Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Nightmare Returns!

Theme: Second Coming - Alice Cooper

Note: I know this is a Halloween post, but I ran out of buffer articles to post bc lazy, but in any case it's been a whole winter since Halloween, and we deserve another.

You may be /fa/, but are you /fa/ enough to rock this bright red codpiece? I didn't think so.

Can a concert film be greatest movie of all time of the week? Why not, if it's Alice Cooper's 1987 comeback showcase The Nightmare Returns? For, from the psychedelic 60s inception of the OG band to the present, perennial Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5 favourite Cooper has injected off-kilter narrative and imagery into the rock show format, transforming it into a visual spectacle with a classically theatrical throughline, from scene-setting start through rising action to knuckle-biting eucatastrophe to ecstatic catharsis. Groucho hailed it as the last stand of vaudeville, while the Dalí praised it as musical surrealism. Personally, I've been to see the great man twice, back when he was a mere boy of sixty-something, and can report that he still stage-mogged bands a fraction of his vintage.

Unlike Sir Mixalot, Alice actually has an anaconda to back up his boasts*.

Yet the narrative behind the scenes lends even more satisfaction to this triumphant moment: Coop himself describes how the old Alice of the OG band days and the classic Welcome to my Nightmare was society's whipping boy, cringing, stumbling about the stage, as pitiful as he was dastardly. Like so many rock stars, Cooper felt the pull of addiction and collapsed personally even as his career lurched erratically from one creative peak to another. From the Inside turned personal misfortune into top tier songcraft, with each tale inspired by fellow inmates in the nuthouse where he spent his first rehab, but it was cocaine masterpiece DaDa where the master hit rock bottom personally even while the unchained forces of his shadow wrought his finest art.

This is exactly how I look when dreaming up my firest b╙og posts.

But then something happened to shock everyone anew: Coop ditched the coke and booze, retvrned to Christ and stormed back into the public's nightmares as he took his rightful place at the head of a brand new wave of rockers who had cut their teeth on his material, pacing and leading like the genre godfather he was. And he was no longer the whipping boy: this Cooper owned the stage. No longer was it his nightmare; this time he was yours.

The pro wrestling energy in this entrance is off the scale.

Alright, the actual Constrictor album this tour promoted kind of sucked, minus the GOATed opener and closer ("Teenage Frankenstein" and Jason Lives theme "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)" respectively), but this hardly matters because only two of the blah tracks are in this show, while all the justifiably overplayed hits you know from radio benefit measurelessly from the added muscle of the metal treatment ("Go to Hell" sounds like it was written with just this overhaul in mind). Speaking of muscle, the more elaborate axework on display comes courtesy of Kane Roberts, who played up to the Rambo image his physique implied, making this even more of an 80s time capsule experience. He even has a machine gun guitar that shoots flames:

Sorry Marty, this is what peak cinéma actually looks like.

The rampage continues in crowd-pleasing style, with Alice duelling this dominatrix who shows up on stage, as dominatrices are wont to do:

Thot patrolled. I repeat: the thot has been patrolled.

The Coop then aims his righteous malice at a cameraman who's been foreshadowed getting too close in a couple of shots, laying the groundwork for his well-deserved demise:

Vlad III poses with Ottoman invader (1462, colourised).

But all good things must come to an end, and so our hero sadly finds himself restrained in hospital, where he laments his lonely life in classic "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". Of course, no hospital can keep /ourpsycho/ down for long:

REKT.

Further shenanigans include a bit of practical magic, in which the Coop constructs a monstrous automaton...

And "Sick Things", in which Coop is adored by these dudes that kind of look like the Toxic Avenger:

I love how he poses like a rapper with his bitches and/or hoes, except they're drooling mutants. Don't worry; I feel the same way about you guys.

Finally, it looks like he must pay for all his crimes. But even a murderer is entitled to his last words, in this case tender fan favourite "I Love the Dead":

"Before I go, I just want to say one thing: I love fucking corpses. Thanks!" - A. Cooper.

Even in death the spirit that inspired every subsequent shock band from the Sex Pistols to Mötley Crüe shows its defiance of society in general. As the executioner steals a triumphant kiss from the Coop's severed head...

Oh, like you've never had a faceful of fluids before.

But then, as though the clouds suddenly part, the spiral into madness and horror gives way to the jubilant strains of "School's Out", which I'm fairly sure even yak herders in the ruralest hamlets of Nepal have heard, and what's better still, after the journey you've been on, it hits like you're hearing it for the first time.

Now that's entertainment.

It's masterful sequencing of a sort the OG band used to good effect on Love it to Death, with the bleak "Dwight Frye" giving way to the reassuringly Zen "Sun Arise". You could also liken it to the end of Fantasia, when the first rays of light put paid to all the devil's bullshit. Generations of imitators have come and gone and tried to top the spectacle with more lavish productions, ostentatious pyrotechnics or tryhard shock antics, but that showman's grasp of narrative and the immortal songs have yet to be surpassed.

*Yeah, I know it's a boa constrictor. Everyone's a herpetologist.

RANKED: the Best and Worst of Christmas Music!

H8ing Christmas is reddit, yet most Christmas music is annoying. How to navigate this elaborate minefield? Why, by means of every cowardly bastard's first and last refuge: radical centrism. Here are the five best and five worst Christmas songs.

The Good

1. Jesus Christ - Big Star

Coping neckbeards have occasionally tried to spin this banger from the devastating Third/Sister Lovers album as ironic. Wrong! Chilton's songwriting exposed every nerve and when he was being sarcastic, as on "Thank You Friends", you'd have to be as autismal as me to miss it. "Jesus Christ" is the crowning jewel in any patrician's seasonal playlist.

2. We Three Kings - Rob Halford

Sure, metal covers are a played-out novelty staple but that doesn't change the fact that making something metal generally improves it, and lyrics of such crushing heft as "King forever/Ceasing never/Over us all to reign" merit every bit of bombast the format imbues. Better yet, there's zero irony in Halford's treatment. Constantly misunderstood by idiots, the name Judas Priest was always intended to convey the duality in the human soul between evil and good, and Halford, who lived this internal war harder than many, ultimately roots for the Priest.

3. No Man's Land - Alice Cooper

Featured on the master's greatest album, DaDa, "No Man's Land" tells a tale of a mall Santa who ditches his duties to go bang some thot he just met, meaning the movie Bad Santa is just a ripoff of this unknown classic from the 80s. The already-ambiguous context of the album gives it a more troubling undertone too, but on a playlist this will go over everyone's heads, enabling them to discover it for themselves when they spin the album, making it the gift that keeps on giving.

4. One More Sleep - Leona Lewis

Basic thots cover your ears: "One More Sleep" is the pop R&B banger "All I Want for Christmas is You" wishes it could be, and finally makes good use of those chiming bell sounds that festoon any number of weaker seasonal arrangements.

5. Als I Lay on Yoolis Night - Martin Best Ensemble

This 14th Century traditional song reaches back into our deep and overly neglected well of heritage to fill you with the calm that is the counterpoint to Halford's majestic bombast and Cooper's sinister mischief.

The Bad

1. Feed the World - Live Aid

Dear boomoids: the reason there was a horrific famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s is because a communist psychopath named Mengistu Haile Mariam murdered the last emperor, seized power and implemented the same collectivisation of agriculture policies that killed millions in the USSR and tens of millions in China, not because "nothing ever grows" in "Africa". Sure, as continents go, Africa is by far the biggest net importer of food from outside of itself, but it didn't have to be that way. There was a perfectly good country called Rhodesia that was known as the breadbasket of Africa until yet another communist faction took it over, ethnically cleansed the white farmers who made it work, and caused another famine that killed a million people. Rather than realise that being an evil libtard is the common denominator in everything that goes wrong ever, evil libtards instead wrote this song pestering everyone to "feed the world", causing an immense, unstoppable explosion of a dependent population, creating a genuinely apocalyptic ticking time bomb, making this by far the worst and most destructive song in history.

2. Happy Xmas (War is Over) - John Lennon and the Yoko Ono Band

So dreary and boring that for years I heard its refrain as "without any cheer" instead of "fear", and it still seemed to make some kind of sense. War will be over when Lennon-worshippers stop listening to neocon slop about how Hitl0r was uniquely evil in all of history and, simultaneously, everyone from Poutine to Hummus is Hitl0r.

3. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - ???

FACT CHECK: the snowman doesn't bring the snow. The snow comes first, then kids make the snowman out of it. Way to screw the kids out of their well-earned credit, someone I can't be bothered to Bing Search.

4. Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart - Wham!

BARF.

5. We All Want Some Figgy Pudding - traditional

"And we won't go until we get some/We won't go until we get some/We won't go until we get some/So bring some out here". Scarcely has a song so begged for a steel-toe-capped boot to the taint.

Stay tuned for more phoned-in listicles!

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.

Thank God It's Friday the 13th: Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives!

The title Jason Lives was a reassurance to the fans that the Scooby Doo era of ersatz Jasons was over, and the classic killer was returning to, once more, kill lots of people for no particular reason*. This was both a good thing and an admission that basically these movies are all the same and are never really going to change, which is also a good thing. There's nowhere to take a character like Jason except all over the place in terms of physical geography. Whether you call it Crystal Lake or Forest Hills, or whether you call Toronto New York City, or whether it's space 400 years in the future, Jason will be doing the same thing, and that is reassuring in its own way. Should a horror flick be reassuring? No, and this is why the series turned, as every series does, into a comedy.

"Does he think I'm a fart head?" - actual dialogue

Tommy Jarvis is suddenly cured of his murderous impulses from the ending of Part 5, and Jason just as wondrously cured of his cremation. So of course Tommy must go and dig him up in order to make sure he's dead, which of course means he comes back to life. He vaguely explains he's been having Jason dreams and this may be the only way to lay them to rest. I know this came out way before Freddy Vs Jason was conceived as an actual project, but wouldn't it be fun in retrospect to imagine that Freddy engineered those dreams to get Tommy to dig up Jason in the first place?

For no reason at all, Tommy brings a mask with him to the cemetery. It's like he wanted what inevitably happens to happen.

Anyway, Tommy and some guy go dig up Jason, who is then hit by lightning and thus revived to kill again. Unfortunately for us, he spends most of the picture whacking annoying unfunny comic relief characters on a corporate paintball outing before finally making it to the camp, making it only the second and final time in the series Jason himself actually kills camp counsellors.

This superqt should have been the Final Girl 2bqh my fams

So Tommy butts heads with the local sheriff, makes out with the said sheriff's daughter, and gets in a car chase, all of which is amiable filler, but filler regardless. Finally he hatches a successful plan to defeat Jason by tying a rock round him with a chain and letting him sink to the bottom of the lake, for someone else to deal with further down the road.

Metaphor for the b**mers polluting the world for their descendants, or not that?

Sadly this would be the last time we'd ever see Tommy, and therefore the last time a main protagonist recurred during the series. It also signposts a major turning point for the tone of the series, as from now on surviving the movie is a life-affirming experience that allows the protagonists to overcome their demons, as opposed to the early instalments in which the survivors were visibly traumatised if not outright nuts from their ordeal. Even goofy as fuck entries like Part 3 and Part 5 went with this, whereas from 6 onward, surviving basically meant peace of mind. Protagonists even tend to survive in convenient romantic pairings, which suggests a sort of closure I'm not sure we really expect or want from these movies.

This kid gets it.

But by far the most important takeaway from this one is the soundtrack of Alice Cooper songs, including the official Jason theme song, "Man Behind The Mask", with its accompanying music video which is maximum 80s/comfy/horror/rock-kino. You'll never guess the twist ending!

*They stopped bothering with motive around Part 4.

Alice Cooper's STEVEN: who is he and what is the meaning of life?

Many music performers have alter egos they inhabit at various times on record or onstage. Eminem routinely slips into his Slim Shady persona to wreak havoc on celebrities and society in general, while Nicki Minaj pretends to be more than 40% human parts. But none of these alter egos are as mysterious as Alice Cooper's Steven. This article includes spoilers for the concept albums Welcome to my Nightmare, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, DaDa, The Last Temptation, Along Came a Spider and Welcome 2 My Nightmare. It will also be a lengthy, unfunny dissertation on an obscure aspect of rock music history which I consider it my autistic duty to elucidate.

I wish I had this subtly creepy wallpaper.

Welcome to my breakdown

Steven first appears in 1975's Welcome to my Nightmare. The nightmare is presented as being Steven's. We are introduced to Steven in the song "Years Ago", in which he sings "All my toys are broken/And so am I inside, mom". Many people take this as an indication that Steven is a young boy, but in the song he doesn't seem to be so sure. Different voices alternately sing "I'm a little boy/No, I'm a great big man/No, let's be a little boy, for a little while longer? Maybe an hour?"

At its end the song segues into "Steven" with the phrase "I think I hear my mom calling..." and "Steven" then kicks in, with the name being repeated in a refrain that becomes more insistent. Steven says "it's right outside my door". He seems to be very afraid of whoever - or whatever - is outside his door.

The next song is "The Awakening". In this song Alice sings of waking up and looking for his wife, only to find that he has stabbed her to death in his sleep. The final song on the album is "Escape", which features the lines "But where am I running to? There's no place left to go/Just put on my makeup/And get me to the show".

What does it all mean?

Welcome to my Nightmare is a concept album. I believe it tells one continuous story - the origin story of Alice Cooper himself. Steven is the fictionalised Vincent Furnier - Alice's birth name. Steven is a grown man who is married. He also drinks to excess, and it makes him violent, or at least he fears it will. The song "Only Women Bleed" reflects this fear. It is preceded on the album by "Some Folks", which goes "I'm just no good without it/I'm not a man at all". While it is not specified what this refers to, I think it's alcohol.

The nightmare starts off in general terms. "Devil's Food" and "The Black Widow" are about generic scary things, like giant spiders and being eaten. But gradually the songs shift to more specific fears. Jack Torrance in The Shining had similar demons - he drank, and he once hurt his son. Like Jack, Steven is haunted by these fears.

Why does Steven drink? He drinks because of something that happened in his past. As mentioned above, there is some confusion about whether he is a boy or a man, but he must be a grown man to be married. I believe that in his nightmare he regresses into a little boy as a way to try to hide from the horrific realities of his life. After pleading to be a little boy for a while longer, he is frightened by someone outside his room, which leads to his awakening - his efforts to avoid reality are in vain.

"I think I hear my mom calling" - but he doesn't hear his mom calling. The cries of "Steven" in the song of the same name are from a woman, but not his mother - his wife. She is crying out to him as he is stabbing her in his sleep.

When he wakes up, Steven realises that he has done what he feared the most - he has killed his wife. Now his only recourse is to do what he has tried to do in the dream - to escape into another persona. "Just put on my makeup and get me to the show". He escapes into madness; into the persona of Alice Cooper.

Alice Cooper Goes to Hell

Steven didn't appear by name on the next album, and it seemed to be about Alice, the entertainer, being sent to a comedy disco Hell for all the controversy that he caused with his antics during the early 70s. However, if you subscribe to the above interpretation of Nightmare, Alice and Steven are really the same person. This is, however, complicated by the inner sleeve of the LP, which featured this text:

Lay still, Steven, and I'll tell you a bedtime story. I'll tell you a bedtime story that's not for all children. It's a very special story, that only special children will understand. It's a half-awake story, and it will be better if you close your eyes. It's a story that takes place in a dream, like other nightmares you have known. It's a dream that Alice has dreamed. You can dream along with him. You can follow Alice down the staircase, deep, down the stairs to the pit where he doesn't want to go, but he has to.

If you go to sleep now, Steven, you can go down the long and endless staircase and sing sweet songs to Alice and free him. And if you can't get to sleep, Steven, and in the middle of the night you get out of bed, when everything is quiet and the trees are still and the birds are hiding from the dark, you can lay down on your bedroom floor and press your ear tightly to the boards. If you listen very carefully you can hear Alice searching for a way out, forever chasing rainbows.

Sleep tight, Steven. And have a good night.

You can read this in all sorts of ways. One way to look at it is that Steven really is a child, and Alice is a character in a story his mom or dad told him. Another is to think of this as a prequel to Nightmare - that Alice was a character in a story, and in "Escape" on Nightmare, Steven drew on this childhood memory to create a character to escape into.

But there's another possible meaning that fits into what we learn on the next Steven album, 1991's Hey Stoopid. That maybe this is something a doctor is telling the now institutionalised Steven. In this analogy, the doctor is trying to get Steven to give up his Alice persona. The pit where Alice doesn't want to go, but has to, isn't really Hell, it's the unconscious mind. The doctor may be trying to get Steven to get rid of Alice, to lock him away under the floorboards of his own psyche. He is treating Steven as a child because Steven has now fully regressed into one.

A Wind Up Toy

Hey Stoopid only mentions Steven at the very end, on track "Wind Up Toy". The song implies its subject is in a mental institution, with doctors who run tests but can't determine what is wrong with him. The song also mentions his parents: "Daddy won't discuss me/What a state I must be/Mommy couldn't stand/Having such a wound-up boy".

This could mean that his parents are alive, and have given up hope for his recovery. However, it could also mean he has regressed to his child-state and only imagines that they are around. This seems likely if we take into account the information that we later learn from "Hell Comes Home".

The Last Temptation

Steven appears again as the protagonist in The Last Temptation, Alice Cooper's 1994 album. This time he seems to be free. In the tie-in comic he's depicted as a young boy. This could mean it is a prequel or that Steven is imagining himself in a free world. I do not believe this is a prequel to Nightmare and all the other albums. For a start, it's called The Last Temptation. It could hardly come before Nightmare, in which Steven has succumbed to the temptations of alcohol. Moreover, Steven is shown to have sexual desires for the character Mercy, which means he must be of a mature age in reality.

So in The Last Temptation, Steven goes (in his mind) to the sideshow, where he meets the Showman (depicted as Alice in the comic), who offers him things. The Showman shows him how his life could be boring or miserable, and offers him a way out. In crisis, Steven prays for salvation, and ultimately confronts the Showman and rejects him. The Showman is strongly implied to be the Devil, which is basically confirmed on the next album, Brutal Planet, as the Devil on that album shares his catchphrase, "nothing's free".

The Last Temptation is a morality play, and Steven's rejection of the Devil seems to clear the way for his redemption: "I'm Heaven bound/Go back to where you belong". Thematically, it also represents a rejection of the sideshow, the "Escape" from reality Steven has relied on for so long. By overcoming his demons both literal and figurative, he may now be able to rejoin the world.

Along Came a Spider

The name Steven reoccurred on 2009's Along Came a Spider. This album revolves around a serial killer named Spider who's collecting legs from eight victims to create his own giant spider, like a cross between Dahmer's zombies and The Human Centipede. At the end of the record he reveals to Steven that he's been in this cell for 25 years, so couldn't possibly have committed the recent murders.

From the wording it could be interpreted that Steven shares the cell with him, or that he has some sort of multiple personality disorder, because he uses the word "we". I don't think it's common practice for the criminally insane to bunk up together, but if Steven isn't in the cell with him, why is he there? Well Steven on The Last Temptation and Spider both kind of find Jesus in their respective storylines, so maybe Steven is a priest now and he's visiting Spider in prison. I don't know if that was the idea though. It could not be. Another possibility is that Steven is another personality of Spider.

DaDa theory

Alice Cooper's best album is also one of his less widely known. 1982's DaDa told the story of Sonny, who may also have multiple personalities. Some fans believe that Sonny is also Steven. Potentially, Alice, Steven, Sonny and Spider could all be the same person (of course, they are IRL). I don't believe that Sonny was meant to be Steven, as there are no overt continuity references on DaDa, and Sonny commits suicide at the end of the album. However, Sonny and Steven both seem to share something in common in their backstories: an abusive father.

The Nightmare returns

Steven is mentioned one more time to date in the AC discography: in track "When Hell Comes Home" from Welcome 2 My Nightmare, the 2011 sequel to the original. The song describes a scenario in which a young boy shoots his alcoholic father who has returned home in a menacing rage. This boy appears to be Steven, which, in keeping with our conception of Steven as a grown man in Nightmare 1, makes this a prequel within a sequel, like the Vito scenes in Godfather 2. Killing his abusive father may be the traumatic event that caused Steven to lose his childhood, which he would spend his adult life trying to get back.

As Steven is only mentioned on the one track, it seems likely that the protagonist for the rest of the album is Alice himself, as on Alice Cooper Goes to Hell. Except, as we know, Alice is likely the creation of Steven. The album ends with his surprise death, which would seem to put an end to the character once known as Steven. Except, as we know, Alice Cooper is the grand villain of rock and roll, and like all good villains, he can never truly die.

Do YEW have an autismal theory about a series of albums going back to 1975??? Poast!

Sweet Dreams: Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare!!!

Nominal series endings generally at least try to go out on a high note. Friday the 13th had two (The Final Chapter and The Final Friday), one of which was good and the other tried, bless it. A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, approached its death in an advanced state of dementia, drooling and shitting all over itself. Fortunately, this wasn't the last movie, because nothing with "final" in the title ever is. Without further ado, let's delve into the heart of retardation.

The glasses do nothing! I'm still watching Freddy's Dead!

Freddy's Dead opens with a guy on a plane. He's obviously having a nightmare. His seat flies out of the plane and he wakes up in bed. He goes over to the window and finds Freddy flying on a broomstick dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West. You know those Comics Code approved Joker stories from Silver Age comics where instead of killing people he played pranks and stole that kid's report card? This is the equivalent of that for horror movies. Jesus Christ.

There's jumping the shark and then there's this bullshit.

So the kid makes his way to a delinquents' centre run by Maggie Burroughs and her shoulder pads. Breckin Myer (Road Trip) is there, along with Tracy, who likes violence but dislikes being touched, and Carlos, who has a hearing aid. As lame as this is, it's still more characterisation than most movies these days have, so whatever. Maggie takes the nameless kid back to Springwood to find out all about him, and the others stow away in the van because this is a wacky comedy (Road Trip).

A fun game is to pause at any second of this joint and see whose expression matches your own.

Springwood is a ghost town in this movie because Freddy killed everyone offscreen between movies. Why they thought that would be less interesting to show us than Freddy playing Nintendo and stealing a deaf kid's hearing aid for 90 minutes, I have no idea. The town with no children could have been a fantastically creepy setting, but instead it sucked.

The Twin Peaks nod is nice and all, but imagine if this flick had half the atmosphere of that show.

So Freddy offs the kids in increasingly stupid ways, stopping only to shill for Nintendo, and then somehow follows Maggie and Tracy back to wherever they come from. I guess the rules for this instalment are that Freddy can't leave Springwood without someone to carry him, so he sent out the John Doe character to bring someone back for him to hitch a ride on. So why didn't he just hitch a ride with the John Doe? Anyway, Maggie learns that she's Freddy's daughter (dumb) and that he got his powers from three floating skull things (gay) and that he lived in the famous Elm Street house, meaning that Nancy's mom moved into the house of the guy she torched (Road Trip).

A twist of some potential fascination teased, then instantly abandoned for more dumb shlock.

Freddy still has powers in the waking world, he just stops using them immediately after this for no reason at all.

Look, you've read my part 5 writeup. You know I'll defend practically anything with the Elm Street name attached to it. This piece of shit is on its own.

You know you're looking at a classy production when all the newspaper articles are copypasted from the sports page and World War 2 history books.

The once feared dream demon kills time by taunting a deaf kid.

Finally Maggie defeats Freddy with the power of 3D glasses, probably because they realised Friday the 13th had a 3D instalment and didn't want to miss out on the trendwhoring, even though 3D wasn't even trendy in the early 90s. Is there anything good about this movie? Well, I liked the fact that Alice Cooper is Freddy's stepdad. I liked the gag where he cuts off his fingers while counting down the ways people have killed him in the past. Maggie was pretty hot. Oh, and Iggy Pop wrote a song for the credits in like two minutes for it, which I thought was funny.

Just close your eyes and think of Dream Warriors.

What did Rachel Talalay mean by this?

The best way to view this one is not even as part of the series but as a parody of it, but even that doesn't work too well because it doesn't even have enough jokes per minute to work as a Hot Shots style parody. But if the intention was to kill off any interest in the series, they succeeded. Killing off Freddy gave it a small box office bump but by the time of Wes Craven's New Nightmare a few years later, nobody cared about Freddy anymore. That's a shame because New Nightmare is one of the best in the series, and almost certainly the best seventh instalment in any film series.