Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors!!!

Spoilers below.

Dream Warriors is to A Nightmare on Elm Street as Aliens is to Alien, except both are better because Ridley Scott is a fart-huffing turbofedora and James Cameron is a meathead douchebag who whacks it to blue catgirls and mechs in about equal measure. But while Alien was carried by ELP album artist H.R. Geiger, Aliens had superior bantz and much better effects, and didn't have that awful hard cut between the puppet robot head and Bilbo which pisses me off every time I've watched Alien (twice).

They dropped "Part" from the title, probably because "Part 2" wasn't part 2 of anything.

So what I really mean is that, while Freddy's Revenge veered off into the insane, Dream Warriors is a proper sequel that expands on the impressive foundations laid by the original, going bigger and more action-packed while bringing back and further developing characters from the original. This one set the template the next three would try to match, usually with far diminished returns, but it was also a perfect time capsule of 1986, and, if nothing else, the subsequent sequels kept up that tradition beautifully.

Freddy: The Hair Years.

The kino opens (and closes) to the strains of Dokken, who are the Beethoven of hair metal bands.  Our /mu/ patrician Kristen (Patricia Arquette) is trying to stay awake by blasting "Into the Fire" and making a house out of Popsicle sticks, but she's thwarted by her mom, drifts off to sleep and is soon in the land of dreams. Freddy shows up and chases her, and cuts her wrist, so when she wakes up screaming it looks like she tried to kill herself.

Me after watching five minutes of Freddy's Dead.

This is interesting because in the first film Freddy arranged the murders so that Rod looked like he killed Tina, and then hanged himself in his cell, and now it looks like he's back to sort of covering his tracks by making his murders look like suicides. Coincidentally or otherwise, Kristen is committed to the same mental institution where other Freddy victims are holed up. Doctor Neil Gordon is baffled by their condition, until Nancy Thompson, Final Girl of part 1, shows up with her brand of expertise.

Incidentally, Nancy >>> Laurie Strode.

Nancy's on the hypnocil, an experimental drug that suppresses dreams, which suggests that Freddy continued to pursue her after the end of the original, but Kristen manages to pull her into her own dream, tipping Nancy off that these kids can develop their will into "powers" to fight back in the dream world. This makes some sense and is consistent with the idea of "taking back control" of the dream introduced in the original. It also ties into two of the great mid-80s motifs of the film: the Breakfast Club misfits banding together in the face of adversity and the Dungeons and Dragons-style party of adventurers approaching the unknown. On the other hand, some of the powers and costumes are pretty gay such as this Harry Potter looking NERD:

"I am the wizard master!" - Urkel "Screech" Poindexter, before getting killed.

Never mind that though. For every idea that sputters and dies on the vine, there's something great to make up for it, whether it's Kincaid's top tier trash talk, Freddy's Harryhausen-style stop-motion animated skeleton, the return of based John Saxon as Donald Thompson (Nancy's father), or best girl, fellow Dokken fan and junkiefu Taryn White (Jennifer Rubin), who, as she explains, is "beautiful...and bad":

>tfw no 11/10 punk rock gf with two feet tall mohawk and glitter on her chest

This one also introduces the idea of creative, personalised kills, such as puppet-making loner Philip who is killed in the best way maybe ever conceived in a horror movie: Freddy rips his veins or tendons out of his feet and wrists and uses them to walk him off a ledge like a marionette. Like everything else in Dream Warriors, they get the fine balance between creativity, darkness and goofiness just about right - a feat never again to be successfully completed. It's like Tim Burton's Batman kinos before Joel Schumacher took the wheel and plowed the franchise straight off a cliff.

He'll feel that in the morning.

Yet another way Dream Warriors creeps right up to the precipice is in its handling of backstory, something everyone thinks they want but no one ever likes when they get it. Dream Warriors reveals just the right amount by introducing Freddy's childhood nickname: The Bastard Son of 100 Maniacs, earned when he was conceived by the gang rape of a nun in an old wing of the mental hospital when she was locked in with the lunatics. This was exactly enough backstory (and, most importantly, creepy enough) to last Freddy forever. We didn't need any more, and no more of it was good past this point.

This sounds like something they'd say on Memri TV.

So everything about Dream Warriors works while exhausting the possibilities for further sequels by pushing it to its absolute limit. The one-liners and gag deaths are great, but just a tiny nudge would make them terrible and excessive. It even blows its wad by killing off Nancy herself, arguably the best Final Girl in slasher history, an audacious decision which lends the ending a significance and weight that, once again, can never be repeated. So this is what it looks like when a series reaches its natural and logical endpoint, pulling out all the stops and giving us a little bit of everything, and just about getting away with it.

And then they made three more.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge!!!

Time for the gay one!!!

IDK why this font choice is so funny to me but it is.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge is easily the most deranged instalment in the series. Part of its adorably insane charm comes from the fact that the writer intentionally filled the script with gay innuendo, while the director (allegedly) remained blissfully unaware of the subtext. In this film, Freddy returns after a five-year absence with a new plan that has nothing to do with the rest of the series. None of the protagonists are children of the mob that killed him, so the title Freddy's Revenge makes no sense, unless Freddy's Revenge is an euphemism, like Montezuma's Revenge, in which case it makes perfect sense.

The nuclear family. Only 30-year-old boomers will remember this.

A new family has moved into the former Thompson residence to pursue a life of mid-20th Century situation comedy. The dad, played by Clu Gulager from Return of the Living Dead, is every sitcom dad rolled into one, and his wife is always rolling her eyes and going "oh, Ken", before a freeze frame and yellow font credits. They have a pet budgie that explodes (yes), and their daughter eats by far the best fictional cereal ever created: Fu Man Chews.

If it's not """"racist"""" in 2018, it's just not hysterically funny.

Additions to series continuity from this movie include the name of the town, Springwood, and the demonym "The Springwood Slasher" (Freddy), but for some inexplicable reason, Fu Man Chews never appeared in any of the subsequent movies, despite being the best thing about Freddy's Revenge, the 80s, and human history.

Our very heterosexual, no really, protagonist.

Anyway, the Richie in this veritable 1980s Cunningham family, Jesse, starts having nightmares about our badly tanned antagonist. This time, however, Freddy has a new goal: to possess Jesse, and thereby enter the real world. This plot blurs the lines between reality and dream even more than the first film did, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional. For instance, there's a sequence where Jesse goes out walking in the rain, enters a gay bar where he encounters his high school coach, who takes him back to the gym (still in the middle of the night), and makes him run laps, which seems like it must be a dream because it's just so fucking strange. But no, apparently that's real, as Freddy then shows up and kills the coach, which is confirmed real by his being found dead at the gym the day after.

Yes, this is New Line founder Bob Shaye in a cameo in the gay bar. Interestingly he also cameos as a teacher in 4 who is presumably promoted to principal by Freddy Vs Jason. Make of that what you will.

The major conflict in the film is between Jesse's desire to pursue a relationship with his young-Meryl-Streep-looking neighbour, and his implied repressed homosexuality, into which Freddy figures...somehow, I don't know. Meryl doesn't believe Jesse's insistence that he's having nightmares, being possessed, or going insane, but for some reason she does believe he's getting psychic messages, for reasons she never sees fit to divulge.

Freddy Vs Kramer (1985, colourised)

Anyway, eventually Freddy takes over Jesse's body and runs around at a pool party slashing away at people, and Meryl must find a way to draw Jesse back out from Freddy's control. The pool party is the only time we really see Freddy wailing on a bunch of people at a time, which is pretty cool, and yields the hilarious scene in which a guy tries to talk down the burn-scarred, razor-fingered demon like he's just had too much to drink.

"Don't slash me bro" - Albert Einstein here.

Finally, Meryl confronts Freddy in the old abandoned factory where he used to take his victims in life. The entrance is guarded by two dogs with the faces of diseased babies. Sadly they don't chase her or anything, just sit around. Like so much else in this movie, I would have loved to see more of these monster dogs, and less of the coach's bare ass.

Even Fu Manchu wouldn't eat these fucking hounds.

Meryl kills Freddy with the power of love (really), and Jesse emerges from the charred ashes of his body, and the very next day they're off to school, all smiles, despite like ten people having died. Could this be a clue that it's a dream? Of course it is. No matter how Freddy is killed in these movies, he always just shows up again for no reason. It's entirely possible that everything that happens in this series is a dream, and Freddy's deaths are just another elaborate way of fucking with the teenagers of Springwood.

Note that about halfway through the movie Freddy's weapon changes from a glove of knives to knives just sticking out of his actual hand. Despite the amount of work required to create two versions, this is never explained.

I think the 2010 remake should have been of this film. There are plenty of cool ideas raised here that are never satisfactorily explored, and even more dumb shit that could have been ironed out. But, if you're looking for a genuinely unique motion picture experience, Freddy's Revenge is that.

Sweet Dreams: A Nightmare on Elm Street!!!

A Nightmare on Elm Street is the best kino of all time. This is the famous movie in which a burn victim with knives for fingers stalks a group of teenagers including Johnny Depp and the best Final Girl ever, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). I have the series documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and I've watched all four hours of it and all the extras twice. I have a copy of I Am Nancy, the Nancy documentary, signed by Heather Langenkamp, and I've seen everything in the series at least five times, even the bad ones. I even have a DVD of the first three Freddy's Nightmares episodes that was released in the UK (they never put out another one). On my assburgers diagnosis, this movie is listed as the cause.

Remember poster art?

The movie starts with Tina (Amanda Wyss) having a nightmare about 80s synth music, which is rudely interrupted by a cackling boogyman we'll come to know as Freddy Krueger. Tina is set up to be our Final Girl, but is killed off in a sweet switcheroo involving a revolving room gag from a Fred Astaire movie. It's a Hitchcockian twist so audacious it would have shocked audiences everywhere, if not for the fact the poster clearly identifies Nancy as the Final Girl. But who cares? It's a great poster, featuring the best tagline ever: "If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming...she won't wake up at all".

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a rarity among slasher movies for having a plot and character arcs and all that screenwriting bullshit you used to get in movies in the olden days. Nancy grows up, takes charge of her life, learns to beat the monster, and bitches out her drunk mom all in the space of 90 minutes. Compare and contrast: The Hobbit (2012-2014).

Nancy becomes the voice of everyone who hated hall monitors (everyone).

So Nancy, who is into survival, does some detective work and finds that she can pull items out of her dream, specifically Freddy's hat, from which she learns his name, uncovering the dark secret her parents have been keeping from her. We've all had these moments in our lives when we discover that the world isn't quite right, and I don't think I've ever seen it captured better in a movie. But whereas most of us turn into bottle-pissing shut-ins who write blogs about horror movies, Nancy instead decides to use her knowledge to overcome her demons, which is pretty typical of the earnest positivity in post-Hills Have Eyes Craven, which is rare in horror, and kind of refreshing.

*Blocks ur path*

I haven't talked that much about Freddy yet, because the movie isn't really about him in the way the sequels were. Clive Barker described the original Hellraiser as a twisted family drama, and that's kind of true here too. Nancy learns her parents are murderers whose dysfunctions are manifestations of trauma from burning a guy to death, which must be an adjustment to say the least. But Freddy is scary in this film, which is easy to forget if you've seen some of the sequels. This is the one where he reaches up out of the bath with his knived glove and sprays Johnny Depp all over his room.

I think if this movie hadn't had all those sequels and become a great big merchandising machine, it would be regarded among the top tier of horror movies where it belongs. On the other hand, some of the sequels were underrated and good, and others were Ed Wood-like in their Icarean aspirations.

How to pronounce heavy metal band names

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#MondayMotivation

Thank God It's Friday The 13th: Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter!!!

Yes, this is the one with Crispin Glover's dance.

Ebin.

Following his unsuccessful effort to hide out in a barn with no one bothering him (and the resulting massacre), Jason is shipped off to a nearby hospital. Little does anyone suspect that the axe wound he received to the head has done nothing, and he's only sleeping. So without further ado (or any ado to begin with), Jason wakes up in the hospital and murders a nurse and her boyfriend who spends his shifts watching exercise videos in a storeroom. Furtive wanking in the 80s was a more patrician affair.

Kino.

Well, true to form, another shipment of teenagers is on its way to a holiday house by Crystal Lake. Since Parts 2-4 each take place on subsequent days, we may assume a fresh batch is dispatched daily. This group runs into a pair of twins, a mysterious hunter, and Corey Feldman (Pizza Gate) and family. Feldman's character, Tommy Jarvis, is an expert horror movie costume and prop maker, which is impressive for like an eight-year-old kid or whatever.

As the cast set about teening up the house, we track Jason's progress back to the lake. Presumably he's heading back in the direction of his shack, which leads him directly through a banana-eating hitchhiker who wants to go to Canada. Friday the 13th movies are filled with these kind of random casualties whose schtick prompts questions that will never be answered. I wonder if in an alternative universe this character made it to Canada. What would she have done? Would the mounties have taken to her banana-eating ways? Did she dream of Canada as a little girl? Would she have wound up getting killed by Mary Lou at Hamilton High? Petition Paramount Pictures to release a statement.

Minor characters I'd unironically watch a whole movie about. What ever happened to those?

So Jason gets lost and winds up at the Jarvis residence and neighbouring holiday house, where he sets about killing everyone because why not? This is the exact point in the series where Jason ceases to have any motive whatsoever and just takes to killing everyone he meets on general principle.

The teenagers watch old porno reels from the 1910s or some shit (who doesn't remember doing this as a teenager?) but meanwhile Tommy and his sister look for their mom, who's gone missing (killed by Jason, obviously). They run into the hunter, who reveals his true purpose in coming out to the woods...he's hunting Jason!!! No, I wasn't very surprised either. It turns out he's the brother of a character who Jason speared in Part 2, and he's out for revenge. You're led to believe this guy is going to be important to the final denouement, but for some reason he's killed off when he goes down into a dark basement looking for Jason, taking a small pocket knife after handing his great big fucking machete to the Final Girl. This goes about as well as you might imagine, although he's kind enough to alert Final Girl by yelling "he's killing me! He's killing me!", which probably wasn't meant to be hilarious, but was.

This is the face you make at the end of a long chain of poor decisions.

The other bit of random craziness that makes you do a double take is when the family dog becomes an hero by leaping through a window for no reason. If we believe Kane Hodder's famous assertion that Jason doesn't kill dogs, this was all for nothing, making it even funnier.

Someone scripted a doggo suicide, someone trained a doggo to leap through a pane of stunt glass, someone backlit it and someone shot it happening, but nobody asked why.

Finally Tommy Jarvis has enough of Jason's shit, and devises a perfectly sensible plan to defeat him: he cuts off all his hair and pretends to be Jason as a child. This confuses Jason, and I don't blame him, because it confused the heck out of me too. This gives Final Girl enough of a distraction for her to whack the mask off Jason's head, and as we all know, when the mask comes off, it can't be long before the J-man takes a fall (Freddy could have benefitted from this knowledge, but it's too late now). Then Tommy goes apeshit and hacks Jason up, screaming "Die! Die! Die!", with a final, classic Friday the 13th fade to white.

This is the first thing pedos see when they enter Hell.

The ending strongly hints that Tommy has gone bugshit insane and is going to become the next killer. Is that what happens in Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning??? From the title, it seems pretty much 100% certain that it will. But then, this one was called The Final Chapter, and look how that turned out.

Roar: The Most Insane Film Ever Made

You all remember Timothy Treadwell, from the greatest docukino, Grizzly Man? Well now imagine he had fuckoff money and was married to a classic Hollywood A-lister, and made his own little Apocalypse Now, except set entirely in the Kurtz compound and starring himself as Dennis Hopper's spaced-out photographer character, and instead of people the inhabitants of the compound were lions.

Yes.

That is, roughly speaking, what Roar is. Noel Marshall was the nutter, Tippi Hedren his equally deranged wife, and a young Melanie Griffith their IRL daughter. Along with two sons from a previous marriage, they form the family at the heart (of darkness) of the most window-licking movie venture ever funded. If Aguirre-era Herzog and Kinski had been pitched this idea, they would have thought it was too nuts. The picture proudly proclaims in its opening credits that no animals were harmed (which I doubt), but cheerfully omits to mention that seventy members of the cast and crew were injured by the said felines, including DP Jan de Bont (who would go on to do Die Hard and Speed) who was fucking scalped by one of the beasts.

U N T R A I N E D

Marshall plays a version of himself called Hank, and Hedren plays a version of herself named Madeleine. This version of her evidently doesn't remember The Birds, which should have given her a healthy fear and loathing of nature on its own. Their kids, however, all play themselves, or at least use their IRL names, possibly in case they needed to keep in any personalised screams for help that might have occurred during filming.

*Record scratch* *freeze frame* I bet you're wondering how I got into this position...

I'd like to think it goes without saying that getting up close and personal with lions (and tigers, and various other dangerous beasts) is one of the worse ideas you can come up with, but this has never occurred to Hank, who goes off on a boat trip leaving his family to arrive unsuspecting at his compound which is now empty except for the hundred and fifty ravenous predators he likes to pal around with.

What's the worst that could happen?

His way back is further complicated when a couple of his tiger friends hop on the boat and capsize it, which I'm not sure was meant to happen, which is something I can say for most of the events in this film. I say this because the animals literally get writing credits for their improv skills, because Noel "One Flew Over The Lion's Den" Marshall doesn't know the difference between improv and the fact that a fucking animal doesn't know it's on a movie set and is only interested in food, rutting, and mayhem.

Except this one which is really into skateboarding.

Meanwhile, Hedren et al spend a lot of time running and hiding from the lions. The sons lock themselves in various things and Hedren loses her top, tries to pull a lion off her daughter by its TAIL, and gets a jar of honey or something drop on her face. I thought this was going to be a plot point that would lead to one of the animals trying to lick/eat it off her, but it never pays off, so it's just another small moment of inexplicable derangement in the midst of what is certainly the best movie no one should have ever even thought of making.

After this she steps on a rake nine times and falls into a cactus.

There's a subplot about two guys who get mauled at the start of the picture coming back to shoot some lions and tigers, which takes care of itself when the one antisocial lion, Togar, whom we can recognise because he's always covered in blood, shows up and mauls them to death. If they weren't in the movie at all it would make absolutely no difference.

"Yes, this looks like a sensible animal to put in a home movie with my family" - Noel

In case getting chased, sliced up and otherwise harassed by the pride wasn't enough, Tippi Hedren then gets in a fight with an elephant.

The woman has no luck at all with animals.

It's worth noting that the film score seems to have been grafted on from an entirely different project, as it's all feel-good family comedy stuff, bookended by two utterly emetic hippy type pop/folk/rock songs about harmony and loving one another and suchlike, all of which is so tonally dissonant with what we're watching, which is definitely funny, but like the Darwin Awards are funny, and laced with a healthy dose of cringe as at any moment you're afraid one of the improv stars is going to improv biting the face off a cast member. Apparently Griffith actually sustained a facial injury and needed reconstructive surgery. Bet you don't think your parents were so mean now (unless you were molested).

Ceiling Cat fucking told you not to masturbate. Now he's sending in the big guns.

Fortunately Roar is never boring and if you look at it as a sort of surrealistic satire it's a pretty great work of art. If you look at it as 100% sincere it's kind of even better because it's a glimpse into madness at the opposite end of the social spectrum to the guy that sits next to you on the bus. Either way, check out Roar.

Here is an article that goes into a bit more detail on the film's background.

Vermintide sketch

Fatshark Games' account tweeted a request for fanart yesterday so here's what I came up with.

Say cheese lolololololololol

I made the neck thicker to support the proportionately bigger head but idk if it's Rob Liefeld tier, especially since the rest of the frame is pretty standard size. But it's a fictional monster so whatever. Should I quit my job and become a mediocre DevianTART drawfag? LMK what you think.