A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
The years have been unkind
Halloween's many sequels didn't diminish its effect. Neither did those of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, nor (to a lesser degree) Friday The 13th. But poor, poor Freddy Krueger was so watered-down and kiddie-fied over the years that it's hard to view the original film without the taint of its sequels. This was one of my favorite horror movies once - nowadays, I can recommend it, but no longer feel so much enthusiasm. It's just hard to look at the villain and not think of him as the guy who speared a little tiny screaming pepperoni-head from a soul-pizza and said "Mmmm! Soul food!"
Granted, upon its initial release, A Nightmare On Elm Street was pretty fresh and frightening, and can't be blamed for the slew of imitators, sequels, and the fact that ultimately, Freddy Krueger was merchandised to children. But some movies, like the above, stand the test of time better than others under similar circumstances. A stronger movie would make the unbelievably silly sequels (like parts 4 and 6 in particular) look like the shameless ripoff fodder they are. Alas, while this movie is well-made and often frightening, it's heavily flawed, and those flaws become so apparent that after a while it starts looking an awful lot like the scads of dreck that ripped it off.
Freddy Krueger, of course, is played by Robert Englund - the role that made Englund the closest thing to a widely-known "horror movie star" to be introduced in my lifetime, and probably yours too. Freddy's a nasty fellow, hideously burned, always wearing the same red and green sweater, hat (fedora? I don't know my hats), and a nasty glove outfitted with four-inch razors on the end of each finger. (trivia: the Spokane airport has a glass case where they showcase all sorts of confiscated weapons, and one such item was a glove just like this, with steak knife blades. Other weapons included hand grenades, knives, guns, and a morning star)
Freddy is making mincemeat out of a group of teens in an L.A. suburb, but not in the streets - in their dreams. Having so far failed to master the technique of lucid dreaming, these teens run into Fred, run, scream, and die. Center amongst these teens is Nancy (Heather Langenkamp), whose mom (Ronee Blakely) is a drunk and father (John Saxon) is a disbelieving cop. Time's running out before Fred catches up to her, and she can't stay awake forever. What's a girl to do?
A Nightmare On Elm Street starts out well, with two remarkable sequences - one of Freddy constructing his famed glove (the audio of which is sampled in the intro for a Children Of Bodom son), and the other of him chasing Tina (Amanda Wyss) around in her dream. I never noticed until this viewing that in this dream, Tina starts out at the end of a long tunnel with a bright light behind her. Needless to say, she runs away from the light. The scenes are atmospheric and tense, the first one in particular building up a really sludgy sense of dread. But soon after, the problems of the film become apparent.
To be perfectly blunt, the acting in this movie stinks to high heaven, Blakely in particular. Saxon alone comes across as half-credible, along with Englund who's just doing something else altogether; everybody else just sucks, including Johnny Depp, who would go on to have a fairly diverse and daring career. How could such a talented guy screw up such an undemanding role? Well, he does.
The dialogue ranges from lame to excruciating, the music can get pretty awful in its more energetic moments, and this has possibly the worst "it was all a dream/no it's not/yes it was/no you're really insane" ending I've ever seen. This actually compounds the folly of an already terrible ending, which uses the ol' "if you refuse to believe in it, you take its power away!" which I really hate. And I still have no idea what the hell that's supposed to be that happens to Nancy's mom. Maybe it's one of those "you're not SUPPOSED to get it" things. (I also don't get the thing where Nancy's hair starts turning white, and a 20-year-old Langenkamp looks into a mirror and sobs "God, I look twenty years old!")
Now, it sounds like all I'm doing is bitching. But I did say that I would recommend this movie, and I stand by that.
One thing that writer-director Wes Craven really pulls off is making all the signifiers of teenage life into objects of menace. The phone, the walk home from school, the parents who mean well but think you're on crack, study hall, the ride in your friend's car, to say nothing of actually getting the house to yourself and your girlfriend. The teens in this movie are supposed to be about fifteen, which is pretty young even for this genre.
If you're better than I am at blocking out the sequels, Freddy is actually a fairly imposing villain here. Sure, he gets some one-liners, but they're less the macabre puns of later films than genuine attempts to scare ("Please, God!" screams a victim. "This," says Freddy, raising his claws, "Is God!"). The film's low budget doesn't give him the opportunity to show off the FX razzle-dazzle of later films, but that helps keep him in the shadows where he belongs, and the monstrous things he does - elongating his arms to span the entire alley he's chasing a victim down, for example - are more effective for it. He's not always that scary here, even for the uninitiated - note one scene where he dons a "mask" (looks like a paper bag) and cries out in Tina's voice "Save me, from...", removes the mask, and says "FREDDY!" C'mon, that wouldn't scare a four-year-old.
I also like how the film captures some of the wonky non-logic of nightmares. It doesn't really get into it, the way the far superior Dreamscape does, but there are a lot of cool ideas floating around in here - like the unexpected, unexplained passage of a sheep, stairs melting when you least want them to, you know, stuff like that.
However poor of an actress Langenkamp is, Nancy is nevertheless a spirited heroine that refuses to just stand there and scream while she gets clawed. She even boobytraps her home (with exploding lightbulbs and sledgehammers wired to hit Freddy right in the nuts) to protect herself. (I always wanted to try that trick with the lightbulb but I'm pretty sure I'd blow off my arms trying to assemble it)
A couple of the more gruesome scenes are really spectacularly done - like one scene where a hapless victim is slashed up by an invisible Freddy while being pushed up the wall and onto the ceiling. And, of course, who could forget the famed scene where one guy is sucked into the bed and vomited out in a geyser of guts? You just can't not like the geyser of guts!
Good music from Charles Bernstein, too, at least when it's quiet and spooky instead of loud and drum-heavy - anyone else remember Will Smith's song "A Nightmare On My Street", where he ripped it off, back when people still called him The Fresh Prince? Man, I'd love to hear that today. I'd probably howl with embarrassment for everyone who helped make it a hit.
A Nightmare On Elm Street of course spawned five and a half sequels (the "half" being New Nightmare, which is sort of a semi-sequel), and an anthology TV series called Freddy's Nightmares, which I never saw any episodes from. I remember seeing the novelizations of parts 3, 4, and 5 in an omnibus edition - and the omnibus was still only about 150 pages long.
The 2-tape set I've got from Anchor Bay features outtakes and unused scenes, like one where Nancy's mom reveals that Back In The Day, Freddy killed the brother Nancy never knew she had. I'm not sure why that was omitted; I suspect Craven felt that giving those particular parents (the only ones we get to know in the film) TOO much of a reason to participate in the vigilante backstory would make their actions a little too sympathetic, making less fitting Freddy's post-mortal retribution, hinted at by the preacher guy in one character's funeral scene. Not that Freddy didn't get what he deserved, but the involvement of concerned but yet-unaffected parents comes across differently than that of grieving parents of murdered children.
Yeah, it's a good movie, flaws and all. But I still hear Freddy saying "Mmmm, soul food!" I wish I could block all that from my memory, and have back the movie that scared the living crap out of me as a fifteen-year-old, scared me so bad that I was actually afraid of how bad it'd scare me when I rented it a second time.