A Moment With Jack

I have a had a lot of run ins with celebrities, politicians, and various dignitaries in the past. Some of these stories are fleeting anecdotes with simple punchlines. There was the time I accidentally stepped on Jon Stewart's foot and forgot to apologize. There was the time I mistook Whoopi Goldberg for a Whoopi Goldberg impressionist. There was the strange moment where I was with former US Presidential Candidate John Kerry when we both heard the verdict of the OJ Simpson trial. I once dated the girl who starred in Curly Sue (for about ten seconds) and I had a girlfriend who cheated on me with... well, the world isn't ready for that story yet.

I never knew former NDP leader Jack Layton and it pains me to even put "former" in front of his name. As a dual citizen who has only lived in Canada full time for less than a decade, it was easy for me to be drawn to someone as outwardly cheerful and passionate as he was. His demeanour was almost infectious and it led to me getting a better appreciation for the NDP platform.

I am not a political pundit in any way, but when someone as well liked as Mr. Layton passes away, it becomes a good time to talk about a moment that you shared with them. My Jack Layton story was one that I always liked to share with people over drinks or in private because it is the perfect blend of lunacy and warmth that makes a story worth telling.

One afternoon, several years ago, I don't remember which one exactly, I was walking past City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. Just between the rows of greasy food trucks and the entrance to the parking garage sits a statue of a seated Winston Churchill. Thanks to the proximity of food, the statue is somewhat inappropriately becoming a pooping ground for local pigeons and seagulls.

I happened to be walking by the statue as Jack Layton was; that day sporting an NDP baseball cap and street clothes. We both stopped in front of the statue and looked at it just as a seagull took one of the largest dumps I think either of us had ever seen right on Churchill's face. Then we looked back at each other.

"That was a pretty huge dump" was the first phrase Jack Layton ever said to me in the only time we would ever meet face to face. He was with two other people, but from there he introduced himself to me and we proceeded to have a friendly conversation. We only once talked politics after he told me who he was.

I pointed at the statue and said, "In your line of work, you must be pretty used to that."

Jack smiled. "Well, it's like any other job. There are good days and there are bad days. Churchill had those days, too, but he rarely ever complained about them. You fight the good fight and sometimes it doesn't always work out. You just have to stay strong."

Never before has something that was said to me at a really awkward time held so much weight, especially in light of his passing today. I don't remember the rest of the conversation as it was mostly about innocuous things like summer heat and travelling (once he picked up on my slightly American accent). But that one thing has always stuck with me. It was pretty great advice and something that I will not soon forget.

I can't properly eulogize the man, nor would I want to. I just wanted to pass along the one thing Jack Layton imparted on me, and that was to constantly roll with the punches no matter what life throws at you.

RIP Jack. You will be missed by all.

The Change Up/The Help/The Whistleblower

Time to clean out the stuff that I had seen, but didn't really write about. Here are three other films in major release that I just never got around to talking about.



The Change Up - Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman star in this crude (and proud of it) body swapping comedy where a pothead lothario (Reynolds) and a high strung family man (Bateman) have their wish to have each others lives come true after pissing in a magical fountain. The wish of course was totally facetious and brought on by too much booze, but both men realize that their jobs and lives both equally suck and that they are in need of a change. Director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) throws a whole lot of unnecessary bodily function jokes at the screen, but Reynolds and Bateman make the film work quite well. It's nice to see Bateman get to cut loose and play the Reynold possessed version of his character, and Reynolds once again shows his reliable comedic talents. The film doesn't have to try very hard to work, but a last minute stab at sincerity rings utterly false and comes in the shadow of a film that wasn't trying to be sincere for the first hour and a half.

Rating (out of five stars): ***



The Help - Without getting into arguments about how the film portrays and somehow celebrates white privilege and the art of racial and sexual subjugation (which is a longer and much more cyclical argument that I don't feel like rehashing on a Saturday afternoon), The Help is a passable bit of feel good pap that somewhat accurately portrays the lives of Mississippi women in the 1960s. Viola Davis and Jessica Chastain do great work eliciting sympathy and gravitas from archetypal characters, while Bryce Dallas Howard straddles the fine line between reality and going over the top as the film's most prominent racist. Emma Stone feels kind of wasted and left adrift as Skeeter, a budding journalist determined to make a grand statement about race relations as it pertains to working with "the help." In a way Stone is kind of a surrogate for writer/director Tate Taylor who is trying to make a statement in a heavy handed way, but it is a sentiment that has been done before that holds few surprises. It's not all that great and at nearly two and a half hours it is far too long, but the performances keep things moving along and earns a lot more good will than the film should probably have.

Rating (out of five stars): **1/2



The Whistleblower - Rachel Weisz gives a commanding performance as a former police officer on loan to a UN task force in Bosnia in the late 90s who uncovers a sex trafficking operation that implicates several of her superiors. In a summer of blockbusters aimed squarely at the teen crowd, it's nice to have a film come out that is aimed squarely at thinking adult audiences. Canadian director Larysa Kondracki has created a swift conspiracy thriller and a call to arms against a private contracting company that still gets work in peace keeping and security missions despite only caring about profits. Weisz heads up an incredibly stellar cast by giving a multilayered performance that can elicit comparisons to Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and Gene Hackman in The French Connection (even if the movie itself isn't on that level of excellence). Also standing out in the cast is Monica Bellucci as a bureaucrat who genuinely thinks she is helping the world by toeing a staid corporate line that hurts more than it helps. A conclusion that is somewhat more convoluted than it needs to be takes away from things slightly, but it doesn't take away from the fact that this is a really solid thriller.

Rating (out of five stars): ****

Terri

Terri opens in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver on Friday, August 19th.



It might seem far too easy to herald a film as feeling almost painfully realistic, but there is no other way to describe the unconventional but emotionally charged Terri. A film that plays more like a series of real life moments than a straight narrative, Terri works harder than most any other film this year to create characters the audience can grow attached to rather than offering up a stock teen movie plot.

Terri Thompson (Jacob Wysocki) is an overweight 15 year old boy who both physically and mentally builds walls around him and who gets his only moments of true happiness when he is alone. He doesn't want to be noticed or have to explain himself to the world, but it is hard for people to not notice him when he wears pyjamas to school. His grades are falling and he doesn't participate in class. His chronic tardiness is the result of being the only person to look after his Uncle James (Creed Bratton), who is in the early stages of dementia. This brings him onto the radar of the assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly) who begins setting up weekly appointments to monitor Terri's progress and moods. Eventually Terri befriends Chad (Bridger Zadina), a hair plucking, loose cannon, and Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), a girl that Terri saves from expulsion after some covert sexual activity in home economics.

The pace of Terri is purposefully slow and director Azazel Jacobs and cinematographer Tobias Datum dwell longingly on things both beautiful and awkward. The purpose of the film isn't to create a standard teen comedy or an outright indie melodrama about how hard it is being young and awkward. It is a movie about people struggling to define what makes them who they are. Just like real life it is painful to watch at times, especially a lengthy scene where the teens get drunk and take pills, but such is the nature of life. Patrick Dewitt's screenplay rings truer than any teen film in quite some time.

The performances born from Dewitt's characters are wonderfully subtle. Wysocki carries a certain world weariness that few other teen actors can match. Zadina and Crocicchia play opposite ends of the teen social hierarchy that find their worlds overlapping thanks to their relationship with another vastly different social outcast. Bratton, better known for his work on The Office, is quiet and reserved as a man who is mourning the loss of his intellect. A scene where James wanders into a bookstore and begins crying is one of the best, and simplest scenes in a film this year. Reilly delivers another great performance to add to his resume as a man who knows all too well what it is like to put on a show to the outside world to come across as successful. Fitzgerald isn't self-centred or egotistical, but he knows that his job demands that he be. He might be the best school principal in film history simply by being human and self aware instead of bombastic or needlessly inspirational.

Terri meanders a bit at times and the lack of any formal plot structure might be hard for some audiences to take. It also lacks any definitive ending, but as the film keeps saying in various ways, "life goes on." Terri isn't a film about closure. It is about getting by from moment to moment and taking the good with the bad. A deft blend of the amusing and the sad, Terri is an oddball that almost anyone can get behind.

Rating (out of five stars): ****1/2

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

This is part two of an eight part series looking back at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The answers to trivia questions in the Toronto Underground Cinema's Dream Date With Freddy giveaway can be found here.



Only 14 days after the original Nightmare on Elm Street had been released, New Line Cinema had enough cash to go ahead and begin production on the follow-up. For the first time in their history, New Line chairman Bob Shaye had taken out ads in Variety to trumpet the business of their most successful film and vowed to have the sequel in theatres by October of the following year. Despite not being able to stick to that vow (the film opened the day after Halloween in 1985), the news of a sequel came as a shock to no one.

Series creator Wes Craven was a bit soured on the idea of making a sequel. Craven always intended for A Nightmare on Elm Street to be a story with a firm conclusion (no matter how ambiguous it might have been). A brewing dispute over a share of profits from the original film was also beginning to brew, which led to Bob Shaye commissioning a script from a different writer. The bringing on of a new talent didn't bother Craven all that much, and New Line still extended an offer to Craven to direct the new script, but the sequel was shaping up to be a much different film from the original and he ultimately passed on it.

Due to the fast turnaround and the general lack of interest from most of the actors and crew from the first film, only three principal people would return for the sequel. Robert Englund had previously signed to do two sequels in the contract for the original film, but even without that provision, he was more than happy to come back (a feeling he wouldn't always share as the series progressed). Production assistant Rachel Talalay would return this time to work in the art department and would continue to stay with the series to eventually become the director of Freddy's Dead. Cinematographer Jaques Haitkin would also return, but would only be available for half the shoot due to prior commitments. Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon were asked about their interest to return, but they both stated that they were uninterested unless Wes Craven was involved.

With Craven off to work on Deadly Friend, his first studio based horror film at Warner Brothers, writing duties fell first time writer David Chaskin and Jack Sholder was tapped to direct. Shoulder was a good friend of Bob Shaye's who had previously directed the only other film to be produced in-house by New Line Cinema. Alone in the Dark (from 1982) was another horror film starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, and Donald Pleasance about a group of lunatics who have escaped from an insane asylum in the middle of a blackout. At one point in the film, one of the escapees is asked by a little girl what town he is from and the answer became the name of the previously unnamed town in the Elm Street franchise: Springwood.

Chaskin wanted to play around with horror franchise conventions and opted to make the lead character in his script male. The protagonist for Freddy's Revenge would be Jesse, played by actor Mark Patton. The film would see Jesse and his family (with parents played by television icons Hope Lange and Clu Gulager) moving into the house on Elm Street formerly owned by Nancy's mother. Freddy would use Jesse as a tool of destruction by trying to possess him and allow Freddy to move about in the real world.



The production on the second film was a lot more tightly regimented this time around despite a friendly relationship between Sholder and Shaye. For New Line Cinema, Freddy's Revenge had even higher stakes than the original film. If a sequel to their biggest success could be a hit, it would make the company a real contender. If it failed, the company could be finished.

Bob Shaye was on set for 31 of the 36 days of principal photography; almost unheard of for an executive producer or studio head. Shaye would often be giving orders to people that the director should have been giving. Shaye was responsible for the hiring of make-up effects artist Kevin Yagher who would end up crafting the Freddy make-up that would be used for most of the sequels to follow. He was constantly calling Chaskin back to the set to rewrite the script on the fly; not because the script wasn't very good, but because he kept trimming scenes to lower the budget and decrease the shooting schedule. The iconic scene where Freddy and Jesse square off for the first time, wasn't actually in any of Chaskin's draft. It was constructed on the day of the shoot by Shaye and Kevin Yagher.

Shaye was also adamant that he act in the film. Described as a "frustrated actor" by Jack Sholder, Shaye heavily lobbied for the part of Mr. Grady, the father of Jesse's best friend Ron (played by Robert Rusler). When Sholder told Shaye that a trained actor was needed for that role, Shaye became incensed and demanded a part in the film. Bowing to his bosses demands, Sholder gave Bob the role of a bartender... in an S&M leather bar.

That brings me to the point that some people involved with the production like to dance around (Shaye, Shoulder) and that others openly embrace (Chaskin, Patton, Englund, anyone with a set of eyes): Freddy's Revenge may be the first openly gay horror sequel.

Jesse is being taken over by a force that he can't control. It is a force that scares him deeply. He has intimacy problems with his girlfriend Lisa (Kim Myers) that he can't explain. He awakens in the middle of the night and sleepwalks to a leather bar. Inside the leather bar, he is stopped by his sadistic gym teacher (Marshall Bell) who takes him back to the school after hours to make him run laps. Coach Snyder is killed by a possessed Jesse and Freddy by tying him up in the shower with a jump rope, whipping him with a towel, and slashing and burning him. (A scene that begins with all of the balls in the gym bouncing around and rolling every which way) Jesse doesn't want comfort from his girlfriend and instead seeks it from his best friend who responds with:

"Something is trying to get inside you and you want to sleep with me?"



Described as "the Top Gun of slasher films" by former New Line executive Jeff Katz, Freddy's Revenge is a sloppy, but not altogether uninteresting sequel. The gay subtext is actually quite exceptional and subversive, especially given how subtly feminine Mark Patton looks in the role. Patton, who is openly gay in real life, gives a genuinely good performance as the conflicted teenager who doesn't know what is happening to his body. Chaskin, who is also openly gay, admits that the subtext is entirely intentional, extending to his asking production designer Maggie Martin (who is openly bisexual and has a really incredible resume) to include little touches to heighten the material without Sholder's knowledge. In Jesse's closet there is a board game called Probe. On Jesse's door it very clearly says "No chicks allowed." Then there is the dance scene.

This doesn't necessarily make Freddy's Revenge a great film, and it is admittedly one of the lesser sequels. The main problem with the film is actually the biggest reason why Wes Craven opted to not come back. The sequel doesn't feel the need to follow the rules of the original film, and by the climax, it has thrown the original rules out almost entirely.



What made the original Nightmare so scary was that anything could have been a dream. In Freddy's Revenge, partially thanks to laziness and partially thanks to Shaye's desire to have a more profitable franchise, the killer is allowed to perpetrate random acts of violence in the real world when he previously was unable to. The death of the coach is satisfying in a "jerky guy getting his comeuppance" sort of way, but it doesn't fit the franchise. The final third of the film has Freddy attacking kids at a pool party by electrifying fences and setting fires when it is impossible that these powers have transferred over to the real world. It leads to a very cool sequence where Freddy stands in front of a wall of flames and says "You are all my children now," but the scene itself just isn't scary and it doesn't work. Then there are scenes where Freddy turns up the thermostat and blows up a parakeet. For absolutely no reason.

It's not without fun or charm, but it is in no way equal to the first film. Freddy's Revenge did, however, outperform the original by grossing almost $33 million on only just over 600 screens. Shaye officially had a franchise that could sustain his company and Englund was well on his way to becoming the icon of horror that he is today.



Next time we will take a look at Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the rise of the cult of Freddy.

Hey, Remember That Movie #17: Cool as Ice

It might seem hard to believe but every few years, the world is graced with a sudden resurgence of relevance for Robert Van Winkle. Better known as Vanilla Ice, Mr. Van Winkle has seemingly dodged being chronically unemployed for the better part of two decades simply by being in the right place at the right/wrong time. It is quite an accomplishment for someone that most of the human population thinks is largely untalented.

Van Winkle wasn't always a punchline. In the mid-1980s he was actually a fairly celebrated motocross rider. In his racing career he won three Grand National championships before an ankle injury kept him out of active competition. From there, he turned his attention to beat-boxing and breakdancing. Eventually he became the rapper we all know and "love" today. You know, the one who stole a hook from a Queen song, dated Madonna, appeared in her Sex book, sang about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and got dangled off a balcony by Suge Knight? That guy.



Ice's popularity as a rapper (and he was extremely popular, becoming the first ever hip-hop artist to hit number one on the Billboard charts) flamed out about as quickly as, well, an ice cube in a fire. His unfortunately delayed second album tanked and despite reinventing himself twice as a Rastafarian and as a nu-metal screamer, Ice never regained his musical fame. He did, however, become a television mainstay.



Ice would appear on several reality TV shows and find any way possible to keep making headlines. In 1999, he infamously trashed an MTV set when the video from his biggest hit "Ice Ice Baby" was officially "retired." In 2007, he trashed the set of a spin off of the show The Surreal Life when he was voted off. He has his own show where he tells people how to buy real estate that is about to go into its second season (?!?) and he recently signed a deal with Insane Clown Posse's Psychopathic Records to release what is technically his fifth proper album. On top of all this, Mr. Ice has graced Canada with his presence by being a judge on the new reality based talent show Canada Sings.

Say what you will about the irony of the talentless judging a talent show, but (1) that's the way of the world and (2) the man has seemingly never met a craze he couldn't exploit for some sort of fun and profit. When flash and positivity were in style, he was there. When taking drugs and moping was cool, he was there. When it was time to be self reflexive and introspective about the evils of celebrity, he was there. Ice isn't stupid, in fact, he is far from it. There is almost something admirable in the way he is constantly able to grind out a paycheck.



The only problem with the Iceman's work ethic is that other than his debut album, nothing he has done has ever turned out to be a huge, game changing success. More often than not, it is something that blows up in his face. Take for instance today's subject, the 1991 film Cool as Ice, a cheaply made quickie production from Universal Pictures (brief owner of Ice's former label SBK) designed to cash in on the cool that was Ice. Coming out as the shine was wearing off from his first album and sadly well before his second (a live concert album not withstanding), Cool as Ice debuted to thundering silence in theatres across the United States (and none in Canada where it was never theatrically distributed as far as I could see). Debuting at number 14 on October 18th, Cool as Ice failed to make 1/8th of what the fourth place Ernest Scared Stupid made. That's how dire the situation was.

Ice would win another award that year to place next to his American Music Awards and People's Choice Awards. He took the Golden Raspberry at the Razzies for Worst New Star. The film itself would be nominated for 8 other dishonours that year, but only Ice would win. The film itself has now become synonymous with overexposure and exploitation of a celebrity image (on top of being fucking terrible), but I defy most people to turn down the kind of money Van Winkle was getting thrown his way to look like a fool on camera.

Cool as Ice opens with a five minute music video featuring Ice rapping in a warehouse of some sort while supermodel Naomi Campbell sings the hook. It is all just really standard montage type stuff set to a terrible song until you get one important credit that comes up on screen: Director of Photography: Janusz Kaminski. Cool as Ice was shot by a man who was just two years away from his first Academy Award for cinematography and his first collaboration with Stephen Spielberg with Schindler's List. If one nice thing can be said about Cool as Ice, its that it really is well shot.

Well shot and well edited are two entirely different things, as this movie takes a full seven and a half minutes for anything to happen. As soon as the musical number is over, Ice and his three black friends (because we really need to up his street cred to an urban audience that already knows he is a joke) leave the warehouse club and take off on their motorcycles to go... somewhere. The friends all seem in a hurry to leave, but the movie never explains why. There isn't another show they have to go to immediately. And why do they all have motorcycles? Was that a request from Ice or was it to make him look like an even more ridiculous version of James Dean.

Before we even know the name of Ice's character, one of his friends points out a pretty young woman riding a horse alongside them on the country road they find themselves on. So Ice goes about getting the girl's attention the best way he knows how: by jumping a fence on his bike and nearly killing her. He follows that up by giving her shit for being pissed off over that whole nearly killing her thing.



After that little run in, Ice inexplicably knows that this girl is in love with him, but without a plot contrivance there will be no way for the two of them to ever see each other again. Thankfully, the motorcycle of the fat friend breaks down and they need to tow the broken down bike into town. As they roll through the nearest suburban enclave the audience is treated to reaction shots from boy scouts, what looks to be the dancing Six Flags guy, and a guy on a lawnmower all stopped in their tracks and gaping slack jawed as if they have never seen three black people and a clown before.



They very randomly happen upon a "whack ass" house that looks like Pee Wee's garage sale. It also very randomly happens that the crazed proprietor and his wife know how to fix motorcycles. Or not. That's never made clear. It really just seems like a case of the blind leading the blind because they end up stripping the bike down entirely causing Ice and his posse to be inconvenienced for A FULL DAY! The passage of time is shown by several time eating montages of Ice and his homies dancing, making sandwiches, sleeping, wearing wacky headgear, watching television, dancing, using belt grinders, building houses made of cards, and dancing. Really riveting stuff.

I should probably pause for a moment and mention that the director of Cool as Ice is a man by the name of David Kellogg. A luminary in the world of making commercials and with an IMDB resume that includes no less than 12 Playboy video collections, Kellogg only made one other theatrical feature. That film was the similarly afflicted and somehow even worse live-action Inspector Gadget in 1999. Both films suffer from having no sense of pacing, no idea how to transition between scenes, horrible fight sequences, and almost universally terrible acting. Inspector Gadget might be the one of the worst things produced in the history of forever, but this is Cool as Ice. Astoundingly, Kellogg has actually disowned Cool as Ice because it wasn't true to his vision. I guess there weren't enough insert shots and random graphics for his liking.



Now in town with some time to kill, Ice (whose character is really named Johnny, but fuck that noise since he's just Vanilla Ice no matter what you call him) takes note that the girl he nearly paralyzed earlier with his wacky shenanigans is living across the street from Roald Dahl's house. So he goes to visit "dat chick who drive da horse" and finds out her name is Kathy, who is alternately called Katherine by her overly square parents and Kat by V. Ice, only to find out she is dating an uptight tool named Nick. Because, you see, Nick rhymes with Dick, and without a name for Ice to freestyle some rhymes off of there wouldn't be any wit in this film.



After uttering the iconic line "Drop that zero, get with the hero" and stealing Kathy's day planner (and after two more montages), the film cuts to her family gathering around the television to watch their daughter make the evening news just for being excellent. Kathy has a 4.0 and double 800s on her SATs. The sky seems to be the limit for this chronic overachiever and as Ice watches the same newscast, he falls deeper into what I think is love but comes across more as constipated.

Unfortunately, this slow news day is bad news for her father, who has apparently been in the witness protection program since before Kathy was born for double crossing a pair of crooked police officers. What exactly happened, I have no idea. I never wrote it down. It was just white noise. Needless to say, if her father doesn't pay them an arbitrary sum of money ($500,000. I did write that down) within the next 24 hours, they will do something nasty to his family. It is really lucky for the film that these two disgraced cops just happened to be in the same place at the same time or else there wouldn't be any dramatic tension.

Once the news is over, which Ice probably just watched for the comics section to come on, he tells his homies he is going to go "shling a shlong," which apparently means go across the street like he's The Fonz to try and see Kathy. Unfortunately Kathy has already left and Ice ends up talking to her mother and little brother. The little brother, named Tommy and is the only remotely likeable character in the film, immediately takes a shine to Ice because his hair is like a lighthouse and he is wearing the most ridiculous clothing known to man. Furthermore, I also like that several times when Tommy is on screen he is playing Nintendo and the sound effects from Super Mario Brothers 3 are so loud that they drown out the dialog.



It turns out Kathy has just left to meet Nick at the only club in town: The Sugar Shack. Of course the place is square as hell, with the club filled with nerds in thick rimmed glasses where Nick will look like a God of badassery since he is the only person drinking. (And he is drinking from his own bottle of cheap vodka!) The band is atrociously white and playing a cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)" that might be played for laughs, but is still unlistenable. Which means it's time for Ice to turn the party out and drop some "funkay lhyriks."



This display of bravado and ego stroking gains the attention of Kathy who tells Ice to return her day planner by tomorrow or she calls the cops. She in turn steals his driver's license without him knowing it as an insurance policy. She didn't get double 800s for nothing.

Of course Nick gets jealous and his crew of friends that we never knew he had show up to trash what they think is Ice's bike, but turns out to be the bike of one of his friends. At the sight of this injustice to the property of one Mr. Sir D, Ice has to truly prove that he is "Down By Law" like his jacket says. He regulates like he's Warren G in a fight scene where absolutely no punches hit their mark and people just fall down rather than getting knocked out. Apparently the fight was bad enough to send Nick to the hospital, but I like to think Nick got whiplash from trying to sell all of the terrible stunts.



The next morning, Kathy wakes up and BAM! ice is in her mouth. Not literally. Well, actually, yes, literally. Ice is in her room shoving and ice cube into her mouth and telling her to be quiet and not wake her father up. All I can think is how long was he there just staring at her in bed and where he got the ice cube from. He seems pretty stupid so I envision he had been there for several hours and he kept creeping downstairs to get more ice cubes from the freezer.

After a chaste scene of sexual teasing that stopped just shy of putting a hot dog through a doughnut, Kathy and Ice have their first date at the site of a house that is under construction in the middle of what appears to be a salt flat. In between such rousing dialog as "So, what's it like having parents and stuff?" and "I'd like to do something wild because I never have." the audience is treated to what would appear to be some sort of fashion ad.



Ice and Kathy jump around and play on the skeletal house, but they are looking directly into the camera most of the time and making goofy faces. They don't appear to be playfully chasing each other since there really isn't anything to suggest that the camera is shooting from the point of view of the opposite person. It seems like something that inexplicably took two days to shoot and neither of them were there at the same time.

After the movie detours for another clothing ad and Ice's love ballad, the movie finally gets to the plot contrivance that is going to race the film to its conclusion. Kathy's dad mistakenly believes that Ice is in cahoots with the two crooked cops and uses the fact that he put Nick in the hospital to damn Ice eternally and forbids Kathy from ever seeing him again. Ice very astutely states that he has no idea what her father is talking about and that "whackhead was trying to play baseball with my homeboy's bike." Perfectly understandable since he is so clearly Down By Law. I know I would trust the guy with "Sex Me Up" on the sleeve of his leathers with my daughter.

The father levels with his daughter and we are treated to a couple more montages to pad out a respectable theatrical length. The idiotic and incompetent energy that the film had going in its favour suddenly flags and the film just gets boring to watch. There is one "good" scene where Ice takes a heartbroken Tommy for a ride on his motorcycle and we get to see a young boy flip the bird to Nick just as he is driving home from the hospital. It truly proves that a young child giving someone the middle finger is never, ever not funny.



Tommy is kidnapped mid-Tecmo Bowl and the kidnappers send an audio tape to his family to show they mean businesses. Kathy, instead of turning to the actual police or the FBI who put her father in witness protection in the first place, turns to Ice for help. Ice CSI's the shit out of that audio tape and deduces through the films incredibly overblown Foley Editing that her brother is being kept at the same construction site they playfully romped through the previous afternoon. The day is saved! The bike is fixed! Nothing happened!

And then the movie ends with another seven minute music video back at the club from the beginning. I honestly just shut the movie off at that point. Did I really need to sit through any more of it? No.

There really might not be any one person to fully blame for this film being this bad since it was a premise doomed from the start. Sure, Kellogg sucks as a director and Ice's face is constantly frozen in one expression except for being able to raise his eyebrow every once in a while, but this really is just another fad movie condemned to obscurity. It was a product of its time that will likely never see release on DVD or Blu-ray. And that, as we all like to say, is for the best.

You Used to be About the Music, Man.

I never really intended it to be like this. In no way am I ungrateful, but the last thing I ever expected to achieve this year is a modicum of success. This year has been an incredibly wild experience between the Defending the Indefensible series, the writing of several books, getting published online and in print several times, and actually being oddly in demand for my talents as a film writer. Is it really bragging if I never expected it to end up this way? I am eternally humbled by the success of this blog, but most of it has admittedly been thanks to my film writing.

If one were to go back to the beginning of this blog they would find that the original intention of this blog was to write about personal experiences with the occasional film review. They would find a lot of promises and schedules I never followed through on. It was never a matter of me being bored with the previous blog format. Some of it was admittedly being lazy, but that almost seems natural to me at this point. When you write for a living about one certain thing and you spend all day doing it, by the time you find a moment to write all the things you wanted to write about, you just don't want to.

In essence, I have kind of unwittingly sold out and typecast myself. Watching films and reviewing them has become something that is very quickly starting to pay the bills. All the personal stuff that I get a lot of satisfaction writing about, doesn't pay for anything. There really isn't that much of a hook that could necessarily get people to care all that much about. Not yet, anyway.

The other day a friend stopped me and asked whatever happened to my "Open Letters to Ex-Girlfriends" series of blogs. I told her that I wasn't really sure what was going on with it. I never really abandoned it and the next entry has been half finished for close to five months now. I told her that I just never have time to get things to the point where I am comfortable releasing them. The same goes for the "Music/Movies and Memories" blogs. The day job doesn't take up all my time, but to keep it up takes a lot more work than one would think.

She was pretty disappointed and she wasn't the only one. I previously thought that no one really cared what they thought of my more personal work, but it shocks me how many people paid attention to those entries. She asked if the neglect of the blog was because I was scared of my public perception taking a beating for what I would write. I told her that was never the case. In fact, I am just as comfortable sharing personal details of my life now more than ever.

Let's go over a couple of things right now that are pretty personal in bullet point form:

-My most recent relationship took an astounding nose dive.
-My living situation, which previously sucked, is now a bit better, but not the most ideal.
-I am deathly worried about the next month or so because it is the ultimate "make or break" time for me as a writer.
-That Nightmare on Elm Street history that I wrote the other day I honestly thought was pure shit, but I finished it like a high schooler the night before it was due because I felt obligated to do it. (The good news is the next entries in that series will be better, and probably filled with more facts that people don't readily know.)

I just felt that a "state of the blog" address was in order for those who have been writing or talking to me and wondering just what the deal was. So regarding certain series that I said I would continue:

-The memory related section will resurface in late September when I have more time to figure stuff out. Same with the Ex-Girlfriends series.
-The "Hey, Remember That Movie?" series will return sooner than one would think. There were two entries that I had written that were scrapped but might be reworked. A new entry could appear within the next 48 hours or so, but don't take my word for it. The "Burnout Movie Club" (which has stayed pat since November) will be more or less absorbed into this category, with the more obscure titles being featured here at a later date.
-The Summer of 1989 series has actually been evolving into something a lot bigger. After the Ghostbusters II piece got over a hundred thousand hits (as opposed to the average of 450 hits that my personal blogs get), I realized that I had to step my game up. Those are going to continue and everything is still on, but that is going to become a book that I am working on. I want to keep the series sequential, but thanks to getting personal interviews with a lot of people involved with these films, I have been working on them out of order. The Batman entry is still admittedly an outline right now. That series will return and continue simply when I have time to finish Batman. I started in order and I want to keep it more or less the way it was.

The next month or so, this will almost exclusively be for film related purposes. Sorry. That's just the way the cards have fallen. I just wanted to give everyone a heads up as to what was going on.

And most importantly and above all else to thank all of you who helped get this blog recognized. Without each and every one of you I would not be doing a job that gives me as much joy as this does. It is incredibly humbling and absolutely amazing. You guys are the best and I applaud you. Hopefully I will have many more awesome things for you guys in the near future.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

This is part one of a ten part series looking back at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Clues for potential trivia questions to the Toronto Underground Cinema's Scavenger Hunt can be found in these entries. The actual trivia questions will be posted at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog.

A note from the author at 1:51am: If you are here just for the contest, you can skip right to the section of this entry where you see the video for the trailer. The answers to Freddy's trivia questions are in that section. I might have helped you. Don't tell Freddy. I'm already not sleeping because of him. Also, the whole first part is me explaining the rules, ticketing info for the event, and just how much I love the Nightmare series in general. I honestly don't think you will read all of this. This is a contest and an event for the fans like myself whom without Freddy, I wouldn't be here. And if you did read all of this admittedly less than tight rambling that I rushed to have out in time, consider yourselves my new best friends.




It was the first R-rated film I saw growing up. I remember it vividly mostly because of the pain involved. It wasn't pain from fear, but from a fever that was keeping me up at night. It was in the middle of the night during the week. Not on a weekend. I remember that little tidbit, as well. I simply couldn't sleep and I was feeling miserable.

I walked to the living room where my father, a notorious night owl, was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on HBO. It was about 2 in the morning and the movie had started about five minutes before I walked into the room. I was practically in tears telling my dad that I couldn't sleep and I asked him what he was watching. He told me, and not being one to censor anything I ever watched (except for Videodrome and Amazon Women on the Moon) he asked if I really wanted to watch it with him. He said it might give me nightmares. I told him I already couldn't sleep. Honestly, how much more miserable was I going to feel?

It might have been bad parenting to some, but the first time I saw Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece I was hooked on movies. I wasn't really all that scared, but I remembered a genuine rush of excitement while watching the film. There was something decidedly naughty about watching a film of that nature in the middle of the night on what should have been a school night. I was relatively sure none of my friends were watching what I was. It was a blast of the fantastical and Gothic that my young mind couldn't entirely grasp, but just the experience of seeing it made me want to seek out more films like it.

From that night on I would prowl video store shelves looking for the next film I would love that I probably shouldn't be seeing. I would hang out in the horror section just to look at the box art. I didn't know at the time that A Nightmare on Elm Street was quite the box office success that it was, or that it already had a sequel by the time I had seen the original. To me it was this awesome little movie with a really scary bad ass at the heart of it that wanted to hurt children.

I actually didn't find it all that scary until I watched the film again when I was 13 in the basement of a friend's house. I had previously only watched such film on my own at home. I had never really watched a scary movie with other kids in the room. It was a battered VHS copy taped from TV, complete with commercial breaks, but the two girls and three guys in the room were genuinely scared by it. The film actually started to work its powers on me and I began to question every bump or noise in the basement. There was a girl I had a crush on who just about lost her shit when the boiler kicked in shortly after the scene where Johnny Depp's Glen dies. It was the first time a girl ever actively latched on to me for comfort, and I have Freddy Krueger and Robert Englund to thank for that. (Although, I should also thank the heating and air conditioning guy who was supposed to fix the boiler that week but never did.)

As I got older and my taste in film developed, my love for the original A Nightmare on Elm Street never flagged. If anything, my appreciation for the film strengthened. While my favourite films in other genres kept changing depending on my taste at the time, my favourite horror film has and probably always will be A Nightmare on Elm Street. I have studied the original endlessly and I have closely watched all of the sequels that came after (some of which I definitely like more than others, as you will all see in the coming weeks). I wrote not one, but two papers in University about the original film. One was on Regan era fears in American typified by the boogeyman character of Freddy and the other was a comparison of the works of Wes Craven and John Hughes (specifically comparing Elm Street's characters to those in The Breakfast Club).

Being able to help the Toronto Underground Cinema with their upcoming screening of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors with Englund in attendance is better than Christmas for me and I know I am not alone. The event is very nearly sold out (you can purchase your tickets online at Brown Paper Tickets or in person at the Underground box office, Eyesore Cinema, Silver Snail, or Suspect Video. It warms my heart to see so many fans of the series coming out to have a great time.

Over the next few weeks leading up to the event, I will be taking a look at the entire franchise from the original to the reboot (with a special entry devoted to non-film related Freddy ephemera) and giving those who might not be as familiar with the franchise a bit of a history lesson on the films while sharing my own personal thoughts.

This all coincides with the upcoming contest and scavenger hunt designed by Mr. Kruger himself to help you guys win your way in to the screening on Friday, August 25th at 8pm (doors at 7pm). Mr. Kruger will be Tweeting clues from his handle FKUnderground and will be posting several trivia questions over at the Notes From the Toronto Underground blog. The answers to many of these trivia questions can be found in my entries (but not all of them).

Then on the day that one of these blogs is posted, Freddy will send me out into the world with a pair of passes for one lucky winner. If you find me at the location Freddy alludes to, I will ask you three of the eight posted trivia questions (you will have a few hours to do research and get all the answers before having to find me). Find me and answer the three questions correctly, and you are going to see Robert Englund himself talk about what may be the most entertaining horror movie sequel of all time.

But before I get ahead of myself, let's talk about the original film, shall we?



Wes Craven might seem like the most unlikely of people to be a horror movie icon. In fact, the famed master of horror never really saw many films until he was a college professor in the late 1960s. Craven's father was a preacher and he was raised as a fundamentalist baptist. Craven lost his father at the age of 6 in 1945, but Craven managed to only remember just how angry and scary his father could be at his angriest.

Craven's Baptist upbringing continued after the death of his father, and with the exception of classical books, he was never introduced to any real sort of popular culture. After graduating college Craven became an English professor who became enamoured with the European films being screened on campus. The first films Craven really remembered connecting to were Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Fellini's 8 1/2.

Only two years after taking the job as a professor, Craven quit his job in the early 1970s and moved to New York where he would become an assistant to film producer Sean S. Cunningham, better known as the man who would create the Friday the 13th franchise. Cunningham, impressed by Craven's work ethic as an electrician, cameraman, and editor, offered Craven a chance to direct his own film.

Using Cunningham's suggestion that horror was the best and most profitable genre to launch a career with, Craven sat down and wrote The Last House on the Left. The film was written by Craven in six days as a no nonsense, take no prisoners revenge film inspired by Bergman's film The Virgin Spring. The film was a grindhouse success that sparked fits of outrage from some members of the mainstream moviegoing public who were deeply offended by the film's graphic depiction of rape and murder. The film was constantly being recut and banned in certain markets, but this only enhanced the film's reputation.



Following Last House, Craven took five years off from filmmaking with hopes of making something other than a horror film. When nothing else was panning out, he made the slightly less controversial, but no less intense film The Hills Have Eyes, which essentially solidified Craven's reputation as a master of the macabre. Craven would then move on to working on several television films, the Amish country set Deadly Blessing (with Ernest Borgnine and Sharon Stone), the comic adaptation Swamp Thing, and a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that Craven never had any real interest in doing and essentially he has disowned (It also wasn't released until 1985 despite completing shooting before A Nightmare on Elm Street even started production).





After filming Swamp Thing and The Hills Have Eyes II back to back, Craven, who was unsatisfied with both films, decided to take six months off to work on something that he could be proud of. The film was to be inspired by a series of Los Angeles Times articles from 1981 that had caught his attention.

There was a series of three articles printed all centring on Hmong men formerly from Cambodia that were dying in their sleep. The common thread between all three men is that they were all survivors of relocation camps during the deadly Pol Pot regime who had told their families that they had been experiencing terrible nightmares before eventually dying of heartattacks in their sleep. The first two stories struck Craven as creepy coincidences, but the third story stuck out.

In the third article the young man had attempted to stay awake for four days. He had explicitly told his parents that there was something that was trying to get to him in his sleep and that if he fell asleep he was afraid he would die. He had been hoarding sleeping pills that his father was trying to get him to take. He had also rigged an extension cord to run from the hallway to his closet where he constantly had a pot of black coffee brewing. One night, the young man drifted off to sleep as the family was watching a movie. The parents brought the teenager upstairs to bed and several hours later were awakened by screaming. By the time the parents had reached the bedroom, it was too late. Their son was dead.

The idea that something could kill you in your sleep from sheer terror was something that Craven knew he wanted to work with for his next film. The idea of terror personified came in the form of Freddy Krueger, a deceased child molester out for revenge against the vigilante parents that burned him alive. Krueger would go into the very personal world of their children's dreams to use their own psyches against them and kill them without leaving any evidence and a whole lot of unanswered questions.

The idea for Krueger came from Craven's own psyche. Fred was the name of the schoolyard bully that used to beat him up everyday. Krueger was the chosen surname because it sounded vaguely German and was a variation on the name Krug, which was the name of the main villain in Last House on the Left. Freddy's sweater was compromised of two colours that Craven remembered from a Scientific American article as being the two harshest colours for the human retina to identify at the same time. The idea of Freddy being a burn victim was a nod to the masked slasher movie killers at the time (Jason, Michael Meyers) as being a natural, but still marketable mask; something that could let the humanity of the actor wearing it show through. Freddy's signature fedora was based on a drunk that Craven had seen growing up that looked into his room and "scared the shit out of" him.

With the script in place, Craven began to shop his work around. By this point, his earnings had dried up. Craven lost his house, his first marriage had ended, he maxed out his savings, and he even had to ask to borrow money from Sean Cunningham just to pay his back taxes and stay out of prison. None of this made Craven think he had anything less than a sure thing in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Major studios declined almost across the board. Paramount, where his friend Cunningham had his Friday the 13th series based, turned Craven down on the basis that it was too close to another film they had in development called Dreamscape, starring Dennis Quaid. In a strange turn of events, Dreamscape was written by Nightmare 3's eventual director Chuck Russell and would be released four months prior to the original Nightmare, but would ultimately be released by 20th Century Fox.



The one major studio that showed any interest in the film was actually Disney. The house that Mickey built thought that the film could be drastically toned down and given a minor theatrical release before being something they could show every year on their newly launched Disney Channel at Halloween. For the better of humanity and the worse of Craven's wallet, that deal never materialized.

The only film company that showed a real interest and a real grasp of the material wasn't even really a studio. New Line Cinema was only a distribution company at the time of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, specializing mostly in owning the 16mm screening rights to classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and Reefer Madness. New Line president Robert Shaye knew that Wes' film could make a decent return on investment, but he didn't have the money to finance the film on his own.

Shaye approached and secured one million dollars of a $1.3 million budget (which was three times less of a budget than Craven had been working with on all his films after Last House on the Left) from the Smart Egg Pictures company. Then at almost the last second (about two months before shooting), Smart Egg pulled out. Shaye and the film's crew were on standby and began to put up a lot of their own money to get the film started. Shaye reached an agreement with Media Home Entertainment for almost a full million dollars with a huge catch. Media had it written into their contract that they could take full control of the production away from Shaye if it went over schedule or over budget. Shaye scraped up the remaining few hundred thousand from private investors and from going back to Smart Egg who gave $200,000 but demanded that their name be on the production credits for this film and any possible sequels. It killed Shaye to acquiesce to this, but he was just glad to have the movie at all by this point.

With the film now a go, a crew was firmly assembled. Craven hired cinematographer Jaques Haitkin to work behind the camera on what was sure to be an ambitious and effects heavy project. Haitkin vowed to Craven that he would make sure every dollar of the film's budget made it to the screen and he would often be the person most critical of his work when dailes of the film were screened. He was also the only cameraman that Craven approached that didn't balk at his desire to film two sequences in the film with a rotating room.

For Freddy's make-up effects, Craven hired effects wizard David Miller, who had just finished work (ironically enough) on Dreamscape and was ostensibly the main make-up consultant for the band KISS. Miller created what would be a somewhat enduring template for the make-up for years to come: an 11 piece mask that would take about four hours to apply that would allow for the actor playing Freddy to have a full range of facial motion. Unfortunately, the make-up would prove one of the most costly day to day items of the film costing almost $20,000 by the end of the shoot.

For Freddy's iconic glove and almost all of the film's practical effects (which we will get into later), Craven turned to mechanical effects wizard Jim Doyle (who had also worked on Dreamscape, but also on Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart and WarGames). Freddy's glove was something that Doyle sketched out numerous times before perfecting. The only real instruction given to him by Craven and the script was that the glove had to be made from items one would find in a boiler room: the place where Krueger would have most likely had his office.

If finding money and a crew was hard, casting the film proved to be comparatively easier. For the lead role of heroine Nancy Thompson, Craven decided upon Heather Langenkamp, a Stanford student whose biggest claim to fame up to that point was that she was an extra in Coppola's The Outsiders and had been cut from the follow-up Rumble Fish. Craven wanted Nancy to be someone who was pretty, but could also be seen as extremely intelligent.

Veteran actor John Saxon was brought in to play the role of Nancy's estranged police officer father. Saxon was the name New Line so desperately needed to sell the movie overseas. A former television teen heartthrob, Saxon would go on to make his name in the US mostly in B-grade horror and crime thrillers like Black Christmas and The Glove. Overseas, Saxon wouldn't be doing films that were all that different, but he had been working with iconic European directors like Umberto Lenzi and Dario Argento and it brought him more respectability with foreign distributors.

For the role of Nancy's boyfriend Glen, Craven had three actors that he had tested in mind, but his daughter made his mind up for him. The man that caught the eye of Craven's daughter was a then unknown who had never acted before named Johnny Depp. The man who would go on to become one of the most bankable and most interesting actors in Hollywood today was talked into being an actor by a good friend of his. That good friend was the equally bankable and enigmatic Nicolas Cage, who set up a meeting between Depp and his agent when he suggested that Johnny try acting. The first reading Depp ever did was for A Nightmare on Elm Street and he got the part on his first attempt. The rest of that story is pretty much history.

If casting for a role like Glen was easy, the casting of Freddy would prove to be much harder. Craven had originally wanted to go with an older man and was keen on hiring British actor David Warner for the role. Warner, who had previously played the villain in Time After Time and Time Bandits, wasn't keen on playing another villain so soon and was even less happy that on a film with a budget as low as this one that he wouldn't have adequate time off to rest.

Robert Englund, a classically trained actor and television veteran, was brought in for a reading with Wes Craven as a favour from an agent who failed to get Englund a part in the John Hughes scripted dud National Lampoon's Class Reunion. Englund nailed the reading, but Craven had to be convinced by Englund and the make-up department that casting someone as young as Englund would make sense in the role. It didn't hurt that Englund was on a break from production on the successful television miniseries V. Englund would also add another (admittedly minor) name to the film.

Production on the film went as smoothly as any seat of the pants venture could go. The main obstacle to Craven and his crew wasn't so much an issue of money anymore, but an issue of time. The shoot could go no longer than 32 days or else Shaye and New Line would have lost everything they had invested to Media and all of his own personally sleepless nights of trying to bankroll the film would have been for naught. In the end, it all came together and the process itself isn't as exciting to talk about as one would believe.

The effects were what ended up making the biggest impact on the production, as well as the audience who would eventually see the film. For the death scenes of the film's Janet Leigh-in-Psycho style character Tina (played by Amanda Wyss) and for Johnny Depp's Glen, Jim Doyle created a rotating room that would give the illusion of Freddy mysteriously dragging Tina across the ceiling and to show 110 gallons of blood shooting up from the bed Freddy dragged young Glen down into. The most iconic shots of the film were obtained by way of Craven and Jaques Haitkin being literally buckled into two car seats from an old Datsun that were bolted to the set as crew members rotated the room slowly.

To recoup some of the production costs, Doyle and Shaye agreed to sell the rotating room set to Cannon Films for them to use in their upcoming sequel to Breakin', Electric Boogaloo. In Breakin' 2, one can see the picture of Freddy's glove on the wall as one of the leads dances around the vastly redecorated room and on the ceiling. All of this is actually quite fitting since Craven and Doyle got the idea to use a rotating room from old Fred Astaire films.





For the nightmarish effect of Freddy's arms stretching across an alleyway to a great length, Doyle positioned two men with fishing poles on the roofs of garages across the alley from one another and simply had them walk with Englund's stunt double (who had just gotten done playing the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters) chased Tina down the alleyway. For an equally stretchy scene where Freddy almost bursts through the wall over Nancy's bed, Doyle replaced the wall with an incredible new material known as spandex. The face that actually appears over the bed in the film is not that of Englund or his stunt double, but of Doyle himself.

The final battle sequence between Nancy and Freddy included a scenes that actually came from the nightmares of producer Bob Shaye. It comes when Nancy attempts to run up the stairs of her house to safety only to be sinking into them as if they were made of quicksand (an effect achieved by mixing chopped up bits of carpeting and Bisquick pancake mix). The scene was almost cut due to time restrictions, but Shaye fought to keep it in the film. Shaye fought so strenuously that an increasingly burnt out Craven let Shaye direct the entire sequence.

The only real controversy of the actual production was the battle between Craven and Shaye over how the film should have ended. Craven always wanted the film to be a stand alone entity, with Nancy finally turning her back on the evil man who she unconsciously gave power to and walking ambiguously away from him. Shaye asked only for one thing specific from the production, and that was a hook to hang a sequel onto. Six different ending for the film were shot with varying degrees of ambiguity, but Wes somewhat grudgingly agreed since Shaye had honestly been really great to him and because without his attempts at financing the film, he would be out of a job.

Once the film was completed and released, New Line started on the road to being known as "The House That Freddy Built." Theatrically in the US alone, A Nightmare on Elm Street opened to generally favourable reviews that lauded it as being a step above the slasher films that were flooding the genre marketplace at the time. It would make almost $30 million and the first sequel was bankrolled by investors one week into the run of the first film. It would also ride the crest of the VHS wave and would position Media as a major player in the video market. On home video, the film would spend 50 weeks on the Billboard rental charts and would bring in another $22 million. It would be the VHS market that would largely make the sequels increasingly more popular in theatres as they rolled out.

The success of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is one of legend, but it isn't very had to see why. Horror films are by themselves extremely profitable, but they are also largely products of their time and a reflection of societal fears. Craven himself said that nightmares are the horror movies of the psyche and that horror movies are essentially nightmares of the society. In his positive review of the film, Paul Attansio of The Washington Post remarked that horror movies are essentially nothing more than organized nightmares.

In a 1988 poll conducted by CBS to ask who the most notable figure of the decade was, Freddy finished second only to then president Ronald Regan. Freddy was a perfect personification of the Ronald Regan era and the largely youthful rebellion against the "silent majority" and their fears of not having a future. Freddy was a spectre that thrived on collecting his pound of flesh from the parents of those who wronged him by killing their children. In the 1980s, with deficit spending out of control, the cold war, a compromised environment, and an industrial war complex out of control, there really might not have been much of a future to have. In film as in real life, the sins of the parents would have doomed the children no matter what they did wrong.

Englund's performance is undoubtedly key to the success of the first film and the ensuing franchise. No one else could have played this role in the same way that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were inseparable from the characters they made famous. We will get more into Englund as this series goes on, I promise. I would simply be remiss by not giving the man his due here.

It is quite telling that in an scene around the halfway point of the film, a teacher in Nancy's class (played by the always lovely to see Lin Shaye) is teaching Hamlet. Much like Hamlet, Nancy has to stamp out the lies told to her by her mother (a raging alcoholic) and she isn't respected by her absentee father. Nancy has had her eyes opened to the truth of the suburban, bucolic nightmare, and this search for the truth is ultimately both a blessing and a curse. Such a touch from a former English professor like Craven is surely intentional, but gives a real literary grounding to a fantastical story.

In fact, Craven's original film serves as a curiously leftist counterpoint to the typically right wing politics of the slasher films it so wrongfully gets lumped in with. Films in the Halloween and the Friday the 13th series mostly award outwardly virtuous behaviour and condemn such sinful behaviour as taking drugs and having premarital sex. Craven doesn't really care about the personal lives of the kids on screen. They are all well rounded characters, but none of them are treated differently from the rest. To Freddy they are all guilty and in need of punishment. It is a very level field of judgment instead of subscribing to the usual "final girl" school of filmmaking that dictates that the most virginal character survives to the end of the film. The audience in this film doesn't know if Nancy is a pure soul or not, nor does it matter.

A Nightmare on Elm Street would give rise to a new type of horror experience known as "rubber reality." While the idea of a film taking place within a dream world is nothing new (and was admittedly done first and possibly best by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), few films took making distinctions between the dream world and the real world as intensely as this one did. The film is at its best when it makes the audience afraid to trust their own perception. Craven plunges the audience into 8 separate dream sequences that grow progressively disorienting as the film goes on and as the characters get less and less sleep. This idea of waking nightmares has been done to death and lampooned at great length today, but in 1984 this concept was still fresh. If imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, Craven and company were the belles of the 1980s horror ball.

Tune in next time for a look at the first sequel, Freddy's Revenge, where the idea of waking nightmares gets a bit muddled, but the film is no less subversive or daring.