I usually don’t put the director’s name in the titles when I write up a review. For instance, I didn’t list the title of Halloween as “John Carpenter’s Halloween” even though that’s what it says on the opening credits. What makes Wes Craven’s New Nightmare different is the fact that Craven directed, produced, and stars in the flick. Also, Craven says he has several nightmares during the movie, so this literally could be called Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
I’ll tell you one thing; I liked his Old Nightmare a Hell of a lot better.
Heather Langenkamp (the chick who played
New Nightmare was Wes Craven’s warm up to Scream. He’s clearly having fun being self-referential and playing with the conventions of the horror movie. While Craven’s approach is ambitious and potentially fascinating, the results are overlong and flawed.
This movie came out shortly after The Player, right when it was hip to throw in a lot of celebrity cameos playing themselves. Langenkamp does a fine job at playing herself but Craven is kinda hammy. I liked seeing Robert Englund as himself too, yet I was a tad disappointed by his “New” Freddy performance. He just wasn’t very menacing (that had more to do with his needlessly redesigned make-up and cheesy looking retrofitted claw) and the padding they used to bulk him up is obvious.
The idea of Freddy coming after his creators sounded great on paper but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. After Craven expertly sets up the premise, he doesn’t do a whole lot with it. He spends more time psychobabbling about it than actually producing the scares, which is kind of unfortunate. He also unnecessarily hits us over the head with all the bedtime stories allegories. (Like Freddy being killed by getting shoved into an oven a la Hansel and Gretel.)
It doesn’t work completely yet it has moments where you go, “Oh damn!” I think my favorite scene comes when Freddy’s Special FX animatronic glove gets a mind of its own and slices up some crew members. The twist on Tina’s paint-the-room-red death from the original also has quite a kick to it too.
The extremely bloated running time (112 minutes) sabotages what should’ve been a dynamite concept. The subplot about the overbearing doctor and the snarky nurses trying to keep Heather from her kid is more a little grating and slows the flick down just when it should be ramping up. Craven also gives us one too many scenes of Heather waking up and finding her son sleepwalking for any sane person to endure. Speaking of the kid, Miko Hughes was great in Pet Sematary but he gives one of the worst child performances in history in this flick. He almost single-handedly ruins the whole deal with his incessant screaming.
I appreciate the fact that Craven at least TRIED to reinvent the wheel though. Ultimately, in a horror franchise as popular as this one, it’s better to aim low and succeed than to shoot for the moon and miss. Wes Craven's New Nightmare is the most interesting of the Nightmare series but it also happens to be the least entertaining. Still, if you ever wanted to see someone shove a moray eel in Freddy’s eye, this is the flick for you.
<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie: Hellraiser>
Master of horror Wes Craven is steadily going through his entire oeuvre and producing (fairly decent) remakes of his past films with edgy European filmmakers at the helm. First there was The Hills Have Eyes, then The Hills Have Eyes 2, and now we get a remake of Craven’s immortal Last House on the Left from director Dennis Iliadis. (Expect Craven to return with remakes of Shocker and The People Under the Stairs some time soon.) I don’t think that this flick is as good as either of the Hills remakes, but you know what though folks, I’m going to give it a Mulligan since the original Last House was itself a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring to begin with.
The basic formula is the same. Two girls get raped and stabbed by a vicious maniac named Krug (Garrett Dillahunt) and his crew of psychos. After murdering one girl and leaving the other for dead, the killers seek refuge in the house of the poor girl’s parents (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter). When the folks find out what the killers did to their girl, they pull out all the stops to get some good old-fashioned revenge.
Some changes have been made from Craven’s flick. In this one, the daughter DOESN’T DIE, which gives the parents’ vengeance a little stronger kick because they are more or less avenging an assault on their daughter instead of her death. (They don’t even ask what happened to the other girl, but oh well.) This is actually a lot closer to Bergman’s film, except nobody speaks Swedish in this one. The couple also has an additional back story about having a son that died the year before too. By having the daughter be merely wounded; it gives them an incentive to save her for fear of losing another child.
While these changes are fine by me, unfortunately the flick has been heavily sanitized from its original incarnation and features none of the squirm-in-your-seat moments that made the first film one of the greatest horror classics of all time. Yes, Craven’s gut-wrenching classic has been watered down and glossed over for mainstream consumption, but think of it this way: A few glasses of straight Scotch will get you fucked up fast. A few glasses of Scotch and water will leave you pleasantly buzzed. If you want to get fucked up, watch the original. If you want a nice buzz that won’t leave you with a lingering hangover, check out this flick.
Sure, this version of Last House is missing David Hess (Seriously, how could you top Hess’ performance?), the infamous “Piss yourself!” scene, Krug carving his name into his victim’s chest, the chisel dream sequence, the chainsaw, and the chomped off penis. What it does have though is a hand in the garbage disposal, a claw hammer to the back of the head, and some pretty gnarly moments of impromptu surgery.
And folks, it has the MICROWAVE. Trust me, when everybody comes out of the theater, they won’t be talking about the performances, the rape scene, or the chick who gets shot in the eyeball. They will be talking about the microwave. Did you ever leave lasagna in the microwave for too long? You know what happens, right? KA-BLOOEY! Yeah, now imagine it’s somebody’s head. All I’m going to say is, too bad it wasn’t in 3-D.
Is the new Last House a pimple on the ass of the original 1972 classic? Hell no! Is it a better than average revenge flick? You betcha. For anyone who bitches incessantly about how Craven lost his balls on this one needs to follow this advice: “Keep Repeating: It’s Only a Remake… It’s Only a Remake… It’s Only a Remake.”
The Video Vacuum Salutes The Last House on the Left for being The Best Horror Remake of the Past 8 Weeks.
Craven films the humiliation of the two girls with an unflinching eye (the “piss your pants” scene is especially unnerving) and doesn’t hold back on the killer’s comeuppance either. While the film has been criticized for the use of the two bumbling policemen (one of whom is Martin Kove from Karate Kid fame), I find those scenes with the cops to be expertly done. I mean we’ve just witnessed two girls’ violent degradation and slaying at the hands of madmen and then Craven shows us two bumbling buffoon cops who are actually pretty funny (the scene where they try to hitch a ride on a truck full of chickens is priceless). Any director that can balance spine tingling terror and broad comedy within the span of two minutes is doing something right.
David Hess is excellent as the twisted Krug and would go on to play equally demented psychos in such films as Hitch-Hike and The House on the Edge of the Park. He also provided the eerie music and the stirring theme, “The Road Leads to Nowhere”. As well known and talked about as this film is though, the trailers for the film are equally notorious. They urged theatergoers “To Avoid Fainting Keep Repeating It’s Only a Movie… It’s Only A Movie!” and the clever tagline was later stolen and used by other lesser horror flicks. This film is also notable in that the creators would go on to create two of the biggest names in horror history. Producer Sean S. Cunningham later directed the seminal Friday the 13th which spawned premiere screen psycho Jason Vorhees and Craven later gave birth to the equally popular Freddy Kruger when he directed A Nightmare on Elm Street.
AKA: Grim Company. AKA: Krug and Company.
Arguably Wes Craven’s best work, it became one of the most influential and popular movies of the 80’s and made a cult star out of Robert Englund and turned Freddy Krueger into one of the most instantly recognizable screen monsters since Frankenstein.
The premise is simple. A scarred child molester dressed in a ragged red and green sweater and brandishing a homemade glove of razor sharp fingernails stalks the dreams of the teenage children of the townsfolk who took vigilante justice into their own hands and burned him alive. If he kills them in their dreams, they die for real.
Krueger doesn’t use any of his patented wisecracks (lines like “THIS is God!” deliver chills rather than chuckles) in this one and relies solely on the kid’s fears and some stark nightmarish imagery to scare the wits out of them (and the audience).
Heather Langenkamp stars as Nancy the girl who’s the main target of Freddy since her sheriff dad (John Saxon) and lush mom (a way over the top Ronee Blakley) were his main executioners. (“He’s dead honey because mommy killed him!”) After her best friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) is brutally murdered (on the ceiling) in her sleep, her boyfriend Rod (Nick Corri) is blamed. When he’s arrested and falls asleep in his cell Krueger gets to him and makes him hang himself in his sleep. After having a run in with Freddy when she dozes off in English class, Nancy figures out the only way to stay safe is to stay awake. Nancy’s mom (“Stop drinking that damn coffee!”) makes her go to see a doctor (the future voice of Roger Rabbit Charles Fleischer) and when Freddy attacks her in her sleep she awakens holding his hat. Knowing that she can pull things out of her dreams, she plots to bring Freddy out into the real world where he can be stopped once and for all. She warns her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp in his film debut) to be careful but after Freddy turns him into a geyser of blood, she goes mano y mano with him in the final fiery confrontation. Freddy gets the last laugh however, and would go on to star in seven sequels.
Craven yet again proves himself to be a master of creating unforgettable images (Freddy’s elongated arms, the glove coming up between Nancy’s legs in the tub, Freddy slowly coming through the wall, etc.). Although the climax is scary and fast paced, it's riddled with gaps in logic. For instance, when Nancy picks up her phone and Freddy’s tongue is on the other line (delivering the immortal line “I’m your boyfriend now Nancy!”), she’s clearly awake and in the “real world” where tongue wagging Alexander Graham Bells certainly don’t exist. She also rigs her incredibly improbable and complicated Rube Goldbergian booby traps in under “20 minutes”. (Did John Hughes see this before he wrote Home Alone?) The only way to view the ending of Nightmare without giving yourself a logic headache is to take the last 20 minutes as one long dream sequence. I think Craven purposely made it out to be one long nightmare anyway and those nitpicks don’t detract from Craven’s terrifying vision.
The scene where Nancy watches The Evil Dead on TV was a reference to that movie using a torn poster from Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. Evil Dead director Sam Raimi later one upped Craven by tossing in a cameo of Freddy’s glove in Evil Dead 2.
Bobby Houston briefly returns from the first film to relate a flashback to his psychiatrist and set up the plot. He’s invented some sort of “super formula fuel” for motorcycles so a group of his dirt bike riding friends head out cross country to a bike race to sell it. (We almost get to see Houston cash his paycheck and leave.) Of course the teens take a shortcut through the desert and get stalked by more mutant cannibals.
The biggest problem with the movie is that whereas the first film was effective in it’s portrayal of a family coming together under dire circumstances; the sequel features the usual assortment of annoying teens and stereotypical black characters. (Even the 2006 remake was smart enough to maintain the family dynamic of the original.) You may have seen irritating kids in horror movies before, but these kids will grate on your damn nerves. If it isn’t the idiotic dirt bike riding kids that will drive you nuts, the blind chick with supernatural hearing (Honestly this chick could give Daredevil a run for his money.) will. All the teens are dumbfucks whose only purpose is to get killed. They aren’t even convincing doing that. The ones that do survive have to rely on Beast to save them, and considering this is 8 years after the first movie, Beast has aged 56 years in dog years and is probably getting too little old for this shit. Oh and if you thought that Bobby’s “super formula fuel” will somehow figure into the climax and blow somebody up, you guessed right.
This was a big comedown from the original and coming off the heels of arguably Craven’s greatest picture, A Nightmare on Elm Street, it’s even more disappointing and started off his post Nightmare slide that continued next with Deadly Friend. The movie reeks of someone trying to make a fast buck and seems more in line with a Dimension Studios direct to DVD sequel than an honest to goodness sequel from a master of horror.
Michael Berryman once again plays Pluto the bald headed mutant who now leads the family. (He miraculously survived his Achilles being ripped out by Beast in the first film.) In the original, his bald bulking stature was scary and intense. In this one, all bets are off as soon as he opens his mouth and tries to speak dialogue. Also the mutants attacks in the original were well organized assaults that left the family (and the audience) reeling. This time the killers just kinda pick everyone off one by one or rely on booby traps. The scene where Pluto steals a motorbike and the teens give chase on their bikes using the super fuel is hilarious. The new member of the family “Reaper” is an unintentionally goofy lumbering lug who isn’t scary in the least. Janus Blythe also returns as the reformed member of the cannibal tribe who’s now stalked by her mutated siblings and co-star Kevin Blair was later in Friday the 13th Part VII. Speaking of Friday, this whole movie owes more to a bad Friday rip-off than a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes. And composer Harry Manfredini’s music sounds exactly like his score from Friday the 13th. I’m not kidding.
Houston also edited/directed the American version of Shogun Assassin.
It was worth it!
Cursed is the new King of Cheesy Horror Movies for the New Millennium. Craven, working in full on Deadly Friend mode, delivers the goofiest Doubt Your Sanity Flick since Death Wish V.
The plot starts out with a gypsy telling hotties Mya and Shannon (American Pie) Elizabeth they will die. Of course, when Christina Ricci and her brother, (Jesse Eisenberg), are going down Mulholland Drive, they hit a big beast and crash into Elizabeth’s car. Then a big fucking werewolf drags her away, but not before biting Ricci and her brother. Ricci, who works for The Craig Kilborn Show (Who also appears, as himself. See how dated this movie is already?), and a publicist, who looks like a human skeleton and works for none other than Chachi himself, Scott Baio, fight over Joshua (Urban Legend) Jackson. Mya even dresses up in a cat suit to get his attention, but gets chased through a parking garage by an extremely pissed off anthropomorphic werewolf, that eats her in an elevator.
Meanwhile, dorky Eisenberg goes on the infonet and finds out all about werewolves and shows Ricci he’s got a pentagram on his palm, which means he’s a werewolf. She’s got one too and in the words of Christopher Lee in the immortal Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Eisenberg tells her they are “cursed” and they have “the mark of the beast” on them.
This is the kind of movie that says it’s title a lot. I counted the term “cursed” a total of eight times, with “mark of the beast” coming in a close second with six.
Of course, the brother’s dog don’t trust him anymore so it bites him. Since the dog gets some of Eisenberg’s blood in him, it turns into (are you ready for this?) a CGI Were-dog!
I love it!
Anyway, at school, Eisenberg’s got other problems cuz the girl he’s got a crush on has a boyfriend who actually has a crush on him! Since werewolves have “unusual sexual magnetism”, the gay boyfriend tries to put the moves on him. Eisenberg puts on the brakes by saying, “Look dude, I’m cursed, not gay!”
At the opening of Jackson’s new wax museum, we find out he’s a werewolf too, just not THE werewolf that’s been killing everybody. That honor goes to the bitchy skeleton woman publicist who kills and reverts back to human form. She got bitten by Jackson during a one night stand.
“Apparently there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf!”
Jackson tries to protect Ricci from the skeleton werewolf woman, but she assures him that “I won’t kill her, I’ll just let her choke on her own blood, rip out her guts, and oh yeah, I might eat her.” She fights Jackson, Ricci and Eisenberg, but disappears when the cops show up. They ask for a description of the beast. Ricci said it had “bad skin, big thighs and a bony ass!” This brings the beast out of hiding. Big Time.
What follows is the single greatest scene of any movie in the history of cinema. The werewolf in a fit of rage gives Christina Ricci the middle finger!!!
I am proud to be an American.
The cops open fire and bring the skinny bitch down. Then, it’s over right? WRONG! We got more movie! It’s like screenwriter Kevin Williamson ended the movie in a tie, and now we’re going to extra innings. Jackson follows Ricci and Eisenberg home and says he must kill Eisenberg, so he can be “The Alpha Male”. They fight and the Eisenberg makes like the cursed version of Lionel Ritchie and starts walking on the ceiling. While Jackson struggles with Ricci and since (according to this flick anyway) werewolves have to be decapitated, Eisenberg cuts off Jackson’s head with a shovel.
By the way, Eisenberg and Ricci NEVER once actually turn into a werewolf. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, for this review I can only give this movie four stars, but in my heart I’m giving it 41 ¾ stars. I thought Craven flipped his lid when Shocker came out, but this flick shows he can still pull out more “Huh’s?” per minute than anyone.
Bottom line: The Best Werewolf Movie Since Teen Wolf.
Also with Judy Greer as the Skeleton Woman and Lance Bass as himself (who unfortunately, does NOT get eaten). Rated PG-13 for Patented Genius after you drink 13 Beers. If you wanna watch another werewolf whodunit where it turns out to be a chick in the end, see also, The Howling V. Craven and Williamson also did a little movie called Scream together.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
thevideovacuum- The Video Vacuum
- The Video Vacuum