A Chronology on Elm Street, Part 6

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

The problem with movies is that it doesn't take much to fuck one up. One shitty actor, one monster suit sporting a visible zipper, one selfish actress who won't take her top off... Sometimes that's all it takes to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. This movie, this miserable fucking whore of a movie, is the perfect example. It begins with our lovely blonde Dokken fan still being terrorized by Freddy (see previous entry in this chronology), and with no second third-rate rockers to rescue her this time she's at her wit's end, eating coffee raw and chasing it with Diet Coke in a desperate attempt to remain awake and skinny. This soon lands her in a home for wayward, suicidal teens (my favorite kind), where it turns out that all the patients have the fever for the flavor of a Freddy. (It's an old TV commercial reference, like "Chow chow chow." Just don't worry about it.) Fortunately for them, the main chick from Part 1 (inexplicably not dead, despite the way that movie ended) shows up to help them develop their lucid dreaming skills, the only way to defeat Freddy on his own turf.

Dammit, Freddy, the penis goes inside the hottie, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, this creepy/ridiculous nun reveals that to truly destroy Freddy someone needs to find his remains and bury them in hallowed ground. Or, you know, in the middle of a junkyard, whichever is easier. (Seriously, don't make an effort or anything.) Now, combine these two plot threads and we're finally getting somewhere. Part 3 has always been the natural ending point for sloppy, unplanned movie series because then they can go around claiming that it was "always meant to be a trilogy", and here it is Part 3 and they've come up with a wholly plausible double-whammy means to put Freddy out of commission once and for all that, if it doesn't really make normal sense, at least makes horror movie sense. And fuck me if their two-front assault doesn't work: between fighting the kids in slumberland and reanimating his bones Jason and the Argonauts style in the real world, Freddy's powers are stretched a little too thin and his clock is finally punched. But not before the hot blonde is almost eaten by a gigantic penis; one chick upgrades from a frumpy 4 to an edible 8 when, in her dreams, she reinvents herself as a punk rock chick (I'm telling you middle-of-the-road girls right now, going punk/goth works, and I can't speak for everyone but I have no problem dating a poseur, as long as she's good in the sack.); and a mediocre nurse who's really Freddy in disguise shows us his/her tits while seducing a teenage boy (because as if Part 2 wasn't evidence enough, Freddy is inarguably gay and a pedophile).

Can't name a single song by The Jam. No one cares.

So yeah, this would've been a passable flick if it wasn't scuttled by the bullshit final shot, where it's revealed that Freddy is STILL alive FOR NO DEFENSIBLE REASON WHATSOEVER. You cock-nobbing motherfuckers. You just spent this entire movie meticulously laying out the goddamned "this is how you kill Freddy" rules once and for all, and then you throw the entire megillah out the fucking window with absolutely no explanation???? Are you FUCKING kidding me??? Why, why, why, should I watch a movie where nothing that anyone does matters at all? Freddy still being alive in the final shot of this miserable flick literally negates everything that happened in the 95 minutes preceding it, and everyone involved can just rim my fucking job. Fuck Dream Warriors. I hate this cunt movie.

----------

The Not-At-All-Cleverly-Titled Book of Dragon Movies. Now available.

Hollywood Lolitas Us Again...

Here's a few classy shots of the children's movie The Neverending Story III blatantly sexualizing an extremely underage girl:

For the full review (of the movie, not the girl, you perv), check out my latest, The Not-At-All-Cleverly-Titled Book of Dragon Movies, on sale now, exclusively on Amazon. And holy shit, if you're a Kindle Unlimited member, it's FREE! Don't have a Kindle? Relax, download this free Kindle app and read Dragon Movies, and all my books, on any device! God damn, the future is awesome, isn't it?

A Chronology on Elm Street, Part 5

"Dream Warriors" - Dokken

A beautiful blonde wakes up in Freddy's dreamworld and finds herself drawn into a spooky old house, where she's confronted by none other than...

...her favorite rock band Dokken. You remember Dokken, right? (Of course you don't. Don't worry about it.) At first Dokken scares her, but after the lead guitarist burrows through the floor like a gigantic mole and then bursts out of the wall to favor her with a guitar solo she realizes that they're pretty okay guys. (Pretty okay guys who can fucking rock.) But just when she's finally starting to enjoy herself Freddy Krueger appears and drags the guitarist off, and when our hottie follows she finds herself in the (relatively unimpressive) bowels of Freddy's twisted dreamscape, where the world's most sparsely-attended Dokken concert is being held. (Well, the most sparsely-attended before 1995 or so, anyway.) Freddy's there too, ready to cook our main chick's hash, only to be driven back by Dokken's preternatural ability to rock, at which point Freddy Krueger is the one waking up in his bed, terrified. "Who were those guys?" he gasps. Really, Freddy? You're afraid of Dokken? They're like one step above hair metal, and frankly I'd probably bet against them in a fistfight with the Sleez Beez.

I feel the same way, Freddy.

"It's just a stupid joke in a dumb music video, it's not fucking canon," you're probably saying right now, out loud, to your computer. (Hey, do I know you, or what?) But let's really think about this for a minute. The big fake-out here is that it wasn't the blonde's nightmare after all, it was Freddy's, and it featured slightly skewed versions of several incidents that will occur in his near future (i.e. the next movie), exactly as presented here. (Minus Dokken, of course, who had better things to do.) (Ha ha! No they didn't.) Given the information provided, it's my contention that this incident really happened in the Nightmare on Elm Street universe; it's what they call a prescient vision, and it's the first suggestion that, in addition to his other powers, Freddy Krueger has a limited ability to see into the future. That's a hell of an important piece of information to dole out in a goddamned music video, but that's what makes the expanded world of A Nightmare on Elm Street such a fascinating tapestry: its willingness to...

Okay, who am I kidding? Even if you jettison the music videos and the comic books and the late-night ads for the Freddy Krueger Hotline, none of this Elm Street bullshit even tries to make any sense. Sometimes Freddy can possess people, other times he can't. Sometimes he's the "bastard son of a hundred maniacs" (whatever the hell that even means), other times he was raised by a pimp (it's in the novel). Thursday he's finally, irrevocably dead. Friday he's better. It's all a load of terminal horseshit anyway, so I say this goddamned music video is canon, if for no other reason than I like the idea of Freddy Krueger being just as terrified of heavy metal as the rest of America was in 1987. Seriously, why should he be any more rational than my mom?

----------

The Not-At-All-Cleverly-Titled Book of Dragon Movies. My latest. Available for pre-order RIGHT NOW.

Q is coming...

...along with dozens of other dragon movies in my all-new book, available for pre-order RIGHT NOW. Get it here.

A Chronology on Elm Street, Part 4

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

A new family moves into the house formerly occupied by the previous movie's main chick, and in no time flat their teenage son is possessed by Freddy and off on a gory, homicidal rampage. Although he does get some limited action with a hot little redhead first, and in my book that's a pretty fair trade-off.

Redheads. Always worth it.

This is the Elm Street flick everyone hates because it doesn't quite gel with the rest of the series, but that's exactly why I like it: it just does its own haunted house/possession thing and doesn't get bogged down with a bunch of half-assed "mythology" that nobody cares about anyway. Plus Freddy is still a passably scary badass here instead of the fucking joke he would soon become, rattling off endless Bob Hope-style one-liners and pimping his own 1-900 number and shit. Seriously, what a tool. In this movie, the people get the funny lines, like the main kid's dad ("He needs a methadone clinic!"), or this smartass:

Chick: "So you going to Lisa's house tomorrow night?"
Dude: "No. Can't. I'm grounded."
Chick: "How come?"
Dude: "I threw my grandmother down a flight of stairs."

Then there's the main chick, a sizzling-hot redhead who isn't even fazed when her sort-of boyfriend shows up at the front door covered in someone else's blood. We all need a girl like that. Clearly this is all good stuff, but wait, there's more:

• The exploding bird
• The joker with the huge Limahl and King Kobra posters in his room. In the history of the world, has there ever actually been a person who listens to both Limahl and King Kobra?
• The whale-song playing while red-hot Red is trying to stab Freddy in her kitchen. For real, did you ever notice that? What the hell?
• All the terror builds up to Freddy crashing a high school pool party. Ha ha! Maybe he'll TP the quarterback's house next. Duh.
• Special shout-out to the bikini chick with the Flock of Seagulls hair at that party, by the way. She doesn't do anything important, but Jesus Christ is she fucking fine.
• End credits song: "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" by Bing Crosby. Brilliant. This movie rocks. Or swings, whatever.

Seriously, any babe with the vag to wear her hair like this, in public, has won my eternal love.

----------

Dig these crazy haunted house movies? I wrote an entire book on the subject. Legendary House of Haunted Hell is currently available here.

A Chronology on Elm Street, Part 3

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Are you reading these blog entries in order? Well you really should be reading them in order, because, chronologically, this is actually Freddy's third outing, thus the whole "Chronology on Elm Street" thing. Pay attention.

So enough time has passed for Freddy Krueger to be little more than an urban legend, although why he waited this long to strike again is a bit of a mystery. Maybe he really does need to recharge his batteries, like an old Buick that's been parked in the barn too long. Maybe he realizes that it's a lot sexier to slasher-kill teenagers than small children, and has been waiting for all the kids on the block to grow up. Or maybe he simply craves at least a little bit of a challenge, and teenagers are way more likely to put up a fight than, say, infants, who tend to give up almost immediately when they're attacked by supernatural evil. Fucking pussies. Whatever his logic, the first of Freddy's new slate of victims is this sexy-ass blonde who really should've been the main chick because quite frankly our actual main chick is no great shakes. (Calm down, fans of this chick, I'm not saying I wouldn't fuck her, just that I probably wouldn't brag about it. Much.) It's a good thing for us that the killing begins relatively early in this movie though, because quite frankly almost nothing these kids say or do when they're not being ruthlessly slaughtered rings true, not even Hollywood true. Seriously, you'd think the screenwriter had never seen a John Hughes film, although most of those came out after this movie was released so I suppose I can't fault him for that. (Still, he does occasionally get it right: "Oh god, I look twenty years old,"says the stressed-out, sleep-deprived main chick.) At any rate, the hottie's numbskull boyfriend is next on the hit list, followed by lil' baby Johnny Depp (which will probably please anyone who's been subjected to The Rum Diary or Dark Shadows) and, finally, the main chick.

Sigh. I'll get a tampon...

If you haven't seen this movie in a while, you'll find that it's both better and worse than you remember it, leaning towards worse. The simpler dream sequences are creepy and effective, with the mild surreal logic of real dreams, and the deaths are respectably gruesome (blood geyser!), but overall not enough really happens, especially during the long, dead period between the moment when the main chick hatches her Home Alone-esque plan to "get" Freddy and when she finally carries it out. (Also, it would have been way cooler if some A-Team music played while she was setting up her jury-rigged Freddy trap.) It probably says it all that my favorite part of this movie is when Johnny Depp makes an incredibly dated cat food reference ("Chow chow chow.") that will just sound like random crazy talk to anyone born after 1980 or so.

So yeah, hardly the preeminent Nightmare on Elm Street outing. Assuming there even is one.

----------

Need to see more "classic" films put in their place? Right here.