And that’s it. Unfortunately, now that the fourth movie is done and the fifth one is underway, I fear I won’t have anything interesting to talk about.

We’re dropped immediately into a blue-filtered sex scene. Oh wait. I put on an old Michael Mann film by accident. No wait. I didn’t. This is the right movie. I just saw Lisa Wilcox’s name. She’s back for another go-round. And her boyfriend’s here, too. They just conceived the Dream Child.

Watch out world.

Oh and now she’s stepped into the shower. Looks like we’re diving head-first into the big pool o’ movie cliches. But hey, at least she’s naked.

This entry into the Nightmare canon was directed by Martin Scorsese. He apparently thought– wait, really? Let me check that.

This entry was directed by Stephen Hopkins, further proving that if you direct one of these things, you go on to better things. Like Lost In Space and Ghost And The Darkness. Actually, he did crank out more than twenty episodes of “24” early in the run of the show, so I appreciate that. And then up next he’s doing “The Reaping” with Hillary Swank. He’s probably–

Oh hey, the movie’s still on. Amanda Krueger’s giving birth in the OR from hell. “Holy shit,” says the doctor, “What is this?” And then hairless troll doll scurries out into dreamland. I think I prefer the pissing dog resurrection of the last movie.

By this point in the series, we abandon all hope. We’re so far gone from the original concept that the festivities have become a gnarly black thread studded with little gristly bits of special effects creativity. There’s nothing scary going on here. There’s nothing even ironic or true. It’s just an exercise in self-aware pop culture kitsch.

Okay, now Alice’s boyfriend is dead. He just turned into Ghost Rider and crashed headfirst into a plot device. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a black cat leap out of a shadow. Oops, and while I was writing that, Greta died too. An anoretic’s nightmare. Freddy Krueger, never less scary than when dressed in a chef’s hat saying things like, “Bon appetit, bitch,” stuffs Greta’s face full of food. And then she croaks.

Speaking of black cats, I used to hang out with a neighborhood cat I called Mooch, after the character in the comic strip, Mutts. He was cool. I’d be typing away, late night, and he’d just wander in. One look around, a twitch of the whiskers, and he’d saunter over to the couch and curl up next to me. Kinda like this: Hello. Food? No. Dogs? No, as usual. Fuzzy Man? There he is. Yawn. Soft. Sleep. He was a muse sometimes. I would sit at my desk, laptop humming, and he’d curl up next to me under my desk lamp, dreaming his cat dreams in a land where all the bowls of food are big, all the dogs are all pent up, and everything else makes small, quick movements. Mooch got eventually got carried away by an owl. No joke. I had moved him down to Camarillo and one day–

Oh good, Kelly Minter’s about to die. She drives me crazy in this movie. In fact, I haven’t seen her in a movie yet that I’ve liked her in. Just rubs me the wrong way. Oh wait. She’s not dead yet. The comic book artist friend (everyone has one of those) gets sucked into the dream in a “Take On Me” moment.

That’s an A-Ha reference.

“Faster than a bastard maniac!” screams Freddy, and in the process sinks this movie so far below the surface that angler fish are trying to eat it. And now comic book artist friend is dead.

I wonder if Lisa Wilcox ever had a moment when she said to herself, “My god, this movie is gonna be angler fish food.”

Finale courtesy of M.C. Escher.

Barf.

Oh and Kelly Minter survives. Who’d a thunk it?

Made for about $6 million this managed to pull in about $22 million during its theatrical run. That’s a lot of disappointed moviegoers.

On February 27, 1987, New Line releases what will prove to become, aside from the first Nightmare, the favorite of fans worldwide. It’s a far better film than the second, even without Clu Gulager. But I’m gonna go on record here and say that it just isn’t my favorite, or my second or even my third favorite. I find it somewhat annoying. But then, maybe I’m wrong about this one. I’m checking it out to see if perhaps on review, I’ll find something to like about it.

Okay, already one thing’s going for it – Heather Langenkamp returns, and this, I think, lends credibility to the episode. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say that if it weren’t for Miss Langenkamp, I’d have already written this one off. She’s not much better at acting, but she’s got presence. And she’s got that cool lock of hair. So if “Nancy’s” back, we must be on the right track.

It’s also the beginning of what becomes a regular feature of the Nightmare films. We begin to see so many names in the credit crawl that have gone on to do much bigger and better things. Director Chuck Russell was already ensconced in a career that had already delved into the world of sleep, namely Dreamscape. He went on to tackle The Mask, Eraser and The Scorpion King. The script is credited to Wes Craven & Bruce Wagner (first pass) and Chuck Russell & Frank Darabont (second pass.) Darabont went on to become a serious writer/director in his own right (Shawshank, anyone?) Larry Fishburne makes an appearance, back before he became “Laurence.” And long before she became the “Medium,” Patricia Arquette squares off here against Freddy, who, thanks to the jacked up budget (doubling again to about $5 million – that’s $3 billion in 2006 dollars) is given some better nightmares within which to frolic.

This time around, we’ve left Elm Street and find ourselves in lock-up. Seems several of the neighborhood kids are having dreams so bad that they’ve ended up in the nut house. And once again, there’s a little of everything. We’ve got the brains, the beauty, the brawn and the girl next door. And to top it off, Craig Wasson, who makes a living doing fringe horror (Body Double, Ghost Story) is here to watch over them.

He has his hands full. Now that Craven’s back and Darabont is on the case, Freddy’s not only more clever, he’s given some of the better lines of his career.

Exhibit Numero Uno: minute 39 brings us one of the most memorable lines of the series, when Freddy Krueger introduces Jennifer, the aspiring television actress, to the screen of a television set. “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” Good line, even if the mechanoid boob-tube Freddy doesn’t quite work for me.

Minute 56 brings us the other fantastic line. Craig Wasson pursues an apparition of a nun into the old, shuttered wing of the mental hospital. She tells him a story. Turns out that many years ago a nun was accidentally locked in the wing with the worst of the criminally insane. She emerged days later, barely alive, raped hundreds of times. Freddy Krueger is the fruit of that unconscionable union. This makes him, as the ghosty nun says … wait for it … wait for it …

“The bastard son of a hundred maniacs!”

Oh man, that’s sweet.

I suppose there’s something else I like about this one. The kids pull together and fight back in a way that we haven’t seen yet and never (well, not quite) see again. The effects are stylish and well-executed. The tone is consistent, and, while never actually getting creepy, at least makes a decent attempt at it. And there are some images that, upon closer viewing, strike me as rather ingenious.

Like this one, where Freddy menaces the recovering addict (played by Jennifer Rubin, by the way–yet another rising starlet):

And this one, which actually made me rewind and rewind a few times. Maybe it’s because I just read The Drawing Of The Three, by Stephen King, but the door image works. It’s a powerful image, and if the two works hadn’t both been released in 1987, I’d have guessed this was an homage to the King book.

So yeah, you know, the kids pull it together, suffer a few losses, rescue one of their own and then off they go to the sequel. I like it, I give it credit for being better than I remember. Though it had none of the raw terror of the first (I’m despairing that any of them will come close at this point,) there’s some good, clever stuff in here. I dig it.

The budget of this one was $5 million. They did a lot with that money. It raked in more than $40 million during its theatrical run, pretty much guaranteeing at this point that a franchise has been born. Nowhere to go but up, right?

Well…

November 16, 1984.

Where are you when the first Nightmare came out? Me? I’m working at Movies Twin in Santa Fe. It’s a quaint (even for the time) twin theater in De Vargas Mall at the edge of town. A handful of us are on staff that night, the night before the film’s release. We’re a bunch of eclectic, hyper-active teenagers, excited about that night’s screening, because. as anyone who’s worked in a movie theater knows, it’s routine to screen any newly assembled film before it opens to make sure the projectionist put the reels together right. In this case, we’re the projectionists, so we’re checking out our own work when we sit down in the theater just after midnight, popcorn and nachos in laps, giant, brimming Cokes on the floor. Since everything’s done manually at Movies Twin, Erik runs up and hits the projector motor switch, turns on the xenon arc bulb, taps the sound button (which also opens the heavy, red curtains) opens the dowser and lowers the house lights.

And we’re off on the ride of our lives. We’re aware, of course, we’re about to watch a horror flick, but we have no inkling that it’s to be a bit of terror so primal and effective that it would still resonate twenty-two years later.

By the time the credit sequence is over, we’re edgy.

Ten minutes in and we’re beginning to suspect this isn’t your average slasher flick.

And then seventeen minutes in comes Tina’s death scene. It’s a tour de force of suspense, gore and shock. As Krueger attacks her in her dream, her body spins like a top in mid-air, wrenched about by unseen forces, showering blood on her boyfriend who watches in shock and disbelief from the corner of the room. This is the defining moment for us. All bets are off. We’re at Wes Craven’s mercy, defenseless and whimpering.

I don’t remember much after that. I think we all passed out from fear.

Since then I’ve seen it a dozen times. It’s full of classic moments that, to this day, still resonate, still terrify. By today’s standards, where theater of the sadistic reigns supreme, the gore is tame. But at minute forty, a dreaming Heather Langenkamp is treated to a horrific vision of Amanda Wyss in her bodybag, bugs crawling from her mouth and worm-laden ooze sloughing out of her body into a delectable pool at her feet, and damn, it still works.

“This is just a dream, it isn’t real!” exclaims Nancy. If only it were so.

Forty-eight minutes into the movie comes what I think of as the “Exorcist” sequence. It’s time to bring science into the scenario. Nancy checks into a sleep clinic. We’re pitting science against the supernatural. This doesn’t have the brutal sparity and clinical horror of its counterpart in The Exorcist, where Regan checks into the hospital and undergoes her battery of tests, but it works towards our desire to find a rational explanation, and then robs us of that by confounding it.

Minute fifty-two. It occurs to me that maybe she SHOULD join her mother in hitting the Grey Goose. Alcohol robs the drinker of dreams. If she went to bed drunk, she might not reach that R.E.M. stage that seems so dangerous.

Minute 80. We’re setting up Johnny Depp’s notorious death scene, and Nancy delivers the tagline, “Whatever you do… Don’t. Fall. Asleep.”

Minute 92. Man, I wish I had Johnny Depp’s hair. Just for a little while, so I could scratch my head vigorously and then watch it fall back into place.

Seven minutes later Freddy pulls Mr. Depp into his bed and showers the room in blood, one of the film’s more spectacular effects. It’s the ol’ rotating room trick, not unlike that one where Fred Astair dances on the ceiling, only with less of a melody.

And just a word of advice? If John Saxon ever promises you he’ll be at your house in twenty minutes, don’t believe him, even if within those twenty minutes you somehow manage to turn your house into a cross between Grimtooth’s Traps and Home Alone.

To this day, there isn’t a horror movie in existence that fills me with more bloody, brutal, nostalgic warmth. The acting is clumsy, the dialogue is wooden, the effects show signs of age. But this is movie-making from a slightly more innocent time. Craven and company were working without a net, outside the plush confines of an established franchise. Their eyes were open, and the thing they made is a slice of bloody beauty.
In its opening weekend the film pulls in $1.27 million. In 2006 dollars, that’s…well, not a lot. This wasn’t a franchise yet. But its budget was about $1.8 million, so I guess it almost paid for itself way back in 1984. Imagine what it’s pulled in since then. Freddy Krueger became a worldwide phenomenon. Twenty years of VHS, DVD, laser and ancillary profits have poured in. Thousands of people dress up as him every Halloween.

It was money well spent.

That year it was nominated in the category of Best Horror Film by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films. Also nominated were Gremlins, Dreamscape, Firestarter, and Titan Find (renamed Creature.)

Gremlins won.

As for the sequels? Well, check back starting tomorrow. We’ll get into them, one by one.