Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Since this lacks the fascinating homosexual undertones of Freddy's Revenge, I'm going to call this one the worst of the series. The main problem being that, at this point, they went way too far in making Freddy wacky instead of scary. It's not just his awful one-liners, the whole movie is a series of Looney Tunes inspired sight gags (complete with goofy sound effects), and few of them are particularly funny.
Still, even though it's a pretty bad movie, I have to admit that a lot of the special effects and dream sequences have a certain entertainment value to them. Obviously, the great thing about this series is the dream motif, which allowed not only for a lot of weird special effects, but certain touches of oddness and surrealism that's often lacking in mainstream horror films. It's not exactly Bunuelian, but it's still cool how it lets the filmmakers unleash a lot of weird ideas, even in a crappy movie like this one. Sure, they never made the dreams particularly abstract or inexplicable, like real dream can be, but it's still neat. (Wouldn't it be a trip if they had tried that? Like a nightmare about abstract shapes and colors that give off a bad vibe and kill you. Or one of those dreams where sometimes you're there and other times you're just watching, or you're a different person or have a different history.) I especially like one guy's dream, where he keeps unfolding and unfolding a roadmap until it fills his entire van.
There is an interesting theme in this one that all the kids are at a troubled youth center, so their nightmares all involve getting abused by their parents. The 3D finale is a fun (if shitty) gimmick, and I also appreciate that they convince you that one guy is the main character, then kill him off halfway through the movie. But like I said, jokey-ness of the screenplay and visual style is a failure, plus the movie is completely lacking in the creative-kills department, and they somehow managed to make Freddy's death anticlimactic and unsatisfying. Unless you're an obsessive nerd like me (I'll probably watch this a handful of times again in my life), it's skippable.
1 comment:
i would have liked to have seen wes craven's new nightmare in 3-D instead...all that shit with the crawling into the coffin and the dead body falling over on mother and child would've been awesome in three dimensions.
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