Galaxy of Terror (1981)

The spaceship Remus, belonging to a planetary culture ruled by someone going by the fortunately not copyrightable moniker of The Master, crashes down on a rather dangerous and mysterious planet.

The Master sends a second ship, the Quest, after it. The Quest is predominantly populated by character actors like Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Robert Englund, Grace Zabriskie, Ray Walston and Sid Haig who are perfectly built to turn the sparse hints the script offers about the characters and the world they inhabit into something that feels plausible and alive. Arriving at the planet, the Quest also crashes, and will need some repairs to fly out again.

At least the Remus is comparatively close by, so it doesn’t take long for our protagonists to stumble upon what’s left of its crew – dead bodies, killed under mysterious and obviously violent circumstances. There are some crew members missing, however, so there still may be survivors, somewhere. Perhaps they have made their way to the gigantic, creepy black pyramid looming on the horizon?

Before anyone from the Quest can start making their way there, as well, the newcomers begin suffering from the same troubles that must have killed the Remus’s crew – tempers begin to flare, moods darken, and whenever somebody is alone, they are killed – or worse – by a different monstrosity with the curious ability to disappear before anyone else can see it.

Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror – produced by Corman’s New World Pictures - is typically considered as being on of the Alien rip-offs. Some of that sweet sweet, Corman money has certainly flown into the film because of that, but the Alien influence is mostly visible in the grubbiness of the tech, the very non-Star Trek (or Wars) characters, and the spirit of some of the production design (among others by James Cameron, who’d put that particular experience to good use a couple of years later when he made an actual Alien sequel). Much larger in feel and form loom Bava’s Planet of the Vampires – one of the core texts in science fiction horror on screen – and of course Forbidden Planet.

In fact, much of the film plays out like a less polite, more brutal and sexed/sleazed up version of the latter film, with added elements of a post-hippie interpretation of A.E. Van Vogt-style SF weirdness. Which works out very nicely indeed for the film thanks to its spirited, imaginative space gothic meets working class production design and practical monster effects that mix puppets, a bit of stop motion and whatever else was to hand in ways to make any monster kid happy.

Obviously, going by contemporary tastes, I could rather have done without the rape by giant worm scene (that makes a thing explicit many another horror movie prefers to keep implicit or plain metaphorical for a reason) – particularly since Clark films it very much as a scene we (as in the imagined all-male heterosexual audience) are supposed to be turned on by instead of squicked out. Which isn’t just unpleasant but based on very weird assumptions about male sexuality.

Fortunately, the rest of the monster business is much too good to let that one piece of unpleasantness destroy it, and Galaxy of Terror would be absolutely worthwhile for its effects and production design alone. The latter does also add a fine layer of cosmic dread to proceedings, uniting the promise of science fiction cinema to show us things we’ve never seen before with the (cosmic) horror dictum of showing us things we probably shouldn’t be seeing.

In short: Natty Knocks (2023)

A trio of kids and their babysitter (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim), become targets of a small town serial killer (Bill Moseley). His murders are connected to the local urban legend of one Natty knocking nine times, as well as the horrible death of a B-movie actress.

If there’s one thing about the contemporary movie landscape that can get me to whining like one of those silly “superhero movies are the doom of all human culture!” people, it’s that there’s little room for the competent journeyman director anymore, apart from mid-level TV and streaming show work with little creative influence whatsoever. So actually getting a proper new feature film by someone like Dwight “Halloween IV” H. Little is a bit of a treat.

At least on paper it is, for the actual film often feels as if it were held together by sheer willpower more than skill. Little clearly cashes in quite a few cheques from old contacts, thus the decently sized and pleasantly energetic appearances by Danielle Harris and Robert Englund.

At times, Natty Knocks has a pleasantly old-school Stephen King style US horror vibe, using 80s references without actually taking place in the 80s, because this sort of thing comes natural to filmmakers who’ve lived through them; at other times, the script seems to go out of its way to tell a very straightforward, semi-supernatural slasher tale in as overcomplicated a manner as possible. Too many characters need to be kept involved, so there’s too much running back and forth between what’s basically the same scenes from different perspectives for the film ever to feel suspenseful or tight.

From time to time, Little hits on a nice moment of suspense or two, and his straightforwardly, intensely competent style of direction never lets the pace get so slack the film actually becomes boring. Still, there’s a lack of focus here that stands in the way of this ever becoming anything more than decently watchable. Admittedly, this has one of the more fun horror movie bullshit endings I’ve seen; also admittedly, if Natty Knocks had actually been the film to fit this ending, this would have been rather more interesting.

Nightworld (2017)

Former LA cop Brett (Jason London) has great difficulty working through the death of his Bulgarian wife Ana (Diana Lyubenova), spending his time at their Bulgarian country home in a deep depression. A concerned buddy has a plan to get him out and back into the world, to which end the proactive man has procured a security job in Sofia for Brett.

It’s a live-in position in an old villa whose upper levels have been converted into apartments, or so the owners of the place say. Not that Brett’s ever seeing anyone living there. It’s a cushy, if somewhat strange job: Brett’s only duties are locking and unlocking the main door and to descend into the very deep cellar twice a day to check some security monitors that are facing the darkness inside a large locked chamber (the film calls it a hangar, for some reason) that’s situated behind a large door with neat skulls and tentacles on it. Clearly, there’s nothing to worry about here, and at first, Brett actually seems to get better doing very little. He’s got a new environment to explore, he’s got at least something to occupy himself with, and the – very young and very very pretty – barista Zara (Lorina Kamburova) of the corner coffee shop clearly has an eye on him. Therea are certainly worse ways to live.

However, there’s something really strange going on in the villa. There are not just the expected peculiar noises, and that hell gate style door in the cellar, but Brett also begins to have nightmares that begin to turn into daytime visions. And once Brett has seen what looks a lot like footprints through one of his cameras and calls in the owners’ expert for this situation, an older blind man named Jacob (Robert Englund) events spiral downwards rather quickly.

For my tastes, Patricio Valladares’s Nightworld is a pleasant surprise, a horror film that feels very much beholden to the classic Weird Tales style of horror with a smidgen of Lucio Fulci I’m not going to spoil. It is, in other worlds, exactly the sort of film where I’m perfectly willing to overlook certain weaknesses as long as it understands and uses its strengths.

The obvious weakness here is the pacing; while this sort of mood based horror does need and deserve a thoughtful pace, Nightworld does meander a bit in the middle, with perhaps one dream sequence and ten minutes of running time that could productively have been excised. It’s not a deadly flaw, at least in my eyes, mind you, though it is something which will make the film not terribly interesting to watch for some viewers. The film’s not always all that believable, either: would a guy like Brett really take a job like this without at least explicitly asking if he’s guarding anything illegal and without any explanation for its strangeness? The May-October romance between Brett and Zara isn’t terribly easy to buy either.


However, while acknowledging these flaws, I can’t say they really did anything to my enjoyment of the film. Valladares – ably assisted by some cracking spooky locations and Pau Mirabet’s moody and shadowy camera work – creates a wonderful sense of creeping wrongness. And once the film has explained the rather wonderful backstory of the villa through some patented and effective Englund exposition, it also develops a neat and effective resonance with classical myths about the realms of the dead, all the while making good use of its budget (the way the film uses a large, dark empty room to full effect borders on brilliance) and evoking its lead’s pining for a lost love to thematically appropriate effect. In general, Valladares uses iconic horror images very well, with moments like the shots of the faces of the dead trapped in the villa pressed against its windows from the inside just resonating very well with me in their archetypal feel.

The Midnight Man (2016)

Young Alex (Gabrielle Haugh) has returned to the old family home – the place where her mother hanged herself in front of her when she was a child, no less – to care for her grandmother Anna (Lin Shaye) who is suffering from dementia of increasing severity. One night, when she is visited by her best friend Miles (Grayson Daniel) – of course he’s secretly in love with her, this is a movie after all and the movie rule book says all male best friends of women are pining for them – she stumbles upon a very creepypasta little game/ritual hidden away in a box.

The “game” evokes an entity known as the Midnight Man (Kyle Strauts) who is allergic to salt, lit candles, and fair play, and who supposedly likes to kill people with their greatest fears. Of course, Alex and Miles start playing, and of course, the Midnight Man turns out to be very real indeed, so our heroes will have to fight for their lives – as well as listen to a Robert Englund shaped exposition dispenser – until the Midnight Man’s allotted time span in the real world is over.

Travis Z’s The Midnight Man has quite a few obvious flaws, mostly concerning its pacing and plot logic. Englund’s exposition dump for example brings the film to a screeching halt at the worst possible moment, the characters just shrugging off the plight of a trapped friend a few rooms off because they just need to listen to that sweet, sweet exposition. During this, Englund repeatedly emphasizes that time is of the essence – while standing around, talking at the characters. Then there is that whole business about the Midnight Man using a person’s greatest fears against them: apparently “I killed my pet rabbit as a child” counts as a fear in the Midnight Man rule book, as does disliking pain. On the other hand, the pet rabbit business enables the film to let its inner freak flag fly and put a very fake looking rabbit head on the Midnight Man, which sits nicely between the goofily absurd and the somewhat disturbing, a position where our antagonist’s usual outfit rests as well.

Generally, while the film’s story is sparse and its dramatic arc is not at all smooth, there’s a sometimes very effective mood of dread and the strange running through it, the director not only using his experience as a production designer – as well as a lot of clever lighting tricks - to create a wonderfully creepy house for the characters to stumble and creep through but also demonstrating a nicely developed sense for strange horror sequences that reminded me a little of a more down to Earth Nightmare on Elm Street. The film’s narrative may at times be rather rough in its attempts to mix classical gothic revival tropes like Alex’s family history with supernatural slasher tropes and creepypasta style horror but its attempt to do so is certainly imaginative and enjoyable to watch if one can just ignore silly things like plot logic. Fortunately, I can.

The film’s good side is further enhanced by Lin Shaye’s performance. What starts as a relatively realistic (and therefore rather sad) portrayal of dementia evolves into the craziness of your classic psycho-biddy, combining outright scenery-chewing with enough subtlety and actual evil for it to be entertaining as well as creepy. The young actors are solid enough, Englund does his expository duty with his usual professionalism, even provides his functional role with a bit of human warmth, and Strauts does the physical part of his Midnight Man duty (clearly enhanced, and I really mean enhanced, by CGI) with aplomb. I would have preferred the MM to not have been quite as talkative as he turned out to be but that might just be my general love for mute (well, moaning, weeping, gibbering and meeping are okay) supernatural evil and dislike for capital-E Evil that feels the need to add bad punning to its sins.


So, even though I have no problem at all seeing why The Midnight Man isn’t exactly well loved, I had rather a great time with it.

The Mangler (1995)

Warning: there may be one or two last act spoilers hidden away in the text, because some things are just too good not to mention them. Plus, it’s Halloween.

Horrible things are happening in the early industrial age looking industrial laundry of evil old capitalist Bill Gartley (Robert Englund in peculiar age make-up giving a performance permanently fluctuating between the ridiculous and the ridiculously inspired): gothic looking mangler number 6 is mutilating and killing off members of the female workforce in accidents that don’t look so much like accidents but rather as if the machine had an evil mind of its own. In a normal place, the mangler would be shut down right quick, but Gartley’s the most powerful man in town, and he only cackles evilly about death and mutilation, so on the mangler mangles.

Only police officer John Hunton (Ted Levine as a bitter, shouty, sweaty and irascible hull of a man with a peculiar haircut) cares. His investigation, involving the help of his “theoretical parapsychologist” neighbour and buddy Mark (Daniel Matmor), quickly leads to the assumption the mangler is indeed possessed by a demon. Finding that out and doing something about it are quite different things, particularly as our heroes take quite some time to make the connection between demons, pacts, powerful evil old men, and sacrifices of the virginal kind.

Like all films Tobe Hooper ever made not called Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this (sort of) adaptation of a Stephen King short story is not well loved; like some of these films, it can be a worthwhile viewing if approached from the right angle.

The sympathetic viewer will need to bring along a patience for the weird, a love for the artificial, and a tolerance for the blindingly obvious yet circumspectly told when it comes to plotting. In other words, this is Hooper’s early 80s Italian-style horror movie, with all the silliness, the gooey blood and the just plain inexplicable stuff this suggests. Of course, in my house, being an early 80s Italian-style horror movie is a good thing, and Hooper is rather good at the whole business too. I, at least, can only appreciate a film with two perfectly silly looking and rather unnecessary cases of old age make-up (well, it’s not difficult to imagine Englund’s there because of his horror idol value), a main monster that is somewhat hindered in being all that threatening by virtue of not being able to frigging move, yet that still finds victims willing to step really close even after corpse number three or so, a script that contains grand ideas like pretending Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” is some kind of magical handbook, and so on and so forth. And let’s not forget the utterly crazy finale when the mangler turns into some sort of organic mecha thing - a fire-breathing organic mecha thing to be more precise.

Hooper presents the glorious mess in a tone of hysterical artificiality that – apart from the Italian angle – mostly reminds me of his own Eaten Alive and Spontaneous Combustion, films that also share the off-beat – and again rather on the hysterical side – approach to performances, not exactly logical plotting and a political subtext so blunt you can scratch the sub right away (doesn’t mean Hooper’s wrong, though). There’s a lot of dry ice fog pretending to be steam so that people have a reason to sweat a lot, harsh blue and red light coming from places where blue and red light have no business coming from, production design right out of the industrial gothic handbook, and camera angles that eschew any idea of realism for the full-time grotesque.

The same goes for the bloody stuff: like in comparable Italian movies, believability or the facts of human anatomy or physics belong to areas Hooper seems to have no regard for or interest in, so people get mangled in pretty damn strange ways completely in tune with the visual language and all around bizarre tone of the rest of the film.

Following the fashion, the haircuts, the cars and the way people talk in the film, it is also impossible to pinpoint when exactly The Mangler is supposed to take place; or rather, it is clear it’s not supposed to take place at a precise point in time at all but in a grotesque nightmare space born out of the corrupting influences of power and money, a place and time that combines 40s movie accents, Italian gore, industrial gothic and random elements of the year the film was actually produced in with wild abandon. It’s not so much a place as a state of mind turned visual. Again, the political subtext about the way capitalism turns everything into ruined shadows of its own seems pretty clear to me.

But, my imaginary reader will ask (what ever did I do before I made you up?), is The Mangler entertaining? Well, to me it is, but I can see how somebody could get bored or annoyed by it easily. It is, after all artificial, grotesque, more than just a bit silly, and most problematic at all, it seems to be the kind of horror film that’s not actually putting much (or any) work into being frightening, or creepy, or suspenseful, using all its energy for the grotesque mood, to bring a bit of weirdness on screen, and to talk politics, so if you go in expecting to be frightened, or shocked, you’ll probably hate it with a passion, and you won’t be wrong about it.

Me, on the other hand, love to wallow in a film that’s all weirdness and grotesqueness all the time, and if the price for that is a horror not very effective at horrifying me, I’m more than willing to pay it, even on Halloween.

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In short: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

aka You Wish

aka Please Make It Stop

aka The Film That Shouldn’t Be

aka Whyyyyyyyyy!?

No, seriously, with this film, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise really reached the point where it’s difficult for me to pretend that what I have encountered is an actual movie made by actual people. Surely, “director” Rachel Talalay and “writer” Michael De Luca only gave their names for this one, while in truth, this piece of utter crap spontaneously came into being as an attempt by one or the other of the Great Old Ones to win themselves a few new followers via movie-induced insanity. To reach that goal, they made the worst Warner Brothers cartoon ever, full of scenes that play out like extended comedy skits that are about as funny as getting one’s head cut off, a script so lazy it does even less to set up its kill fodder than even the worst of the Friday the 13th films, barely a minute going by that isn’t offensively stupid.

Honestly, it’s hard to put into words how much I loathe this thing, and if I hadn’t put myself into the position of having to watch these slasher sequels to the bitter end, I’d have cut my losses after twenty minutes of this film-shaped object and never spoken or – hopefully – thought of it again. Alas, that wasn’t meant to be, therefore this blog post made out of bile and terrible jokes that still are much, much better than those The Final Nightmare makes. I’d add the usual sentence about the wasted ideas in this one but it is so obvious nobody involved in this production would actually have had the interest or possibly even the talent to make something of them I’m not blaming them for that. After all, you don’t blame your garbage can for being full of crap.

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In short: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

Brain A: “So, how are we going to get Freddy back up and running this time? We already had the fire-pissing dog.”

Brain B: “Well, then how about…how about Alice is pregnant and Freddy something-something tries to be reborn something-something through her unborn child?”

Brain A:”Yes! Something-something! Brilliant! And he can only be beaten back again if Alice finds the remains of Freddy’s mother! Because that totally makes sense!”

Brain B: “Now to the important bits. How many kills?”

This, or something very much like it must have happened during the first brainstorming sessions for the fifth and still not final A Nightmare on Elm Street movie. You really don’t need to know more about the plot than this, apart from the fact that Alice (still Lisa Wilcox, who also just happens to be the only actor on screen actually putting effort in, despite the film really not deserving any) has somehow managed to acquire a new group of friends none of whom know anything about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund in a performance so phoned-in I wouldn’t even be sure it isn’t a professional Englund double if he weren’t listed in the credits) or the absurdly high death rate among their age peer group even though they must have been on the same school as the last two bunches of Freddy victims, so Freddy has somebody to kill.

Needless to say, while I found more than enough to criticize about Nightmare movie numero four, this is the low point of the Nightmare series up to this point, with a script that just copies various plot beats from the films that came before it without adding anything to them or making any interesting changes – unless increasing their stupidity counts – but really only ever wants to get to the next special effects sequence with a now completely idiotic Freddy doing lame wise-cracks. Everything that isn’t an effects scene, neither director Stephen Hopkins nor screenwriter Leslie Bohem seem to have even the least interest in, leading to a shoddily written mess that probably thinks “It’s all happening in dreams” is an excuse for its complete lack of…well, an interesting plot, engaging characters or just simply good ideas. Too bad that excuse is already disproven by – at least – Nightmares one and three.

Even worse, the effects sequences in general aren’t even very good, with technical flaws meeting boring conceptions meeting a lack of imagination, style and humour that really turn this one into a film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Halloween: Resurrection or Jason takes Manhattan. And yet, it’s still not the worst of the NIghtmare on Elm Street films…

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

As you may have realized, the whole horrifying project of wasting my life on slasher sequels hasn’t finished by Halloween. Because I really need to watch a decent film from time to time, the rest of the series will continue sporadically during the next month or so.

The lives of Kristen (now played by one Tuesday Knight, who wins the stage name competition) and the other surviving Dream Warriors from the last movie have returned to their normal teenage lifestyles again, and at least in Kristen’s case to her old cliché group of friends, the black nerd girl, the tough chick, the male love interest, the male love interest for the final girl and the very obvious final girl Alice Johnson (Lisa Wilcox).

Alas, lately Kristen has begun dreaming of Freddy’s house on Elm Street again, dragging her dream warring buddies in with her, without Freddy ever actually appearing. That is, until Roland (Ken Sagoes) dreams of his dog pissing fire on Freddy’s grave. During the course of the following fifteen movie minutes or so, all of Freddy’s old enemies are dead, Alice has acquired Kristen’s dream powers, and Freddy starts using said dream powers to get at new victims, because – apparently we’re supposed to ignore film number two again, hooray – he can on paper only kill the original Elm Street kids, which doesn’t go for people he meets through Alice’s dreams, even though she isn’t one of the Elm Street kids, because…umm, no idea.

Anyway, shy and rather wimpy Alice acquires additional powers with each friendly soul Freddy sucks up in the ensuing killing spree, so our sartorially impaired undead serial killer might just bring about the means of his own destruction – if Alice ever gets around to striking back, that is.

Remember how I praised Dream Warriors for building on the first Nightmare movie’s foundations, broadening the mythology, and so on? Turns out, the earlier film’s virtues are a bit bigger than that, for Renny Harlin’s The Dream Master takes a comparable approach but does succeed with it far less. Sometimes, and I am pretty sure this is one of these cases, it’s all in the execution.

Just take the sampling of clichés Freddy slaughters in this movie and compare it with Kristen’s friends in the one before. Both groups of kids are painted in the broadest strokes, yet where the earlier film uses exactly the right strokes to give us some basically believable kids we might even not want to see die, Harlin’s movie just puts up the blandest of slasher meat troupes, giving everyone a single identifiable mark that doesn’t seem to be meant to make them interesting to watch interacting but that’s only there to set up one of the film’s “ironic” (if irony is a sledgehammer) death scenes.

And in these scenes lies another problem, because with this film, the killings have lost all terror and are only ever meant as visual gags, Freddy now finally having turned into the ugly guy in the stupid outfit who never fucking stops making bad one-liners, the film’s sympathy in these scenes shifting completely to him whenever he isn’t fighting the final girl. Needless to say, I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with that, and not in the good way I want to be made uncomfortable by through horror. The film’s lack of empathy with its own characters weakens its impact as a horror movie decisively, for if the film I’m watching can’t be bothered to feel for its own characters, why should I as a viewer do, and why should I be afraid for them or disturbed or shocked by what happens to them? The same goes for Freddy, who loses all of his menace this way.

Of course, as a revue of pretty great special effects and surreal ideas, there is fun to be had with the kill scenes but it’s an approach to horror film I find rather alienating and just not that interesting to watch.

These problems are certainly exacerbated by the film’s somewhat lazy seeming script, where not even the mandatory revival of its bad guy is prepared with any sort of care and thought. So, Freddy returns because a dream dog pisses fire on his grave, presumably to counter the effect of the holy water applied in the real world in the last film? How could anybody involved think that’s a good idea, or really, any idea at all? And that’s not a one-off: little of the film’s mythological background is thought through at all, with many an opportunity for meaningful connection of single parts wasted because – I couldn’t help but feel – the writers just couldn’t be bothered to think about the implications of things like Freddy’s connection to the Elm Street kids, Alice’s new role as Dream Master, and so on and so forth. I have difficulty reading it as anything else than the film, as franchise horror loves to do, just declaring its audience to be only interested in the kills and therefore putting little to no effort into anything else. Which – surprise! – just might attract only the part of the audience that really is only interested in the kills.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Just imagine Freddy’s Revenge had never happened. It’s easy to do: even its sequel does it.

Sleepy Springwood in Ohio has been hit by a series of teenage suicides. A handful of survivors (among them Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Rubin and Ken Sagoes) are now in the care of the local mental health facility, where Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson) and his colleagues try to cure them from a curious shared delusion. You see, the kids think that someone is trying to murder them in/through their dreams. Given what movie series they’re in, they’re not delusional at all. Nobody on the mental health professional side, despite not really following the evil psychiatrist model at all, seems to be all that confused by delusions shared before the kids ever met, curiously enough.

Fortunately for the kids, new intern Nancy Thompson (again Heather Langenkamp) arrives and very quickly realizes that she didn’t banish the nightmare-haunting serial killer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) as well as she thought she did in the first movie, and he’s still hunting down the Elm Street kids to make them pay for the sins of their parents. Nancy, after a bit of dithering on his side even with the help of Gordon, tries her best to protect the kids and get rid of Freddy, but in the end she and the kids will need to face Freddy inside of his own domain. Fortunately, they have dream superpowers.

To me, Chuck Russell’s Dream Warriors is an absolute model of how to do a horror franchise sequel: keeping as much as possible from the backstory and the construction of the supernatural world it occurs in from its predecessor (remember, part 2 didn’t happen), and using this as the basis to broaden these elements and take some of the original’s ideas further.

So unlike the second film Dream Warriors really keeps Freddy as a dream demon with only one moment late in the movie where he breaks through into reality on his own, and that one actually a sensible (by the logic of a world in which dream demons exist, of course) consequence of a plot development, namely Freddy nearing his implied goal of truly becoming part of the waking world which again is a consequence of a lot of dead kids. It’s a thoughtful approach to worldbuilding that is – I can say with conviction after the last few weeks – pretty much unheard of in the world of the slasher sequel where the last question anybody involved in making the films seems to ask is “what more do we have to say about the themes and characters of the first film, and what can we do with them that is new?”.

For this alone, Dream Warriors would deserve praise, but its major achievement for me is how interested it is in the telling detail and how important it is for any film to get it right. So, for example, the kids aren’t just killed off in brutal, surreally nightmarish ways by Freddy but killed off in ways actually connected to their personalities. And while these personalities aren’t drawn very deeply, there’s enough here to actually make most of the victims a little more than just a number on the kill tally. In fact – as far as I can remember – this might be last Nightmare movie whose sympathies lie squarely with Freddy’s victims. This doesn’t just make the film ethically more pleasant (because really, films that bank on an audience identifying with a serial and child killer because he’s good at wise-cracking – which he actually isn’t - are at least a bit icky) but also makes Freddy a more impressive monster, a creature that doesn’t just kill you but kill you with deeply intimate knowledge. Again, the film isn’t subtle about these things but it is putting much more thought in than it would have needed to, and is rewarded by becoming highly engaging.

Lest you think the film is a rather earnest piece of horror filmmaking, there’s also the undeniable fact that it is also a cheesy and silly (but not stupid) bit of 80s horror that delights in comic book ideas of horror. The dream deaths are fitting the characters perfectly, for example, but they are also decidedly on the silly side, with them being slightly creepy fun right out of a cartoonist’s conception of nightmares clearly higher on the film’s agenda than actually frightening anyone in the audience. Fortunately the murders are executed with technical finesse and just the right amount of distance, hitting the curious spot where the gruesome becomes silly and vice versa with sure aim. If that’s already too much silliness for you, you’ll probably die when confronted with the kids’ dream superpowers (I’ll just say “The WIzard Master”) but again, it’s the right kind of silly and also seem to be fitting representations of the problems of these specific teenagers.

In fact, the only aspect of Dream Warriors I don’t find either highly enjoyable or surprisingly clever is the way of Freddy’s eventual dispatch via the age old “burying his body on hallowed ground”. Sure, it’s a classic but there’s little in it that resonates with Freddy’s nature, nor does it work as well with his origin story as it should. On the plus side, this part of the story gives us an expositional ghost nun, and a scene of church robbery by a rogue health professional, so I wouldn’t say it’s a total wash.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

After years of the place standing empty, the Walshs move into the Thompsons’ old house. That seems to be enough to get Freddy Krueger (as always Robert Englund) going again, and soon Walsh son Jesse (Mark Patton) is plagued by nightmares and grows whiny and sullen, the air conditioning seems to go crazy because Freddy’s new thing is heat, and later a toaster will burn and a budgie will explode.

Eventually, Freddy manages to take control over Jesse’s body from time to time, using it to kill his S&M loving (with more implied) teacher (Marshall Bell) and later on just bursting out of Jesse’s body in what is a at least a fun special effect to do a bit more killing. Will Jesse’s new girlfriend’s Lisa (Kim Myers) manage to save him by talking about love?

At the beginning of its life, this very quickly shot sequel to Wes Craven’s best film (and true classic) got a particularly bad time; years later there was a minor critical reassessment thanks to some critics reading the film as being about the horrific experience of growing up queer in the 80s in the US. I think there certainly is something to be said about that reading, but I don’t think the film applies the subtext all that successfully, consequently or coherently, which only leaves us with an at best mediocre sequel to a film that actually knew what it was doing.

Ironically, it would be just as easy to interpret the film as using Freddy Krueger to tell us a warning story about the perceived evils of homosexuality, something that can only be cured by a good woman, giving the whole thing a particularly unpleasant conservative bend. That both interpretations fit the movie points at one of its core problems as a film actually being about something behind people getting killed by Freddy: that neither director Jack Sholder nor writer David Chaskin seem to be willing to commit to the subtext and their supposed themes, to think through what they are trying to say, instead of just adding signifiers but then not do enough (or anything) with what could be.

Not that not doing enough is a problem only with the film’s subtext. Textually, it’s an indifferent sequel to the first NIghtmare at best, blunderingly replacing that film’s strongest elements (Freddy only being able to act through dreams) with some random stuff about possession and exploding budgies, either not realizing or not caring that this turns a unique and individual supernatural menace into some random slasher with equally random super powers. From time to time, the film stumbles upon a potent nightmarish and potentially meaningful image like Freddy’s birth out of Jesse’s body but never really arrives at the point where these things become more than just interesting images. A lot of the film’s better effects are just random, like the human-faced dogs guarding Freddy’s home base from intruding girlfriends. These things sure look impressive but they have no connection at all to anything else in the movie and can’t even be excused as being random dream flotsam because they don’t appear in a dream. As you can see, the film never bothers to really establish the connections between nightmare and real world as well as the first one did, either.

The same goes for the film’s final confrontation between Lisa and Freddy where the power of love – I suppose – wins the day, I assume because love totally works against nightmares? Seriously, I don’t have the faintest idea what the mechanics of the climax are supposed to be, or how they relate to anything the film established (or tried to) before. In the end, while it’s no Halloween: Resurrection in badness, it’s difficult for me to see anything more in Freddy’s Revenge than a film made by people who didn’t at all know what they were actually trying to achieve and consequently ended up making very little but promises.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,slasher,jack sholder,mark patton,kim myers,robert englund

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Black Swarm (2007)

Jane Kozik (Sarah Allen) has chosen a very bad time to return with her daughter Kelsey (Rebecca Windheim) to her hometown Black Stone to become (deputy?) sheriff. Ten years earlier, Jane left town after her exterminator husband Dan died in a wasps' nest explosion (seriously). There's a lot of backstory about her actually being in love with Dan's twin brother Devin (Sebastien Roberts) - now the town's exterminator - and running away from her hurt feelings for him that will become important soon enough.

These soap operatics fortunately do have to play second fiddle behind Black Stone's new, lethal problem. A swarm of rather evil genetically modified wasps has made their home in town, stinging people to death and turning them into what the film likes to call drones but what clearly are wasp zombies (wombies?). Curiously, it takes quite some time until someone realizes that it isn't normal for, say, the town priest to stumble around town while staring and making wasp noises, and once people realize what's going on, it might already be too late.

Because a simple mutant wasp swarm with assorted zombies just isn't enough, there's also a mysterious mad scientist (Robert Englund) out for redemption, and a helpful entomologist with plans even more frightening than her botox-caused (seriously, movie land, Botox doesn't make you look younger, but more like a corpse) facial paralysis (Jayne Heitmeyer).

How's a couple ever going to find the time to get back together again, as SyFy Channel law commands? Or are the rules different when a movie is even more Canadian than many other SyFy films?

By now, I like to imagine all SyFy Channel movies are taking place on a slightly bizarre alternative Earth where all divorcees get back together again after monsters have shown them the errors of their ways, the military prefers killer wasps to drones (not the zombie version), where every newspaper is full of headlines like "Battle Dogs kill hundreds in New York" and "Prophecy of Nostradamus averted by the magical standing stones of Native Americans", and where random working class people are the deadliest monster destruction force imaginable. It's a great place to visit at least once a week, as long as you don't have to live there as a character who dies after the second commercial break.

Even for a film taking place on SyFy Earth, Black Swarm is particularly silly, needing a viewer to swallow things like an evil military agent working undercover as an entomologist (it's rather Delta Green of her, now that I think about it), killer wasps as a great idea for biological warfare, and large wasps' nest shaped holes in the plot. Like, how did the wasps get to Black Stone? Do we have to imagine Englund's Eli as a kind of Richard Kimble figure not following a one-armed man but reports of wasps? Wait, I'd actually like to imagine that! And there's the point where Black Swarm's immense silliness starts to pay off, for the film is as entertaining and fun as it is silly, taking to the place a lot of the better SyFy movies inhabit where the silly also just happens to be the awesome like a pig takes to mud, never spending a single second to apologize for its nature but instead wallowing in it, for better rather than worse.

How shall I put it? This is a film that has frigging wasp zombies, and is clearly proud of that idea and adds another layer of fun to it by particularly showing the standby character types of small town cliché (and authority) - a cop, a priest, a mayor and an ice cream man - in zombie form. I bet Stephen King is a bit miffed he didn't think of that one first. The early appearances of the wasp zombies are even rather creepy, a mood Black Swarm loses once it really gets into its groove of all out (well, as all out as director David Winning can manage on the budget) exploding van versus wasp action, Englund doing a surprisingly well-weighed bit of overacting (and, I assume, relishing the opportunity to not be the bad guy for once) every friend of subtle overacting will appreciate, and increasingly weird plot wrinkles.

Did I already use the word "awesome"?

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