BEFORE: Getting close to the end of October now - I lost a week of course, by going to North Carolina so it feels like the month went by very quickly, and losing shifts at both jobs of course didn't help me out, but it is what it is, and we've got four days until Halloween. I've got one shift at the new job tomorrow and I'm at the theater on Halloween because nobody else wants to work that day, the kids just want to go out and party.
Rooney Mara carries over from "The Discovery". This is one of those film franchises that I have left very much alone over the years - in the horror genre, I first focused on the "classic" films, going back to the original Dracula and Frankenstein movies and such. Then I started to watch a bunch of more modern horror films, but I did not make it a top priority to cover the period in-between, the 1980's and 1990's films like "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" and "Child's Play" and such. There's still time, I can get to them when I choose or when I start running out of other films, but I don't know that I'll ever run out of horror films, the list seems to be endless. Next year's schedule is kind of set, so I'll have to play it by ear.
But I've got the time and the linking to watch the re-boot of the "Freddy Krueger" franchise, I'm sure the older films will always be available, but that's a long-term plan. I did use to work at a movie theater in Massachusetts that was located on an Elm Street, and I was working there when I think the fourth film in the franchise was released, and people went nuts, the crowd was tremendous because everyone wanted to visit the theater on Elm Street to watch it.
THE PLOT: The spectre of a disfigured man haunts the children of the parents who murdered him, stalking and killing them in their dreams.
AFTER: This feels like another case of a movie franchise that lost its way at some point - when you're frantically re-booting it and re-casting your lead actor at the same time, that's a really bad sign. (Are you listening, James Gunn?). When they stop numbering the movies, that's another bad sign - I know there's a school of thought that says people won't go see a film with a "3" or a "4" in it, especially if they haven't seen the films numbered 1 & 2, but that should be an added incentive to make them better, or make the story so relevant that people simply can't miss one! But no, that's crazy - instead you can almost imagine the studio meetings they have when the installments start to bomb, let's STOP numbering them so people will get confused and also new fans will be more likely to jump in at the fourth one, and then if THAT doesn't work, let's just scrap the whole thing and wait a couple years, then reboot it all. How long before another actor can play Sherlock Holmes or Victor Frankenstein or Luke Skywalker?
The "Nightmare on Elm Street" series is a classic example, they numbered the first five films, then the wave of reboots started - "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare", "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" and then "Freddy vs. Jason". Then things got so bad that Robert Englund didn't want to play Freddy any more, hell, he must have made enough money already, so the next attempt at a solution was to scrap everything and start over, with a film that incorporated elements from some of the previous films, but also with a new twist or two, stripped down and simplified, no continuity to keep track of, back to basics. Simplified and more complicated at the same time, I think the only horror franchise with a more convoluted history is the "Halloween" films, and I've been afraid to get into those also. But hey, never say never, I once said no to the "Twilight" films and the "Scream" films, but then I became a regular customer.
The linking says I need to deal with Freddy Krueger, if I want to continue with the chain. I've learned to listen to the linking, but still, slasher films just aren't really my thing. The first few killings here are a set-up for the big confrontation down the road, I get that. But it still feels like a waste to umm, kill off a couple of the biggest stars they cast near the beginning of the film. There's a precedent, sure, they killed off Angie Dickinson in the early part of "Dressed to Kill" and Deborah Shelton in the first half of "Body Double", I guess by the end of a horror movie you may been down to just a few characters, anyway, they're works of attrition after all.
They never really say here what exactly Freddy Krueger is, did they cover this somewhere in the first 8 movies? Ghost, demon, spectre, how exactly are we supposed to classify this, or does it just never come up? He's got the power to attack teenagers through the collective dreamscape, a thing that was also proposed in "Dream Scenario", but that came later. He's a variation on the boogeyman, or Nightmare from the Marvel comics, and if he manages to kill you in your dream about him, then you're slashed up and dead in real life, too. It hardly seems fair, how the hell are the teenagers supposed to counter him? They try here with various ADHD drugs like Ritalin and then later on, adrenaline, however this only sets up a situation where the characters start taking "micronaps", and then Freddy's got a toehold in the door again. Apparently if you don't sleep for three or four days, supposedly you can then fall asleep at the drop of a hat and NOT be aware that you're in the dreamscape. Whoopsie. Quention even manages to take a micro-nap during swim practice, which is, umm, not a great idea and maybe also not possible.
The film really only has one gag, which it uses again and again - that is "HA! You thought you were awake, but really you were asleep, and now here comes Freddy!" OK, sure, high school kids fall asleep during class, I've done that. But here they fall asleep everywhere, while eating dinner or watching TV or while driving, which is dangerous for at least two reasons. Thanks to MTV and cell phones and social media, all of these kids have the attention span of a goldfish, that may be part of the problem. And then I think a couple times these kids take a micronap while they're already asleep, so then they're two levels in, like in "Inception". It's a vicious cycle, they fall asleep and dream about Freddy, after a close call they're so afraid they CAN'T sleep, so then they stay up and drink more coffee but that only makes them more tired, so they have to crash, and we're back to the original problem. Look, I've worked long days at the theater during film festivals, and I've been so jacked up on free ice coffee from the pre-screening reception that I go to sleep right after I get home, but then after a four-hour evening nap, good luck getting back to sleep at 2 am, right? Might as well just watch another movie at that point.
The original Freddy was a child-killer, but they took the extra step here and made him an (alleged) child molester, he was apparently the handyman and gardener for a day-care center or pre-school, and the parents got together and solved the problem via vigilante justice, burning down the school building with him in it. This way the kids didn't have to testify against him, and the parents could focus on getting their kids to forget about any incidents. Sure, that works, until the handy-man's vengeful spirit targets those kids in the dreamscape - but then I'm not really sure who I should be rooting for here, I know it shouldn't be the child molester, but if not him, then whose side am I on?
I think there must be other reasons why this film was problematic, note that they haven't made any more sequels since the reboot - but there is talk now about rebooting the whole franchise yet again. There was talk of making Freddy innocent but falsely accused of his crimes, which would have made his killings more heroic, but then, NITPICK POINT, why would he be targeting the kids instead of their parents, you know, the ones who killed him back then? I mean, eventually he kind of gets there, I'm just wondering why he didn't START there. I mean, everything is ultimately the parents' fault, right? This freaking generation of post-millennial teens blame everything on their parents - "My parents didn't pay enough attention to me!" "My parents paid too much attention to me!" "My parents gave me ADHD!" "My parents gave me autism!" "My parents were too strict!" "My parents weren't strict enough!" "My parents killed the gardener at my pre-school because I got molested!" Suddenly I'm starting to wonder if Freddy had the right idea in the first place... JK!
Directed by Samuel Bayer
Also starring Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "The Union"), Kyle Gallner (last seen in "Scream" (2022)), Katie Cassidy (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Thomas Dekker (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Kellan Lutz (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Clancy Brown (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Connie Britton (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Lia Mortensen, Christian Stolte (last seen in "Novocaine"), Kurt Naebig (last seen in "Road to Perdition"), Kyra Krumins, Brayden Coyer, Max Holt, Andrew Fiscella (last seen in "Gotti"), Bob Kizer, Peter A. Kelly (last seen in "Contagion"), Jason Brandstetter, Rob Riley (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Parker Bagley, Tommy Bartlett, Aaron Yoo (last seen in "10 Years"), Julianna Damm, Don Robert Cass, Scott Lindvall, Dominick Coviello, Jennifer Robers, Tania Randall, Logan Stalzer, Christopher Woods, Christine Crawley, Charles Tiedje
RATING: 4 out of 10 prescription refills
No comments:
Post a Comment