kid who gets involved in Freddy's plot. Also, there's a reference to abortion. Hard G. (I'm joking, but it's the the Internet. Hard R. The hardest R.)
DIRECTOR: Stephen Hopkins I think I'm fried on these movies. I think they've broken my standards by a lot because I didn't hate this one. It is exactly like the other movies in the franchise and there's nothing that makes Part 5 in an already bloated franchise any different than its predecessors. But I could sit through this one. I don't know what it was. Perhaps my brain patterns have changed and there's something that has warped. I'm not saying its good or even that I even really enjoyed it. But there was this zen attitude that washed over me in my binging of the series that allowed me to shut my brain off and just accept it. The Dream Child, in all its insane luster, tries doubling down on the mythology of Freddy. Again, I acknowledge my hypocrisy in applauding this, but there is something weirdly refreshing of just seeing the filmmakers just go for it. It really plays up the "child of a hundred maniacs" angle by actually trying to make this sequence happens. I need to put a disclaimer: the scene is very uncomfortable. There is something problematic when not only is the creepy serial killer a serial killer, but there is a tie to sexual assault. I don't like that this part of the narrative is in the story and I should have as concerned a mind about the violence that is constantly being portrayed in the films, but the sequence does have an epic scope. Again, super gross, but it does give this weird mythology to Freddy. The one thing I didn't like about these semi-flashback sequences is the concept that Freddy was born deformed and evil. The thing that the reboot actually got right is stressing the fact that Freddy was just a pathetic and gross human being. I know, it makes no sense that out of all people, pathetic murderer Fred Krueger is given immortality. But that story is far more compelling. Rather, the classic franchise has the attitude of throwing everything at the wall and seeing if it sticks. Like I said, that's not the worst thing in the world. In an attempt to achieve anything classy, there's a weird kind of success there. The creepy newborn scuttling around a nightmare hospital has that heavy metal music video vibe, which I don't love. But it is weird enough to just allow me to shrug my shoulders and accept the oddity that I'm watching on screen. I do like that Alice is allowed to be a protagonist for a second movie. While characters have made it from one movie to the other, giving Alice the front and center position actually seems to give Freddy an antithesis needed to make Freddy interesting. I don't know if Alice is exactly handled correctly. Alice always seems like the victim who is simply playing along with the cards that she is dealt. Outside the fact that she has a very ambiguous ability, she is simply another potential corpse for Freddy. I keep coming back to Alien and wanting a Ripley to take Freddy out. Alice never really reaches that depth. This comes down to Alice's morality center. Considering that I'm a Catholic school teacher who is super Catholic, I do have to talk about her stance about abortion. The topic does come up and I'd like to think that a movie (despite being about a serial murder rapist) would like to take a stance on life. She decides to keep the child, but I think that's for the sole purpose of a storytelling element. The only thing that makes it kind of interesting with her choice is that the child is the only thing that the father left behind. Why? Because he gets turned into a murdercycle. I guess they can't all be theological reasons. Instead, the moral crisis comes from a confrontation from the father's parents, who find Alice incapable of taking care of her own child. The confrontation is more than a little forced, but it does make for a halfway compelling break from the constant murderfest that this movie embraces. Now there is one nightmare that actually was pretty cool to me. It breaks my rules of creating two dimensional characters simply for the sake of giving them an appropriate death. The reason that this nightmare strikes the note correctly (for the most part because there are beats that are serious missteps) is that the production value is good and I'm a comic book nerd. Every time a fake comic book character is created for a movie, the art is always awful. It never seems fully fleshed out, but this movie gets the comic nerd mostly right. It is only when Freddy steps in that the premise gets pretty dumb. But the movie does its best "Take On Me" animation for the movie and creates a kind of fun comic book world. But, like I said, once Freddy shows up, the premise becomes really hack and the efforts of the special effects and props department is all to pot. Freddy becomes "Super Freddy" and I couldn't watch the rest of the movie because my eyes were rolled so far back into my head. I just wanted to give a shout out to one moment that got close to being really good. I do have a question for filmmakers everywhere, though. No prop department can ever get the texture of comic book pages right. I don't know why new comic books always get a heavier paper stock for their comics than what would have actually been used. It doesn't help in this one because the fake comic is right beside issues of The Uncanny X-Men and The Spectacular Spider-Man. Nothing highlights a created prop by setting it right next to the thing that it is supposed to emulate. I have to admit, my brain is seeping out of my ears. I have one more of the original movies to review before I have to start watching Freddy vs. Jason. I know, Lauren. I don't have to watch these movies. In fact, I'm going way above and beyond for this upcoming podcast, but at least no one can say that I didn't do my homework or that I don't know what I'm talking about. It's October! To celebrate the boys' favorite holiday, Halloween (not Pumpkin Spice Day), we're going to try to do a full length episode every week in October! To start off, we made an extra long episode focusing on our favorite Halloween movies. We also talk about David S. Pumpkins, because he's a delight.
Check out our new website through SquareSpace, www.literallyanything.net! Also, check it out on iTunes or Google Play! The stabbing hands are still in this movie, but they're just a lot more digital. If you can somehow distinguish between the morality of a kid getting stabbed by a practical effect and a kid being stabbed by a digital effect, more power to you. Hard R.
DIRECTOR: Samuel Bayer I don't even know what I want out of this franchise anymore. I've now seen too much stupid horror to make sense of the world. In my last Nightmare review, I kept talking about the dangers of making Freddy jokey. This one makes him really hardcore. So what am I supposed to think when I really don't like this movie. I have my reasons at least, but golly...I'm sick of being such a stick in the mud when it comes to this movie franchise. The fundamental problem that the remake (reboot?) of A Nightmare on Elm Street has is that it is the most remakey movie you could possibly do. Similar to what happened with Friday the 13th, the remake was produced by Michael Bay. I've complained about Michael Bay before. I'm not the only snob in the world to complain about this guy getting his mitts all over a franchise. I'm not covering new ground. His over polished and over flashy look to a movie really ruins Freddy Krueger (as far as he can be ruined). There is something ridiculously garage bandy to the very nature of the Nightmare movies. Again, this is coming from someone who finds these movies to be burdensome, but there is this odd ray of sunshine knowing that a bunch of guys are having a fun time over creating the goriest effect that they possibly can using stuff they can get around the workshop. Maybe I've just been indoctrinated into the myth that creature effects guys are playful and competitive. Maybe it's just that I've seen some examples of characters in Wes Craven's New Nightmare that lets me think that lie to myself, but I'd like to think that there is a joyful obsession that comes with these grossout effects. I don't know why the idea of a computer doing the same thing sanitizes it, but it definitely seems like this is the most Hollywood production of the lot. I have to be honest with myself that somewhere earlier in the run of sequels, New Line Cinema took over and made them cash cows. Looking at those turnaround times for how quickly these movies were made was jawdropping, but it still seemed like someone was having fun on these movies. This movie just looks like a Michael Bay crapfest and I know there were just oodles of people counting dollar signs, needing this to be a success. Commercialism, right? There is a bigger problem with the visual effects being digital. I don't know why it works this way, but the digital effects are somehow less scary. In both situations, there's an element of disbelief that comes with seeing these grossout moments. If you can train your brain (or untrain your brain), you can watch these movies and completely believe that what you are seeing is real. That belief is what makes a gross out scene work. The digital effect never really captures that. There's a scene in this one that, unfortunately (I'll get to that in a second), parallels one of the effects from the original film. The scene is Freddy coming out of the wall as Nancy sleeps. It's a very unsettling effect in the original film. It looks like the wall is birthing Freddy Krueger and that sentence alone should bother you to a certain degree. When the scene is digital, it looks very dated and digital. I don't want to harp on these effects because some digital effects are awesome. But digital effects easily date themselves very quickly. Practical effects lie in the talent of the designer. I know that practical effects can't do everything and I'm sure that the original effects creator wish that they could create a practical effect that had the mobility of the digital effect in the reboot. But it just looked bad. There are a few digital effects that hold up, like in Jurassic Park or for a good portion of Terminator 2, but these effects somehow fit the narrative within the realm of necessity. The idea of digitizing something that could be done with practical effects just feels cheap. I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, but it definitely impacts this movie in a way that I didn't know it was possible. This might be Exhibit A against the unnecessary use of digital effects. What was odd is that the movie so wanted to be cooler than the other films while being reverent to the original that it just picked the worst things to recreate. One of the things that probably sounded cool in a planning meeting was the recreation of scares (I told you I'd get back to this!). Many of the really iconic moments from the original Nightmare on Elm Street are in this movie. The bloody body bag being invisibly dragged down the hallway, the thrashing on the ceiling, the bed of blood, the bathtub sequence: all of these moments are recreated for this film. But the one thing that makes a scary movie really scary is the sense of tension that comes from dramatic irony. When we know something is going to happen because we know more than the characters, but we don't know what? That creates suspense. It's the reason a scary movie or a comedy isn't as good the second time. We know what is going to happen. When Nancy gets into the tub, we know that the hand is going to come out of the water. We know it won't kill her because we've seen the other movie. This is the exact thing I was praising about It. In It, the scares were all changed from the novel and the previous version. It kept it fresh while retaining the fundamental beats. I'm glad that the movie got the storyline for the most part right, but the scares were very empty, especially for the target audience of this movie, the lax fans of the dead franchise. The other demographic for this movie were teens and they simply cast everyone from the CW and WB to fill in generic roles. I do love that Rooney Mara is in this movie. She actually makes a better Nancy than Heather Langenkamp, to whom I must apologize for constantly berating her performance. I swear, I have no beef with this person. But Rooney Mara is a tank and she does a pretty good job in this one too. Again, there wasn't a ton to work with and I'm embarrassed that they gave her the angsty artist character to play. There are far too many characters who are simply defined by angry art. There's got to be something better. The thing that I'm most bummed about is the fact that I love Jackie Earle Haley. I love him so much. There was a time when he was in everything. He's such a cool character actor and when I heard that he was taking over from Robert Englund, I couldn't be more excited. I never thought that the Nightmare movies' problems stemmed from Englund. I think Englund made the character his own, and despite the fact that I never loved the character, I think that Englund made the character something special in his own right. Haley doesn't necessarily do anything wrong with the character, so much as there's nothing all that right with Freddy in his burnt form. Rather, Haley thrives in my favorite choice for the franchise, the revamped Freddy origin. This might be blasphemy, but I really like the changes that they made with Freddy's backstory. It seems real and dark. As much as the child of a hundred maniacs is cool, it also is very over the top. The story of a guy who might have been innocent turning into a serial killer is great. I was a little nervous (odd, because I saw this movie in theaters too) when they said he was innocent because it would be weird that Freddy became such a monster after the fact. But having that moral dilemma actually gives the movie a little guts (pun intended). There is that ethical crisis that I thought about. In the other movies, the parents are such stereotypes that there was no relating to any of them. But in this one, the parents (albeit very blah) seem like real people taking care of a guy who hurt their children. Fred, pre-burns, seems like a genuinely scary guy. I just finished the original series (sans Freddy vs. Jason) and Fred Krueger making a deal with dream gods is so ridiculously dumb that it was refreshing to see a parred down version of a famous story. I like that. The movie is too clean overall and the scares are just lacking. I blame a lot of this on digital effects, but there are moments that really shine. I will say that I don't want a sequel and the Nightmare on Elm Street movies can just stop. I don't know if we're really clamoring for a shiny new sequel, but what can I say? People like them and who am I to stand in the way of that? |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
April 2024
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