Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman (Felicity) play a young couple who have come to town for a wedding and are staying at an isolated house Scott’s family owns. It’s a house with a long driveway and a lot of trees around, a place where people can get lost, he mentions. They’ve had a bad night and might be calling it quits with each other and then all the sudden, around 4 am, some girl knocks on the door asking for somebody they never heard of.

Out here? In the middle of nowhere? Where did she come from? Then Scott makes the mistake of going to buy cigarettes. While he’s gone the girl shows up again, and things start getting weirder. Basically this is the story of what happens when 3 people in Halloween masks show up at your house and try to get in, for unknown reasons.

I gotta admit man, the setup on this thing really pushes my creep-out buttons. The first half of this movie is the most genuinely scary new horror movie I’ve seen in a long time. Rural areas at night – hell, even suburbs – those places creep me out. Because nobody’s supposed to be around. If you see a stranger nearby then you know they’re up to no good.

Out in the city it’s not a problem. I got drunks stumbling around all the time, sirens going by, people laughing or yelling at each other, that’s normal at any time of night. Not a big deal. In the city I can walk around in the middle of the night and there’s not much to fear. You’re not alone, there’s always cars driving around and a few people out. They’re very polite and ask you if you “need anything.” Not that long ago a dude tried to sell me a porno VHS while I was waiting to cross a street. You generally assume people will leave you alone or won’t give you too hard of a time. If they do they’re probaly some schizo or something, they’ll back off if you ignore them. (more…)

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So here we are. The VERY LAST time we will ever see Freddy Krueger. Dead forever. Never, ever again will he appear in a movie of any kind, because this at last is the end of him. It says it right there in the title, twice. He is dead, and this is the final one. And what a journey it’s been. But thank God we have this precious last 89 minutes to spend with him.

I don’t know if all the New Line Cinema people were wearing funeral clothes when they made this, but behind the scenes it was kind of a family affair. Director Rachel Talalay had been working on the Freddy pictures since part 1, usually as a producer. This was her first time directing – she later did TANK GIRL. She’s also the only woman to ever direct a Freddy movie.

The writer was Michael DeLuca, who was New Line’s president of production for years, so you will recognize his name from all kinds of movies during the height of the company, like S7V7N and BOOGIE NIGHTS. Before this he had written the god-awful movie LAWNMOWER MAN as well as 5 episodes of FREDDY’S NIGHTMARES. One online profile of him says, “Michael De Luca is best known for receiving a blowjob at age 32 from the sister of actor Cary Elwes and producer Cassian Elwes in front of guests (such as ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGER, EMMA THOMPSON, JOHN MALKOVICH and QUENTIN TARANTINO) at a pre-Oscar party thrown by then head of the William Morris motion picture division, Arnold Rifkin at his home in March, 1998.” (more…)

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Part 5 is one of the less popular Freddy pictures, maybe because it made an admirable attempt to get beyond high school. It continues the story of Dream Master Alice and her boyfriend Dan (still played by the same actors, Lisa Wilcox and Danny Hassel) and their new circle of friends who replaced the dead ones. They are just graduating from high school, Alice and Dan are planning a trip to Paris over the summer, and early on Alice finds out that she’s pregnant. So they’re still teens but they’re dealing with some growing up type shit here.

The gimmick this time is that because she has a baby inside her, and because babies (according to the movie) dream all the time, she suddenly starts having Freddy dreams while awake. In the dream world the baby is a kid named Jacob and he does not have a positive male role model in his dream life so unfortunately Freddy comes in and takes advantage of that. You know how a bad uncle lets his little nieces and nephews drink beer, or helps them score pot? Freddy’s like that, he feeds Jacob the souls of Alice’s dead friends. I’m actually not sure what he’s trying to do – will this make the baby grow up into Freddy? Is he just trying to make the baby a killer like him? Or is he just pushing Alice’s buttons by messing with her kid? I don’t really know.

What if the baby doesn’t turn out to be evil, but has dream powers from eating all those souls? Maybe he’ll haunt people’s dreams but instead of giving them gimmicky deaths ironically based on their hobbies he’ll give them nice dreams. Instead of getting slashed and they wake up and have real cuts, he gives them a lollipop and they wake up and it’s right there on the pillow next to them. Or he gives them a bunch of money. And it works as real currency, it doesn’t show Freddy wearing a George Washington wig or anything stupid like that. It’s not printed in red and green ink. (more…)

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Technically Freddy already got his revenge in part 1 by going after the children of the people who burned him alive. In this one he’s just messing with a new kid who moves into the same house. It really is not revenge when you do it to a stranger who never did anything to you before and is not related to anyone who did anything to you before. Not to be pedantic but, come on dude, titles are important. Make ‘em count.

I always thought FREDDY’S REVENGE was the worst of the ELM STREET pictures, a pretty common view. They ended up figuring out the sequel formula in part 3 and they stuck with that for a while so part 2 is now kind of the odd man out when you look back at it.

But watching it again now I realize that’s a good thing. Freddy had not yet become a comedian, so although he’s probaly on screen a little more than in part 1 he’s still pretty scary and mysterious. At the end of part 1 Nancy had dis-believed him out of existence (at least before the shock-ending – we never really know what happened with that) so now his way to come back is through this kid who lives in Nancy’s house (although it sure doesn’t look like the same house) and found her diary (that we never saw her writing in before).

The different twist is that instead of attacking this kid Jesse in his dreams and hurting him for real Jesse has dreams about Freddy attacking other people, then all the sudden realizes that it’s him wearing the glove. Watching it this time I realize this is actually a really clever idea for the sequel because it makes it a different type of psychological horror – the fear of what you could do to others instead of the fear of what others could do to you. He’s afraid that he is murdering people without realizing it. And it’s playing off of his deep felt hatred of people like his asshole gym teacher. Alot of people have some violent anger in them at that age, that’s why you get all these school shootings. So I think it’s a good spin on the concept of the original. (more…)

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