'Twas several nights after Christmas and it had many flaws,
Because I ended up watching something called Santa Claws.
It had lots of sex, it seemed less slasher than porn,
But it sucked as a slasher, so it's getting my scorn!
SPOILERS will follow, as they always do,
So if you want to see it first, I bid you adieu!
The film starts off with a young boy named Wayne.
He saw Mom boinking a stranger, which drove him insane!
Wayne grabbed up a gun and shot them both dead,
Then the credits came on, when I wanted gore instead!
Our heroine is a model, named Raven Quinn,
She poses in the nude, wearing not so much as a grin.
Wayne's now her neighbor, as well as grown-up,
And has an unhealthy obsession with her double-D cups...
One day they chat, and she treats him real nice...
So he decides to put all of her co-workers on ice!
Oh, and he keeps on a table a mannequin's head,
Which looks like Raven (but much less brain-dead).
To make matters worse, Raven's single--and how!
Her husband's a photographer, and has models to plow...
His mother and sister tell lies to Raven's kids,
Blaming her for the marriage being on the skids.
At about this time, Wayne starts up his plan
Helping her get ready for Christmas, that crazy lovestruck man!
He screws up though, by moving too fast,
And when Raven gets pissed, his brief happiness has passed.
She then starts to flirt,
Boy, I wonder why her mood changed?
(Oh wait, it's a delusion...
I forgot he was deranged.)
His first victim, another actress, is killed after a shower,
He uses a claw, killing the delicate flower.
The claw is like one from Raven's last flick,
So Wayne adopts that movie-killer's dumb-as-Hell shtick.
After killing the starlet, Wayne attacks an old man,
He worked at the studio, 'til Wayne kicked his can...
The very next day, Wayne buries the bodies in snow,
Which isn't too bright, 'cause it melts, y'know?
In the next scene, the ex is photographing a sexy witch,
And when Raven calls him, it's her he tries to ditch!
Raven wants to talk, try to work the marriage out,
But her ex is busy getting tits shoved up his snout.
Wayne, by the way, slips Raven's kids sleeping pills,
While we watch another "starlet" strip for cheap thrills.
When the kids are out cold, Wayne buys a Santa suity,
And we see more of that random stripper's booty.
When she gets home, the girl pets her pussy....a cat!
Why, there's nothing at all sleazy about that!
Then she gets naked, and fills her tub up with bubbles,
But Wayne ruins my fun, and just causes her troubles.
He knocks at her door, and gets into her house,
And kills her, that rude, psychotic louse!
Then he resumes babysitting, before Raven gets home,
And she never suspects that they've been drugged and home alone.
The next night, Raven has to "model" again,
So she asks Wayne, once more, to watch her children.
He starts spray-painting his new Santa costume black,
Probably to prepare for his next lame attack.
Unexpectedly, Raven's hubby makes a surprise return home-a,
And finds his kids in a Wayne-induced coma.
He assumes that Raven drugged the poor kids,
And plans to confront over what he thinks she did!
The ex grabs the phone, first to call his mom,
She of course has no idea what's going on.
She tells him that Wayne has taken over babysitting the kids,
And the whole thing makes the ex incredibly livid!!!
He goes next door, but Wayne isn't home,
So he returns to the house, so the kids won't be alone.
He waits for his mom and sis to arrive,
Then goes off to find Raven, as fast as he can drive.
Back in the studio, Raven's removed her top,
This scene is so good, why must it stop?
But alas, it does end, just as Wayne sneaks in,
Later, I'll rewind it, though, again and again!
Wayne kills a secretary, then stashes her in the john,
By the time she's discovered, he hopes to be long-gone!
This all occurs just as the ex knocks at the door,
Some dude lets him in, because the security's piss-poor.
The flunky's the next guy that Wayne kills,
He should be a hitman, the guy's got mad skills!
While this is going on, the ex finds his wife,
And informs her about the looney now in her life.
Wayne interrupts them, in his Santa suit made black,
And Raven now sees that's he totally whacked.
She tries real hard to reason with the guy,
But he decides that the couple both have to die.
The ex and Wayne get into a fight,
When Wayne gets knocked down, the couple escape into the night.
He corners poor Raven, knocks the husband out cold,
Is this thing close to done? It's getting kinda old!
The ex wakes up, and Wayne attacks him once more,
While Raven just stands there, useless to her core.
When Wayne drops his claw to strangle the guy,
Raven finally does more than simply stand by!
She picks up the claw and stabs Wayne from behind,
And shows love for her hubby, who responds in kind.
The ending shows the family together at last,
Putting their troubles squarely into the past. THE END
Sheesh. You know a movie's bad when you get so bored watching it, you start reviewing it like Dr. Seuss. The worst part is, it fails as both a softcore porno AND a slasher flick! How did they manage to do THAT??? It gets 3 killer trees for all of the gratuitous cleavage-baring, and a -1 as a bland and uninteresting slasher flick...so, "2", I guess(although that still seems like way too high of a score.)
I never thought I'd say this, but next week, I'll be glad to watch the next Friday the 13th sequel. See? See how badly this thing traumatized me? I'd like to deck somebody's halls, I'll tell ya that right now!
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Frozen
Ever have "one of those weeks"? I had 2(TWO!!) winter-themed movies queued up on Netflix, and both managed to arrive late. I was ready to throw in the towel and just re-watch Session 9, but both arrived (FINALLY) in the mail 2 days ago. Yay. It's a Christmas miracle. Anyway, without further ado, I shall pop in the first film, Frozen, so let's get our eggs nogged and snuggle up to our favorite ho-ho-ho's. I added SPOILERS to the figgy pudding, so be warned! Oh, and I promise to watch the next one IMMEDIATELY after I sign off, to make up for all of these stupid delays.
The first thing I noticed about Frozen is that it's directed by Adam Green, who also directed Hatchet and Hatchet II. That's a good sign, as Hatchet was a fun, crazy slasher flick. and the second one is on my queue. So, let's keep our fingers crossed!
The premise is deceptively simple: 3 friends on a ski vacation are left stranded on a ski lift as the place closes for the night. Will they survive? Was it done on purpose? Is there a kid somewhere in the film demanding 2 dollars from John Cusack?(wasn't part of that set at a ski resort? I may be thinking of the wrong film...)
There's Parker, the cute perky blond; Dan, a smooth-talking guy with charisma to spare; and Joe, aka "Lynch", a guy who looks a little scruffy, but also seems decent enough. The trio of friends have come to this particular slope because Lynch persuades them into thinking the girl who runs the lift has a thing for him. The plan is to let him charm her, in the hope that all 3 can ride the lift for free.
The plan is flawless, save for the fact that the lift operator is a mean-looking guy, instead of some cute bubblehead.
After a quick discussion, Lynch and Dan convince Parker to flirt with the guy until he accepts a bribe. She starts up a conversation with the guy, but he seems pretty immune to her charms.
While Parker's using her feminine wiles to get her way, Lynch and Dan are having a heated debate over why Parker's even there to begin with. It seems that, since she started dating Dan, Lynch and Dan's other buddies haven't seen him around as much. Anyway, Parker gets them all in, but is criticized when the guys discover that she bribed the lift guy with $100, the full amount they gave her. Oops. She was apparently supposed to "ask for change". For a bribe?
Well, whatever. It worked, because they all get to ride up the slope. During the ascent, Parker and Lynch start in on each other. Parker's romance-talk and smoking habit bother Lynch, and his sarcastic attitude and alpha male behavior bug her. As Dan tries to keep the peace, the lift suddenly creaks to a halt. Ooooh, here we go!
Wait, nope, after several other patrons complain, it starts up again. Anyway, they all ski and ride snowboards and blah blah blah, 'til they're nearly worn to a frazzle. Lynch tries to hook up with a cute girl whose skis keep tripping her up, but he nearly gets torn apart by her boyfriend. He defuses the situation by playing dumb, and charms the girl into breaking up with the boyfriend later.
After they find out about the break-up, the friends decide to take one more trip up the slope, but the lift operator refuses. He tells them that some rough weather is moving in, and that he can't risk it. When they remind him that he was given $100, he decides to allow them up one last time. Gee, I wonder what will happen?
Well, as it turns out, a couple of things happen...First, the lift operator is told by a fellow employee that the boss wants to see him. He remembers to tell the other guy that there are still 3 skiers up there, though. Phew!
Oops. It turns out that, as Lynch, Parker and Dan are going up in the lift, they see 3 skiers rushing downhill. When the new lift operator sees them coming, he throws the switch. Talk about bad luck!
Stranded, the trio don't realize at first that they were forgotten. They assume that the lift was stopped due to technical problems, or maybe a skiing accident. They even exchange gruesome ski stories, just to freak Parker out. Once they realize that they were left in mid-air, they try yelling for help, but it's too late by then.
As the day turns to night, they try to come up with some escape plans. Parker suggests that it might be possible to jump from their height with the snowboard, ride down, and call someone. The guys, on the other hand, think it's risky, and still hold out hope for employees to show up and get them down, possibly with ladders.
When it gets darker, they suddenly remember something else: it's Sunday. That means that, theoretically, they could be up in the air until the following Friday. As that dawns on them, Parker starts to laugh. It turns out that she has to pee. As she and Lynch argue over how THAT is going to work, he reminds her that they will all have to figure out a way to go to the bathroom, because they won't be able to hold it all in for 5 days straight. To prove his point, Lynch pees right then and there.
Well, at least it can't get worse...until the storm starts. Damn, the lift operator was right, and the storm is a doozy! Lynch zips back up, lowers the safety bar again, and they all sit tight while ice, snow and rain batter them. Makes me want to take a trip to Aspen!
As they continue to wait for the storm to die down, a pair of headlights appear. They get excited as the vehicle starts driving toward them, and shout and wave with frantic desperation. From inside his plow, the guy can't hear them. Geez dummies, try throwing something down to get his attention!
Wow, they heard me! Dan throws his goggles straight down in front of the plow. Sadly, he does this while the driver is looking at the rear of the vehicle, trying to back up. Angry now(and afraid), all 3 start throwing stuff: skis, goggles, poles, you name it. One item bounces off the windshield, but when the driver looks ahead again, he sees nothing and chalks it up to hail or something. Dumbass!
As the night goes on and the temperature drops, Lynch tries to keep them distracted from the cold by coming up with inane lists: Top 3 Breakfast Cereals, Worst 3 Blind Dates, stuff like that. When Parker loses one of her gloves, Dan turns to reassure her and sees what could be the start of frostbite on her face. He announces that he's going to jump, then get help, but the other 2 urge him to stay.
Dan jumps. He lands flat on his back, and at first it appears that he might be dead. The good news? He sits up. The bad news? Both legs are broken, so badly that the splintered bones are protruding through his pants. Oh, and he's bleeding out---FAST.
Parker tries to throw him her scarf to him to help staunch the bleeding, but it flies away into a high tree branch. Lynch balls up his scarf to throw, and it lands closer, but in FRONT of poor Dan. After several attempts, much agonized screaming and many tears, Dan finally leans over his broken, splintered legs enough to snatch up the scarf. and ties it to one of his legs.
Of course, there's still the OTHER leg...Parker offers to toss her coat, which, while a sweet gesture, is incredibly stupid. Lynch comes up with a dangerous plan of his own: he wants to try to pull himself across the cables, until he can get to a safe jumping point. After considering it, they revise the idea: he's going to cross the cables to the nearest wire-pole, and climb down to the ground to help Dan.
Before they can watch Lynch kill himself on wires, they all hear howling. The wind, perhaps? Nope, it's much worse: wolves. And thanks to Captain Numbnuts, there's now a blood-scent to follow. Great thinking, Dan. Hope you enjoy being eaten alive, dude. Dan starts to freak out, and Parker tells him it could be worse. When asked how, she tells him that he could have been eaten by the Sarlaac in the Star Wars trilogy.(that's Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi...I refuse to acknowledge the other 3 until technology is invented to make them suck less!)
Lynch prepares to scale the wire, but it's blocked by a layer of ice. As he and Parker chip away the ice, fragments of it start falling toward Dan, who covers his face. When he lowers his hands, he comes face to face with a snarling, growling wolf. While he panics, Parker throws something, and scares the wolf away. It's right about then that Dan realizes that he no longer has feeling in his legs. Uh oh.
More bad news, but this time it's up in the ski-lift chair. Frostbite is settling in on both Parker and Lynch. Determined to be brave, Lynch stands on the seat, and starts his rope-climbing idea. A short distance in, he starts to feel the wire cutting into his hands. Then he glances down and rushes to pull himself back into the chair with Parker. When she asks him what was wrong, he tells her not to look down.
Parker looks down. Below the chair, wolves have begun to circle Dan. He begs Parker and Lynch to look away, then just covers his head with his arms. The wolves tear him apart. As he screams to death, his friends try not to watch the carnage. They still see too much, and both start screaming and crying.
Later, they fight over who was responsible for Dan's death. Parker blames Lynch, because he didn't jump first. Lynch tells her that the death was a direct result of her dating Dan in the first place. They both shout, then cry, then console each other. Then Parker gets upset thinking about her dog, She imagines that the dog, while waiting for her to return, will starve to death. They eventually both calm down enough to fall asleep.
The next morning, Parker wakes up and discovers that she gripped the railing sometime during the night. As a result, her hand is now frozen, welded to the safety bar. When she does finally pry her hand loose, a whole lot of flesh stays on the bar. Her cries wake Lynch up, and he sees her hand. He also sees that her frostbite is much worse, and warns her again about scratching it. Oh, and she finally peed, all over herself.
Realizing that they won't last until the weekend, Lynch decides to try to cross the cable again. He pulls himself up, and part of the mechanism holding the chair up breaks, making the chair swing sideways. Lynch pulls himself across the wire to the next chair and rests in it.
Now alone in her section of the lift, Parker tries to keep as still as possible. At about this point, the wolves return. When they see Lynch about to make his next move, they begin to circle underneath his position. He shouts over to Parker, asking her to reach one of the remaining ski poles, and try to throw it as close to the climbing post as she can. She does, but it's not very close.
Lynch climbs out of his new seat and makes his way to the post. As the wolves watch, he actually makes it! Quickly, he starts climbing down, exciting the wolves by losing his footing once. When he gets to the ground, he makes a mad dash for the snowboard and begins to strap it on.
That's all the distraction the wolves need. Two move into position, and one of them pounces on Lynch. He tries to roll away, and struggles to reach the pole Parker threw. As the wolf keeps clawing at him, Lynch gets the pole and surprises the wolf with a sharp jab. Both wolves retreat back into the trees.
Lynch gets to his feet, and starts coasting down the trail, while Parker gets excited. A few moments later, the wolves follow him, and Parker screams for him to get to safety. There is no response, and Parker prays that he made it safely away.
The rest of the day passes with no activity, and that night Parker assumes the worst. The next morning she decides to try to do what Dan and Parker did, but she has no real plan. She sees that the last wheel holding the chair up is close to breaking, and she climbs down the chair. The wheel starts to snap, and as Parker dangles under the chair, it plummets. Luckily, it hangs on by a wire, and the wire stretches enough to the point where she thinks it might be safe to attempt a jump.
Parker takes her leap of faith, just seconds before the last wire snaps. She lands safely on the snow, but the chair falls as well, and injures one of her feet. Ignoring the pain, Parker straps on some skis and takes off down the trail.
A short way downhill, she sees the wolves eating Lynch. They start to growl at her, but the meal of Lynch distracts them, and she gets away. Once she gets to the bottom, Parker staggers past the ski lodge, heading for the main road. She sees a car, but it sails right past her, and she collapses just as she reaches the road.
While she lays there, dead or unconscious, another car arrives. This motorist stops, and he pulls her to her feet. After making sure that she's alive, the driver gets her into the car and tells her that the hospital is 10 minutes away. Parker just stares at her reflection in the sideview mirror. THE END
Phew! While not a slasher film in the least, Frozen was definitely harrowing to watch. The performances were quite convincing, and the tension was thicker than the ice! As a horror film, I'd give it a solid 5 killer trees out of 5. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
And what did I learn from Frozen?
-Ski resorts are all deathtraps.
-Never try jumping off of a ski lift, your legs will break and animals will eat you!
-The need to pee and rescue your starving puppy can give you instant bravery!
Later this weekend, I'll do the other movie Netflix sent me, something called Santa Claws. Sounds awful enough to be pretty fun. I hope. Happy holidays!
The first thing I noticed about Frozen is that it's directed by Adam Green, who also directed Hatchet and Hatchet II. That's a good sign, as Hatchet was a fun, crazy slasher flick. and the second one is on my queue. So, let's keep our fingers crossed!
The premise is deceptively simple: 3 friends on a ski vacation are left stranded on a ski lift as the place closes for the night. Will they survive? Was it done on purpose? Is there a kid somewhere in the film demanding 2 dollars from John Cusack?(wasn't part of that set at a ski resort? I may be thinking of the wrong film...)
There's Parker, the cute perky blond; Dan, a smooth-talking guy with charisma to spare; and Joe, aka "Lynch", a guy who looks a little scruffy, but also seems decent enough. The trio of friends have come to this particular slope because Lynch persuades them into thinking the girl who runs the lift has a thing for him. The plan is to let him charm her, in the hope that all 3 can ride the lift for free.
The plan is flawless, save for the fact that the lift operator is a mean-looking guy, instead of some cute bubblehead.
After a quick discussion, Lynch and Dan convince Parker to flirt with the guy until he accepts a bribe. She starts up a conversation with the guy, but he seems pretty immune to her charms.
While Parker's using her feminine wiles to get her way, Lynch and Dan are having a heated debate over why Parker's even there to begin with. It seems that, since she started dating Dan, Lynch and Dan's other buddies haven't seen him around as much. Anyway, Parker gets them all in, but is criticized when the guys discover that she bribed the lift guy with $100, the full amount they gave her. Oops. She was apparently supposed to "ask for change". For a bribe?
Well, whatever. It worked, because they all get to ride up the slope. During the ascent, Parker and Lynch start in on each other. Parker's romance-talk and smoking habit bother Lynch, and his sarcastic attitude and alpha male behavior bug her. As Dan tries to keep the peace, the lift suddenly creaks to a halt. Ooooh, here we go!
Wait, nope, after several other patrons complain, it starts up again. Anyway, they all ski and ride snowboards and blah blah blah, 'til they're nearly worn to a frazzle. Lynch tries to hook up with a cute girl whose skis keep tripping her up, but he nearly gets torn apart by her boyfriend. He defuses the situation by playing dumb, and charms the girl into breaking up with the boyfriend later.
After they find out about the break-up, the friends decide to take one more trip up the slope, but the lift operator refuses. He tells them that some rough weather is moving in, and that he can't risk it. When they remind him that he was given $100, he decides to allow them up one last time. Gee, I wonder what will happen?
Well, as it turns out, a couple of things happen...First, the lift operator is told by a fellow employee that the boss wants to see him. He remembers to tell the other guy that there are still 3 skiers up there, though. Phew!
Oops. It turns out that, as Lynch, Parker and Dan are going up in the lift, they see 3 skiers rushing downhill. When the new lift operator sees them coming, he throws the switch. Talk about bad luck!
Stranded, the trio don't realize at first that they were forgotten. They assume that the lift was stopped due to technical problems, or maybe a skiing accident. They even exchange gruesome ski stories, just to freak Parker out. Once they realize that they were left in mid-air, they try yelling for help, but it's too late by then.
As the day turns to night, they try to come up with some escape plans. Parker suggests that it might be possible to jump from their height with the snowboard, ride down, and call someone. The guys, on the other hand, think it's risky, and still hold out hope for employees to show up and get them down, possibly with ladders.
When it gets darker, they suddenly remember something else: it's Sunday. That means that, theoretically, they could be up in the air until the following Friday. As that dawns on them, Parker starts to laugh. It turns out that she has to pee. As she and Lynch argue over how THAT is going to work, he reminds her that they will all have to figure out a way to go to the bathroom, because they won't be able to hold it all in for 5 days straight. To prove his point, Lynch pees right then and there.
Well, at least it can't get worse...until the storm starts. Damn, the lift operator was right, and the storm is a doozy! Lynch zips back up, lowers the safety bar again, and they all sit tight while ice, snow and rain batter them. Makes me want to take a trip to Aspen!
As they continue to wait for the storm to die down, a pair of headlights appear. They get excited as the vehicle starts driving toward them, and shout and wave with frantic desperation. From inside his plow, the guy can't hear them. Geez dummies, try throwing something down to get his attention!
Wow, they heard me! Dan throws his goggles straight down in front of the plow. Sadly, he does this while the driver is looking at the rear of the vehicle, trying to back up. Angry now(and afraid), all 3 start throwing stuff: skis, goggles, poles, you name it. One item bounces off the windshield, but when the driver looks ahead again, he sees nothing and chalks it up to hail or something. Dumbass!
As the night goes on and the temperature drops, Lynch tries to keep them distracted from the cold by coming up with inane lists: Top 3 Breakfast Cereals, Worst 3 Blind Dates, stuff like that. When Parker loses one of her gloves, Dan turns to reassure her and sees what could be the start of frostbite on her face. He announces that he's going to jump, then get help, but the other 2 urge him to stay.
Dan jumps. He lands flat on his back, and at first it appears that he might be dead. The good news? He sits up. The bad news? Both legs are broken, so badly that the splintered bones are protruding through his pants. Oh, and he's bleeding out---FAST.
Parker tries to throw him her scarf to him to help staunch the bleeding, but it flies away into a high tree branch. Lynch balls up his scarf to throw, and it lands closer, but in FRONT of poor Dan. After several attempts, much agonized screaming and many tears, Dan finally leans over his broken, splintered legs enough to snatch up the scarf. and ties it to one of his legs.
Of course, there's still the OTHER leg...Parker offers to toss her coat, which, while a sweet gesture, is incredibly stupid. Lynch comes up with a dangerous plan of his own: he wants to try to pull himself across the cables, until he can get to a safe jumping point. After considering it, they revise the idea: he's going to cross the cables to the nearest wire-pole, and climb down to the ground to help Dan.
Before they can watch Lynch kill himself on wires, they all hear howling. The wind, perhaps? Nope, it's much worse: wolves. And thanks to Captain Numbnuts, there's now a blood-scent to follow. Great thinking, Dan. Hope you enjoy being eaten alive, dude. Dan starts to freak out, and Parker tells him it could be worse. When asked how, she tells him that he could have been eaten by the Sarlaac in the Star Wars trilogy.(that's Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi...I refuse to acknowledge the other 3 until technology is invented to make them suck less!)
Lynch prepares to scale the wire, but it's blocked by a layer of ice. As he and Parker chip away the ice, fragments of it start falling toward Dan, who covers his face. When he lowers his hands, he comes face to face with a snarling, growling wolf. While he panics, Parker throws something, and scares the wolf away. It's right about then that Dan realizes that he no longer has feeling in his legs. Uh oh.
More bad news, but this time it's up in the ski-lift chair. Frostbite is settling in on both Parker and Lynch. Determined to be brave, Lynch stands on the seat, and starts his rope-climbing idea. A short distance in, he starts to feel the wire cutting into his hands. Then he glances down and rushes to pull himself back into the chair with Parker. When she asks him what was wrong, he tells her not to look down.
Parker looks down. Below the chair, wolves have begun to circle Dan. He begs Parker and Lynch to look away, then just covers his head with his arms. The wolves tear him apart. As he screams to death, his friends try not to watch the carnage. They still see too much, and both start screaming and crying.
Later, they fight over who was responsible for Dan's death. Parker blames Lynch, because he didn't jump first. Lynch tells her that the death was a direct result of her dating Dan in the first place. They both shout, then cry, then console each other. Then Parker gets upset thinking about her dog, She imagines that the dog, while waiting for her to return, will starve to death. They eventually both calm down enough to fall asleep.
The next morning, Parker wakes up and discovers that she gripped the railing sometime during the night. As a result, her hand is now frozen, welded to the safety bar. When she does finally pry her hand loose, a whole lot of flesh stays on the bar. Her cries wake Lynch up, and he sees her hand. He also sees that her frostbite is much worse, and warns her again about scratching it. Oh, and she finally peed, all over herself.
Realizing that they won't last until the weekend, Lynch decides to try to cross the cable again. He pulls himself up, and part of the mechanism holding the chair up breaks, making the chair swing sideways. Lynch pulls himself across the wire to the next chair and rests in it.
Now alone in her section of the lift, Parker tries to keep as still as possible. At about this point, the wolves return. When they see Lynch about to make his next move, they begin to circle underneath his position. He shouts over to Parker, asking her to reach one of the remaining ski poles, and try to throw it as close to the climbing post as she can. She does, but it's not very close.
Lynch climbs out of his new seat and makes his way to the post. As the wolves watch, he actually makes it! Quickly, he starts climbing down, exciting the wolves by losing his footing once. When he gets to the ground, he makes a mad dash for the snowboard and begins to strap it on.
That's all the distraction the wolves need. Two move into position, and one of them pounces on Lynch. He tries to roll away, and struggles to reach the pole Parker threw. As the wolf keeps clawing at him, Lynch gets the pole and surprises the wolf with a sharp jab. Both wolves retreat back into the trees.
Lynch gets to his feet, and starts coasting down the trail, while Parker gets excited. A few moments later, the wolves follow him, and Parker screams for him to get to safety. There is no response, and Parker prays that he made it safely away.
The rest of the day passes with no activity, and that night Parker assumes the worst. The next morning she decides to try to do what Dan and Parker did, but she has no real plan. She sees that the last wheel holding the chair up is close to breaking, and she climbs down the chair. The wheel starts to snap, and as Parker dangles under the chair, it plummets. Luckily, it hangs on by a wire, and the wire stretches enough to the point where she thinks it might be safe to attempt a jump.
Parker takes her leap of faith, just seconds before the last wire snaps. She lands safely on the snow, but the chair falls as well, and injures one of her feet. Ignoring the pain, Parker straps on some skis and takes off down the trail.
A short way downhill, she sees the wolves eating Lynch. They start to growl at her, but the meal of Lynch distracts them, and she gets away. Once she gets to the bottom, Parker staggers past the ski lodge, heading for the main road. She sees a car, but it sails right past her, and she collapses just as she reaches the road.
While she lays there, dead or unconscious, another car arrives. This motorist stops, and he pulls her to her feet. After making sure that she's alive, the driver gets her into the car and tells her that the hospital is 10 minutes away. Parker just stares at her reflection in the sideview mirror. THE END
Phew! While not a slasher film in the least, Frozen was definitely harrowing to watch. The performances were quite convincing, and the tension was thicker than the ice! As a horror film, I'd give it a solid 5 killer trees out of 5. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
And what did I learn from Frozen?
-Ski resorts are all deathtraps.
-Never try jumping off of a ski lift, your legs will break and animals will eat you!
-The need to pee and rescue your starving puppy can give you instant bravery!
Later this weekend, I'll do the other movie Netflix sent me, something called Santa Claws. Sounds awful enough to be pretty fun. I hope. Happy holidays!
Monday, December 13, 2010
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
(quick note: technology sucks! My laptop kept overheating, despite trying out 2 different cooling fans. So, after having to keep restarting the thing, and taking over a week to watch a 90-minute film, I surrendered and bought myself a new laptop, from Alienware. Should arrive this week! *crosses fingers* Anyway, here's the thing I wrote while I watched Friday the 13th 7 for over a week of 20-minute spurts...enjoy!)
Well here it is, the day I've been dreading: the era of the "Jason vs. Gimmicks" movies in the Friday the 13th franchise began with today's movie, Friday the 13th VII: The New Blood. Or, to put it more accurately, Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Carrie. That's it, that's your premise in a nutshell: a pouty, whiny blond girl with telekinesis goes up against Jason. Who loses? The audience, mostly. As always, ahead thar be SPOILERS!!!
The film begins on a promising note, with a narrator telling us the "legend of Jason", which amounts to a sort of "Cliff's Notes"-ish highlight reel featuring some of Jason's best kills. Most of the clips come from Parts 4-6, the Tommy Jarvis trilogy: Corey Feldman getting grabbed through the window; the wheelchair guy's corpse getting pushed down all of those stairs; Tommy's sister hitting Jason in the head as he goes after Tommy; the lightning bolt reviving him in the previous film; the deaths of most of the 1-scene characters from that same movie; Tommy describing Jason's motivation, followed by his plan to trap him at the bottom of Crystal lake...those are the highlights.
As the narrator winds up his spiel, the screen goes dark. Then a bright, white light shows through all of the holes in the iconic hockey mask, and it splits apart to reveal the title. The famous theme music is gone, replaced by Foreboding Metronome Muzak instead. According to the credits, the damsel this time is named Lar Park Lincoln. Jason is played by Kane Hodder, the actor most-credited with the role. Other familiar faces include Terry Kiser(BERNIE!!!) and...no one else I recognize. Da-amn, movie.
Anyway, the film begins at some point presumably not long after the events in 6: Jason's "sleeping" at the bottom of the lake, still chained to the rock Tommy attached him to, and he's completely dormant. I guess stabbing fish just doesn't have the same thrill as stabbing humans does. Although later scenes contradict this, his clothes are still intact and no weapons are seen in either hand. In fact, there are many more contradictions in this scene: Jason's wearing a different set of newer-looking clothes, that are NOT the same color; the sign at the lake now says Crystal Lake again, though it was changed to Forest Green previously; and Jason's facial deformity(as we see later) has changed yet again. Weird.
We meet our protagonist, Tina Shepard, as a little girl. It's weird, but the young Tina is almost a dead ringer for the little girl from the 3 Poltergeist movies(I checked IMDB...it's not her.). Anyway, she's standing outside her family's summer cabin listening as her parents have a fight over custody of her. A real Hallmark moment...
Tina decides to run away from home, after hearing Daddy hit Mommy. She gets to the edge of the lake just as the argument ends, and climbs into a rowboat before her father can catch up to her. He begs her to bring the boat back, but she refuses, even after her father apologizes for hurting her mother. As Tina is screaming at her father, the dock begins to shake and the water around the boat churns. Oh, and Tina makes a face that looks like she just farted. Classic.
As the dock starts to collapse, Tina feels some remorse, but is too late to stop the accident. Her father falls into the lake, and the debris comes crashing down on top of him. She screams for him a few times, then--
Oh. Dream sequence. Tina's now a budding teen with a pretty nice physique, and her mom has a head of hair any lion would envy. It's probably about 10 years since her father died, which brings up some pretty big questions: If her father did die in the lake, why didn't they recover the body(you'll see what I mean...)? And, if they had made ANY attempt to fish his corpse out, wouldn't anyone have noticed the hulking brute down there too, chained to a rock and wearing a hockey mask???
Eh, whatever. On with the show. So, Tina and her mom are heading back to Crystal Lake to meet up with Tina's shrink, Dr. Crews, on the pretense that he thinks bringing her back to the place where he died might be a therapeutic breakthrough for the troubled teen. In reality, though, he simply wants to put Tina under as much stress as possible, so that he can exploit her telekinesis and become famous. Oh, and the shrink is played by Terry Kiser, who was in the Weekend at Bernie's films, as previously mentioned. If he smirks and gets a hat stapled to his head, this movie will rock.
Meanwhile, we also have neighbors to deal with here, a house full of attractive young rich kids staging a surprise party for a friend. They're a pretty damn generic group...there's Nick, the resident hunk who serves as Tina's love interest; Michael, the birthday boy; Jane, his moody girlfriend; Eddie, a wanna-be writer and sci-fi geek; Russ, a guy who decided to let Eraserhead style his 'do; Melissa, a hot blond who somehow manages to be both snobby AND slutty; Maddy, the boy-crazy bookworm; Ben and Kate, the required black couple who never survive these things; Dave, a pothead; and a cute, yet generic, girl named Robin.
Anyway, Tina and the doctor get started on their "treatment" right away. He sets up a video camera, and puts a book of matches on the table in front of her. Right off the bat, I'm drawn right out of the movie by the stupidity on display...hasn't this guy ever seen a horror film? Everyone under the sun can pretty much predict that if you put a matchbook in front of someone with "powers", there will be a fire that starts spontaneously!
Surprise! The matchbook moves....then ignites. Wow. Shocking. The movie switches to a brief quickie in a van involving a couple who are not yet named, then we get more of Tina making a sad face. We get a lot of that in this movie. When she frowns, she resembles Kermit the Frog. Anyway, KermiTina runs out of the lake house after getting upset yet AGAIN, and stands at the edge of the lake, reliving the whole trauma of making her dad drown.
Suddenly, she gets an idea! She thinks she can sense her dad's soul nearby(nope, it's Jason), so she wonders if her "POWERS!!!" can bring him back. Uh, Tina, you DO know what ten years of decomposing underwater is going to do to a body, right? I mean, I loved my grandmother, but that doesn't mean I want to hang out with her zombie for any period of time, while she bakes cookies and eats brains.
Well, science doesn't matter to our heroine. She focuses all of her mental ability on reviving her dad...and wakes up Jason instead. D'oh! His clothes are still as bright blue as they were in the opening scene, but now they're ripped in places. I guess color doesn't fade in lake water. *rolls eyes*
So yeah, Jason wakes up. Yay. Tina loosens his chains(with her POWERS!!!!!), and he bursts up out of the lake right in front of her. When their eyes meet, Tina faints. As he walks toward dry land, Jason inexplicably does nothing to harm Tina.
When she wakes up, Tina sees her mother and Dr. Crews standing over her. Jason, of course, is nowhere to be seen. They help her to her feet, get her in the house, and Crews starts dismissing her story as nothing more than some kind of hallucination. As they argue, Tina's stress level causes her to crack a picture frame with her POWERS!!! Nick shows up and invites Tina to the surprise party, and her mother lets her go...which irritates the hell out of Crews.
In the next scene, we meet Jane and Michael, who are stranded when their car overheats. Jane is forced to tell Michael that the whole reason they drove out to Crystal Lake in the first place, was to throw him a party. Uh, if the house was a family summer house in the first place, wouldn't he have figured this stuff out? Was the script written by a roomful of chimps with A.D.D.?
Michael leaves Jane alone, so he can take a leak. Jason grabs her from behind, covers her mouth, and kills her quickly, pinning her to a tree by her throat. When Michael returns and sees her, Jason starts pursuing him through the woods. As Michael starts putting some distance between himself and the killer, Jason throws his knife(where did he get a new knife???), and plants it right in Michael's back. Michael tries to crawl away, but Jason picks him up and flings his body off of the knife like a pesky fly.
Back at the lake, Nick and Tina enter the house, where everything for the party is being set up. Tina meets almost everyone, then has a VISION due to her POWERS!!! Yeesh. Anyway, she spills a drink and runs out of the house like the Road Runner being chased by Wiley Coyote. Meep-meep!
On the way in, Tina finds a long shard of metal stuck in the door frame. She gets frightened, and decides to tell Crews and her mother about everything she's been seeing. When she gets to the part about the spike, Crews offers to go check it out, but he claims not to see it. Sure enough, when Tina and her mom go out to look, it's gone. Hmmm.....
Meanwhile, in the forest we meet another couple, Dan and Ann Nonymous. Oddly enough, Dan is the spitting image of "MacGruber"('MACGRUBER!!! We Made A Fucking Movie! MACGRUBER!!!'...lol, go see it, you'll get the reference...), which just cracks me the hell up endlessly. Anyway, when Dan goes out of their tent for firewood, Jason plunges his fist through the guy's back, and out through his chest.
The Chick With No Name doesn't fare much better. She gets picked up in her sleeping bag, then flung against the side of a tree. Damn, I always thought that scene in Jason X was original. Oh well. (according to Wikipedia, the female's name is Judy, but I have no idea where this is ever mentioned by anyone in the film. Anyone?)
Anyway, Nick and Tina meet up again outside, and play 20 Questions. Nick reveals that he came from a broken home, but made something of himself, while Tina reveals only that her dad died at the lake when she was a child, but leaves out the telekinesis. Nearby, Melissa decides to eavesdrop. Melissa sneaks back inside without being discovered, and Nick and Tina also go in.
Everyone's busy making food. Maddy tries flirting with Eddie, but Robin steals the limelight by cozying up to Dave, leaving her nerdy friend in her wake. While Tina loses track of Nick, Melissa recruits Eddie into making a tasteless joke about Tina's mental health issues, which is a VERY bad idea. Tina uses her POWERS!!! to make Melissa's pearl necklace strangle her until the string snaps, sending pearls flying everywhere. Tina runs back home, just as Nick returns.
That evening, Tina begs her mother and Crews to let her leave. When Crews refuses, Tina throws a hissy fit, and uses her POWERS!!! to fling a television toward the conniving doctor. You can practically see the strings lifting the TV, the effect is terrible. As she storms out of the house again, Tina runs into Nick and tells him about her visions and premonitions. Her mother interrupts the conversation to tell her that they'll leave in the morning.
Sandra(who the heck is SHE???) and Russ hook up, and decide to go skinny-dipping. YAY, NUDITY!!! Jason kills Russ before he gets as far as taking his socks off, by decapitating him with a machete that he found. Sandra comes up for air, sees Russ missing his head, and screams as Jason emerges from the water right behind her. HUH? How the heck did he pull that one off without her noticing him in the water with her? Jason grabs her ankle, pulls her quite-lovely form underwater, and she drowns.
Back at the surprise party that never happened, Nick tries calling Michael to find out why he never showed up, but gets no response. Melissa tries to seduce Nick, and settles for Eddie when Nick rejects her. Maddy decides to use Melissa's beauty supplies to give herself a makeover, and Ben and Kate hook up. Jason walks right up to a window and watches them all, and no one takes notice of a hulk wearing tattered clothes, in a hockey mask, and brandishing a weapon right outside.
Back in the Shepard cabin, Crews reveals that the spike Tina saw outside the house was put there by him. He's been using the local legends about Jason to terrify Tina, hoping to get enough filmed evidence of her POWERS!!! to make himself famous. Crews takes a walk in the woods, finds one of Jason's victims next to a spike similar to the one he used to scare Tina, and he assumes that she's had a psychotic episode. Tina's mother discovers his scheme when she sees his notes and the spike in the desk drawer, they argue, and Crews is threatened with the exposure of his scheme. But before their argument gets to that point, Tina overhears a small portion of the fight. When she hears Crews mention keeping her locked up as a mental patient indefinitely, she takes one of the car's keys and makes a hasty escape. Her mother hears the car, and she and Crews use the other car to try to find her.
Tina gets herself into a highly emotional state and has a vision of Jason murdering her mother. She rams the car into a tree, then panics when it won't restart. She picks a random direction and jogs into the woods. Maybe the Blair Witch can draw her a map.
Maddy transforms herself into Tammy Fay Bakker. Pleased with her trans-whore-mation, she goes out to bag the first man she sees. She finds a corpse in a tree instead, and Jason chases her. Maddy ducks into a tool shed the size of a condo, and hides behind a wall where she can see Jason enter. He hears her moving around, and waits for her to back up against a wall, so he can punch through the wall on either side of her and stab Maddy with a sickle. For once, the virgin dies! Wow.
Nick finds Tina in the woods, at the same time that her mom and the doctor find the wrecked car. Crews watches as Mrs. Shepard runs off to find her daughter, and both make enough noise to alert Jason, Freddy and Leatherface combined. Smart thinking.
Back at the un-surprise, un-birthday house, 3 couples are having sex. First we get Ben and Kate having sex out in the van. They hear Jason moving around, and assume it's Michael, the birthday boy, finally arriving. Jason kills Ben first, by crushing his skull. Then he murders Kate by jamming a party horn into her face. I wish I could be more specific, but the kill happens so fast, it's hard to tell WHAT he does with the noisemaker. Supposedly there's a DVD with all of the gore extended, but this ain't it!
The next couple having serious snuggle-time are Eddie and Melissa. Melissa tells Eddie that she was only using him to make Nick jealous, and he leaves. Robin and Dave finish having sex, just before Jason cuts the power. Left in the dark, they still keep going at it. Those two are real troopers, I tell ya.
On their way back to the summer houses, Tina and Nick discover Michael's body in a tree. Nick has no time to mourn his cousin's death, though: the others have to saved! Yeah, good luck with that plan. Half of them are dead, why not just call it a day? No? Okay, I tried to help....
Robin and Dave got stoned and ended up screwing like bunnies too. He gets the munchies, and leaves her naked in bed while he goes to make himself a snack. Dumbass. She might be a generic character, but she is also fairly damn cute. For being stupid, Dave gets a butcher knife in the gut.
Tina and Nick return, and Tina finds the spike Crews used to scare her. She also finds her dad's old pistol, and gives it to Nick. After all, why would a girl with POWERS!!! need a gun? Oh, and she also finds a series of old newspaper clippings about Jason, providing a hugely unnecessary info-dump for the audience. Tina FINALLY realizes that it wasn't her father that she brought back from the dead, and her POWERS!!! go bonkers.
Melissa sneaks outside while Eddie decides to start opening Michael's gifts. In one of the few funny bits in the movie, he unwraps a package labelled as a "Penis Enlarger", and finds a magnifying glass in the box. Mean, but funny. I'll bet it was from Melissa. Seems bitchy enough for her. Jason slices through his neck less than a minute later.
Tina gets a psychic vibe telling her that her mother is in the woods, and Nick decides to try to find his (remaining) friends while she attempts to try to rescue her mom. Robin gets dressed(damn...) and starts knocking on doors, but finds no one. When she enters one of the bedrooms, she gets a generic cat scare(who the hell had a cat in this movie???), followed by Jason throwing her through a window. Hilariously, Tina and Nick never hear a thing.
Nick urges Tina to escape with him, but her concern for her mother makes her stay. Nick still leaves, but promises to bring back help. He gets to his cousin's cabin, and heads up the stairs. Nothing happens...yet.
Crews finds Mrs. Shepard and tries to coax her back to the lake, but she refuses. The shrink sees Jason coming up behind her, so he uses her body as a human shield, which Jason promptly stabs. What an asshole this guy Crews is.
Nick discovers Eddie's body, and bags the plan to warn his friends. When he re-enters Tina's house, he finds Melissa there instead. He tells her about discovering Eddie, but she doubts him. I almost feel bad for her...almost.
Crews and Tina bump into each other in the woods, and Crews tries to convince her that her mom is waiting back at the house. When she notices the blood on his shirt, Tina assumes that the doctor killed her mother. She runs in one direction, while Crews runs the opposite way. When Crews leans against a tree to catch his breath, Jason mutilates the doc's face with a circular saw. Good!
Tina wanders around some more, until she finds her mother's body. She gets upset, sees Jason nearby, and begins following him. Instead of having a face-to-mask confrontation with Jason, Tina discovers Kate in a tree, the party favor still jammed into her eye socket. She backs away from the corpse, only to stumble into several more. Seems that Jason's been building a little shrine dedicated to his hobby.
This all leads up to Tina's first big battle with Jason. She finds him waiting for her at the edge of the woods, and starts using her POWERS!!! She levitates some fallen tree branches and wraps them tightly around his legs, yanking him into a large puddle. Then she ripa a power line loose from a nearby pole, and sends it directly into the water. Little cartoony blue bolts of electricity course through Jason, and he drops face-first into the puddle like an anchor.
Being a completely inept nimrod, Tina approaches him. To my complete non-shock and un-surprise, Jason gets up. Tina runs away, and Jason just watches her, looking somewhat baffled. Then he starts to follow her. She enters the house where most of her new BFF'S were just slaughtered, and Jason leaps through a window like Spider-Man. Tina screams, and Jason just calmly keeps walking toward her, as they have a staring contest.
Tina slams a door shut between them, then psychically shoves a table in front of the door as a makeshift barricade. Jason just pushes everything aside, so she throws a small sofa or loveseat at him, which he also swats away. She floats a potted plant with a severed head in it at Jason, then runs back outside, before stopping to turn around and wait for him to catch up. When Jason finally emerges, Tina brings the porch down around him, collapsing the floorboards so that he'll be buried under all of the debris. Can you imagine explaining the property damage on your insurance claims???
Tina goes back to her family's house, where Nick and Melissa hear the commotion. Tina tells Nick that she defeated Jason, just before we see him punch through the porch roof he was just buried under. Melissa refuses to buy the Jason story, but when she attempts to make her dramatic exit out of the house, Jason meets her at the threshold. He plants an axe in her head, then tosses her body across the room.
Nick attempts to shield Tina with his body, and they make it up the stairs. Inexplicably, Tina then decides to wander back to see how fast Jason's following. (Hint: he's fast.) As he gets to the top, she sends a light fixture crashing into Jason's face, which knocks him back. He falls through the stairs, creating a huge hole. Being imbeciles, they decide to go back down, slowly creeping past the edge of the gap in the staircase.
Just before they can get out of the front door again, Jason crashes through a wall under the staircase. He grabs Nick, throws him across the room, then decides to stomp him through the spine, but Tina uses her kooky, spooky POWERS!!! again, squezzing Jason's mask so hard it makes pus run out past the edges of the mask. He turns to stop her, and Tina makes the hockey mask explode in half.
Here's where we run into continuity issues again. Gone is the deformed eye, replaced by a piglike, flat nose, and a mouth that is crooked. Why do his deformities change so many times after the first couple of sequels? Didn't any of the FX crew WATCH any of the previous movies, to at least get an idea of what Jason looked like? The face looks kinda cool and all, but it doesn't look anything at all like the previous faces of Jason.
Anyway, while he snarls at her, Tina wraps an electrical cord around his neck, which lifts him into the air. While he flails around, Tina creates a crater in the floor, then sends Jason plummeting through it.
She approaches Nick's body, quickly checking the hole to verify that Jason hasn't moved. The nanosecond she looks back at Nick, Jason opens an eye. While she tries to revive Nick, Jason pulls Tina into the basement with him.
Their second battle starts. Jason gnashes his teeth and glares at Tina, and she sends a jar of nails flying at him, hitting him in the shoulders mostly, with a single nail planting itself in his forehead. Grinning and shrugging it off, Jason plucks out the nail.
Next, Tina tries using fire to defeat him. She makes a can of gasoline spray him, as well as splashing newspapers and several other flammable, dry materials lying around. When he's soaked with gas, she causes the furnace door to fly open, then lights him like a birthday candle. The room gets engulfed in flames.
Fortunately, this is exactly when Nick decides to wake up. He joins Tina in watching Jason collapse in a flaming heap, then they rush outside. They get to the dock just before the house explodes, knocking them both down. As Tina and Nick embrace, Jason somehow manages to get behind them, and throws Tina like a frisbee. Nicks fires the pistol he found earlier at Jason, with little or no effect. Jason shrugs his shoulders a bit, gnashes his teeth, then throws Nick into a boat before turning back to Tina.
She sees him coming, and makes one last-ditch effort to use her POWERS!!! to raise her father from the dead. Here's where we get another plothole so huge you could pilot a jumbo jet through it: Her dad rises up through the wooden dock, and grabs Jason. But the thing is, apart from from moss on his cheeks, he hasn't decayed at all. In fact, he blinks and screams at Jason, indicating that he is very much alive now. Even his hair looks the same. Since he died when Tina was a little girl, shouldn't he have decomposed at least A LITTLE?
This never gets explained. Tina's dad wraps a chain around Jason's neck, then drags him back to the bottom of the lake. Tina calls out for her father, then faints. When she wakes up again, we see firemen extinguishing the exploded house, and one firefighter finds and picks up Jason's mask, which had split in half. Tina gets taken by stretcher into an ambulance, and is told that Nick is fine.
In the ambulance, they reunite. Tina tells a stunned-looking Nick that she took care of Jason. The ambulance takes off. THE END
WTF??? The end? What about Tina's dad mysteriously coming back to life? What happens to her now that her mother's dead? Who gets blamed for all of the killings this time around? "The End", my ass!
I've always hated this one, and seeing it this week reminded me exactly why I did. The kills are way too similar, Jason's face and costume is altered, the iconic music's gone, Tommy Jarvis is only mentioned in clips, the kills happen too fast...the movie's a mess. Sadly, it's still not the low-point of the series,as Jason still has to get to New York, Outer Space, and Elm Street. 2 killer trees, for at least the production values, make-up gore, and humorous touches.
No clue what the next slasher flick in my queue is. I actually may start on Part 8 of the franchise, as the later ones are all currently on the Netflix Instant menu. But hopefully, I can get a break with a holiday-themed slasher flick first. These later sequels are horrible, some much worse than I remembered them being. See you next week?
Well here it is, the day I've been dreading: the era of the "Jason vs. Gimmicks" movies in the Friday the 13th franchise began with today's movie, Friday the 13th VII: The New Blood. Or, to put it more accurately, Friday the 13th: Jason vs. Carrie. That's it, that's your premise in a nutshell: a pouty, whiny blond girl with telekinesis goes up against Jason. Who loses? The audience, mostly. As always, ahead thar be SPOILERS!!!
The film begins on a promising note, with a narrator telling us the "legend of Jason", which amounts to a sort of "Cliff's Notes"-ish highlight reel featuring some of Jason's best kills. Most of the clips come from Parts 4-6, the Tommy Jarvis trilogy: Corey Feldman getting grabbed through the window; the wheelchair guy's corpse getting pushed down all of those stairs; Tommy's sister hitting Jason in the head as he goes after Tommy; the lightning bolt reviving him in the previous film; the deaths of most of the 1-scene characters from that same movie; Tommy describing Jason's motivation, followed by his plan to trap him at the bottom of Crystal lake...those are the highlights.
As the narrator winds up his spiel, the screen goes dark. Then a bright, white light shows through all of the holes in the iconic hockey mask, and it splits apart to reveal the title. The famous theme music is gone, replaced by Foreboding Metronome Muzak instead. According to the credits, the damsel this time is named Lar Park Lincoln. Jason is played by Kane Hodder, the actor most-credited with the role. Other familiar faces include Terry Kiser(BERNIE!!!) and...no one else I recognize. Da-amn, movie.
Anyway, the film begins at some point presumably not long after the events in 6: Jason's "sleeping" at the bottom of the lake, still chained to the rock Tommy attached him to, and he's completely dormant. I guess stabbing fish just doesn't have the same thrill as stabbing humans does. Although later scenes contradict this, his clothes are still intact and no weapons are seen in either hand. In fact, there are many more contradictions in this scene: Jason's wearing a different set of newer-looking clothes, that are NOT the same color; the sign at the lake now says Crystal Lake again, though it was changed to Forest Green previously; and Jason's facial deformity(as we see later) has changed yet again. Weird.
We meet our protagonist, Tina Shepard, as a little girl. It's weird, but the young Tina is almost a dead ringer for the little girl from the 3 Poltergeist movies(I checked IMDB...it's not her.). Anyway, she's standing outside her family's summer cabin listening as her parents have a fight over custody of her. A real Hallmark moment...
Tina decides to run away from home, after hearing Daddy hit Mommy. She gets to the edge of the lake just as the argument ends, and climbs into a rowboat before her father can catch up to her. He begs her to bring the boat back, but she refuses, even after her father apologizes for hurting her mother. As Tina is screaming at her father, the dock begins to shake and the water around the boat churns. Oh, and Tina makes a face that looks like she just farted. Classic.
As the dock starts to collapse, Tina feels some remorse, but is too late to stop the accident. Her father falls into the lake, and the debris comes crashing down on top of him. She screams for him a few times, then--
Oh. Dream sequence. Tina's now a budding teen with a pretty nice physique, and her mom has a head of hair any lion would envy. It's probably about 10 years since her father died, which brings up some pretty big questions: If her father did die in the lake, why didn't they recover the body(you'll see what I mean...)? And, if they had made ANY attempt to fish his corpse out, wouldn't anyone have noticed the hulking brute down there too, chained to a rock and wearing a hockey mask???
Eh, whatever. On with the show. So, Tina and her mom are heading back to Crystal Lake to meet up with Tina's shrink, Dr. Crews, on the pretense that he thinks bringing her back to the place where he died might be a therapeutic breakthrough for the troubled teen. In reality, though, he simply wants to put Tina under as much stress as possible, so that he can exploit her telekinesis and become famous. Oh, and the shrink is played by Terry Kiser, who was in the Weekend at Bernie's films, as previously mentioned. If he smirks and gets a hat stapled to his head, this movie will rock.
Meanwhile, we also have neighbors to deal with here, a house full of attractive young rich kids staging a surprise party for a friend. They're a pretty damn generic group...there's Nick, the resident hunk who serves as Tina's love interest; Michael, the birthday boy; Jane, his moody girlfriend; Eddie, a wanna-be writer and sci-fi geek; Russ, a guy who decided to let Eraserhead style his 'do; Melissa, a hot blond who somehow manages to be both snobby AND slutty; Maddy, the boy-crazy bookworm; Ben and Kate, the required black couple who never survive these things; Dave, a pothead; and a cute, yet generic, girl named Robin.
Anyway, Tina and the doctor get started on their "treatment" right away. He sets up a video camera, and puts a book of matches on the table in front of her. Right off the bat, I'm drawn right out of the movie by the stupidity on display...hasn't this guy ever seen a horror film? Everyone under the sun can pretty much predict that if you put a matchbook in front of someone with "powers", there will be a fire that starts spontaneously!
Surprise! The matchbook moves....then ignites. Wow. Shocking. The movie switches to a brief quickie in a van involving a couple who are not yet named, then we get more of Tina making a sad face. We get a lot of that in this movie. When she frowns, she resembles Kermit the Frog. Anyway, KermiTina runs out of the lake house after getting upset yet AGAIN, and stands at the edge of the lake, reliving the whole trauma of making her dad drown.
Suddenly, she gets an idea! She thinks she can sense her dad's soul nearby(nope, it's Jason), so she wonders if her "POWERS!!!" can bring him back. Uh, Tina, you DO know what ten years of decomposing underwater is going to do to a body, right? I mean, I loved my grandmother, but that doesn't mean I want to hang out with her zombie for any period of time, while she bakes cookies and eats brains.
Well, science doesn't matter to our heroine. She focuses all of her mental ability on reviving her dad...and wakes up Jason instead. D'oh! His clothes are still as bright blue as they were in the opening scene, but now they're ripped in places. I guess color doesn't fade in lake water. *rolls eyes*
So yeah, Jason wakes up. Yay. Tina loosens his chains(with her POWERS!!!!!), and he bursts up out of the lake right in front of her. When their eyes meet, Tina faints. As he walks toward dry land, Jason inexplicably does nothing to harm Tina.
When she wakes up, Tina sees her mother and Dr. Crews standing over her. Jason, of course, is nowhere to be seen. They help her to her feet, get her in the house, and Crews starts dismissing her story as nothing more than some kind of hallucination. As they argue, Tina's stress level causes her to crack a picture frame with her POWERS!!! Nick shows up and invites Tina to the surprise party, and her mother lets her go...which irritates the hell out of Crews.
In the next scene, we meet Jane and Michael, who are stranded when their car overheats. Jane is forced to tell Michael that the whole reason they drove out to Crystal Lake in the first place, was to throw him a party. Uh, if the house was a family summer house in the first place, wouldn't he have figured this stuff out? Was the script written by a roomful of chimps with A.D.D.?
Michael leaves Jane alone, so he can take a leak. Jason grabs her from behind, covers her mouth, and kills her quickly, pinning her to a tree by her throat. When Michael returns and sees her, Jason starts pursuing him through the woods. As Michael starts putting some distance between himself and the killer, Jason throws his knife(where did he get a new knife???), and plants it right in Michael's back. Michael tries to crawl away, but Jason picks him up and flings his body off of the knife like a pesky fly.
Back at the lake, Nick and Tina enter the house, where everything for the party is being set up. Tina meets almost everyone, then has a VISION due to her POWERS!!! Yeesh. Anyway, she spills a drink and runs out of the house like the Road Runner being chased by Wiley Coyote. Meep-meep!
On the way in, Tina finds a long shard of metal stuck in the door frame. She gets frightened, and decides to tell Crews and her mother about everything she's been seeing. When she gets to the part about the spike, Crews offers to go check it out, but he claims not to see it. Sure enough, when Tina and her mom go out to look, it's gone. Hmmm.....
Meanwhile, in the forest we meet another couple, Dan and Ann Nonymous. Oddly enough, Dan is the spitting image of "MacGruber"('MACGRUBER!!! We Made A Fucking Movie! MACGRUBER!!!'...lol, go see it, you'll get the reference...), which just cracks me the hell up endlessly. Anyway, when Dan goes out of their tent for firewood, Jason plunges his fist through the guy's back, and out through his chest.
The Chick With No Name doesn't fare much better. She gets picked up in her sleeping bag, then flung against the side of a tree. Damn, I always thought that scene in Jason X was original. Oh well. (according to Wikipedia, the female's name is Judy, but I have no idea where this is ever mentioned by anyone in the film. Anyone?)
Anyway, Nick and Tina meet up again outside, and play 20 Questions. Nick reveals that he came from a broken home, but made something of himself, while Tina reveals only that her dad died at the lake when she was a child, but leaves out the telekinesis. Nearby, Melissa decides to eavesdrop. Melissa sneaks back inside without being discovered, and Nick and Tina also go in.
Everyone's busy making food. Maddy tries flirting with Eddie, but Robin steals the limelight by cozying up to Dave, leaving her nerdy friend in her wake. While Tina loses track of Nick, Melissa recruits Eddie into making a tasteless joke about Tina's mental health issues, which is a VERY bad idea. Tina uses her POWERS!!! to make Melissa's pearl necklace strangle her until the string snaps, sending pearls flying everywhere. Tina runs back home, just as Nick returns.
That evening, Tina begs her mother and Crews to let her leave. When Crews refuses, Tina throws a hissy fit, and uses her POWERS!!! to fling a television toward the conniving doctor. You can practically see the strings lifting the TV, the effect is terrible. As she storms out of the house again, Tina runs into Nick and tells him about her visions and premonitions. Her mother interrupts the conversation to tell her that they'll leave in the morning.
Sandra(who the heck is SHE???) and Russ hook up, and decide to go skinny-dipping. YAY, NUDITY!!! Jason kills Russ before he gets as far as taking his socks off, by decapitating him with a machete that he found. Sandra comes up for air, sees Russ missing his head, and screams as Jason emerges from the water right behind her. HUH? How the heck did he pull that one off without her noticing him in the water with her? Jason grabs her ankle, pulls her quite-lovely form underwater, and she drowns.
Back at the surprise party that never happened, Nick tries calling Michael to find out why he never showed up, but gets no response. Melissa tries to seduce Nick, and settles for Eddie when Nick rejects her. Maddy decides to use Melissa's beauty supplies to give herself a makeover, and Ben and Kate hook up. Jason walks right up to a window and watches them all, and no one takes notice of a hulk wearing tattered clothes, in a hockey mask, and brandishing a weapon right outside.
Back in the Shepard cabin, Crews reveals that the spike Tina saw outside the house was put there by him. He's been using the local legends about Jason to terrify Tina, hoping to get enough filmed evidence of her POWERS!!! to make himself famous. Crews takes a walk in the woods, finds one of Jason's victims next to a spike similar to the one he used to scare Tina, and he assumes that she's had a psychotic episode. Tina's mother discovers his scheme when she sees his notes and the spike in the desk drawer, they argue, and Crews is threatened with the exposure of his scheme. But before their argument gets to that point, Tina overhears a small portion of the fight. When she hears Crews mention keeping her locked up as a mental patient indefinitely, she takes one of the car's keys and makes a hasty escape. Her mother hears the car, and she and Crews use the other car to try to find her.
Tina gets herself into a highly emotional state and has a vision of Jason murdering her mother. She rams the car into a tree, then panics when it won't restart. She picks a random direction and jogs into the woods. Maybe the Blair Witch can draw her a map.
Maddy transforms herself into Tammy Fay Bakker. Pleased with her trans-whore-mation, she goes out to bag the first man she sees. She finds a corpse in a tree instead, and Jason chases her. Maddy ducks into a tool shed the size of a condo, and hides behind a wall where she can see Jason enter. He hears her moving around, and waits for her to back up against a wall, so he can punch through the wall on either side of her and stab Maddy with a sickle. For once, the virgin dies! Wow.
Nick finds Tina in the woods, at the same time that her mom and the doctor find the wrecked car. Crews watches as Mrs. Shepard runs off to find her daughter, and both make enough noise to alert Jason, Freddy and Leatherface combined. Smart thinking.
Back at the un-surprise, un-birthday house, 3 couples are having sex. First we get Ben and Kate having sex out in the van. They hear Jason moving around, and assume it's Michael, the birthday boy, finally arriving. Jason kills Ben first, by crushing his skull. Then he murders Kate by jamming a party horn into her face. I wish I could be more specific, but the kill happens so fast, it's hard to tell WHAT he does with the noisemaker. Supposedly there's a DVD with all of the gore extended, but this ain't it!
The next couple having serious snuggle-time are Eddie and Melissa. Melissa tells Eddie that she was only using him to make Nick jealous, and he leaves. Robin and Dave finish having sex, just before Jason cuts the power. Left in the dark, they still keep going at it. Those two are real troopers, I tell ya.
On their way back to the summer houses, Tina and Nick discover Michael's body in a tree. Nick has no time to mourn his cousin's death, though: the others have to saved! Yeah, good luck with that plan. Half of them are dead, why not just call it a day? No? Okay, I tried to help....
Robin and Dave got stoned and ended up screwing like bunnies too. He gets the munchies, and leaves her naked in bed while he goes to make himself a snack. Dumbass. She might be a generic character, but she is also fairly damn cute. For being stupid, Dave gets a butcher knife in the gut.
Tina and Nick return, and Tina finds the spike Crews used to scare her. She also finds her dad's old pistol, and gives it to Nick. After all, why would a girl with POWERS!!! need a gun? Oh, and she also finds a series of old newspaper clippings about Jason, providing a hugely unnecessary info-dump for the audience. Tina FINALLY realizes that it wasn't her father that she brought back from the dead, and her POWERS!!! go bonkers.
Melissa sneaks outside while Eddie decides to start opening Michael's gifts. In one of the few funny bits in the movie, he unwraps a package labelled as a "Penis Enlarger", and finds a magnifying glass in the box. Mean, but funny. I'll bet it was from Melissa. Seems bitchy enough for her. Jason slices through his neck less than a minute later.
Tina gets a psychic vibe telling her that her mother is in the woods, and Nick decides to try to find his (remaining) friends while she attempts to try to rescue her mom. Robin gets dressed(damn...) and starts knocking on doors, but finds no one. When she enters one of the bedrooms, she gets a generic cat scare(who the hell had a cat in this movie???), followed by Jason throwing her through a window. Hilariously, Tina and Nick never hear a thing.
Nick urges Tina to escape with him, but her concern for her mother makes her stay. Nick still leaves, but promises to bring back help. He gets to his cousin's cabin, and heads up the stairs. Nothing happens...yet.
Crews finds Mrs. Shepard and tries to coax her back to the lake, but she refuses. The shrink sees Jason coming up behind her, so he uses her body as a human shield, which Jason promptly stabs. What an asshole this guy Crews is.
Nick discovers Eddie's body, and bags the plan to warn his friends. When he re-enters Tina's house, he finds Melissa there instead. He tells her about discovering Eddie, but she doubts him. I almost feel bad for her...almost.
Crews and Tina bump into each other in the woods, and Crews tries to convince her that her mom is waiting back at the house. When she notices the blood on his shirt, Tina assumes that the doctor killed her mother. She runs in one direction, while Crews runs the opposite way. When Crews leans against a tree to catch his breath, Jason mutilates the doc's face with a circular saw. Good!
Tina wanders around some more, until she finds her mother's body. She gets upset, sees Jason nearby, and begins following him. Instead of having a face-to-mask confrontation with Jason, Tina discovers Kate in a tree, the party favor still jammed into her eye socket. She backs away from the corpse, only to stumble into several more. Seems that Jason's been building a little shrine dedicated to his hobby.
This all leads up to Tina's first big battle with Jason. She finds him waiting for her at the edge of the woods, and starts using her POWERS!!! She levitates some fallen tree branches and wraps them tightly around his legs, yanking him into a large puddle. Then she ripa a power line loose from a nearby pole, and sends it directly into the water. Little cartoony blue bolts of electricity course through Jason, and he drops face-first into the puddle like an anchor.
Being a completely inept nimrod, Tina approaches him. To my complete non-shock and un-surprise, Jason gets up. Tina runs away, and Jason just watches her, looking somewhat baffled. Then he starts to follow her. She enters the house where most of her new BFF'S were just slaughtered, and Jason leaps through a window like Spider-Man. Tina screams, and Jason just calmly keeps walking toward her, as they have a staring contest.
Tina slams a door shut between them, then psychically shoves a table in front of the door as a makeshift barricade. Jason just pushes everything aside, so she throws a small sofa or loveseat at him, which he also swats away. She floats a potted plant with a severed head in it at Jason, then runs back outside, before stopping to turn around and wait for him to catch up. When Jason finally emerges, Tina brings the porch down around him, collapsing the floorboards so that he'll be buried under all of the debris. Can you imagine explaining the property damage on your insurance claims???
Tina goes back to her family's house, where Nick and Melissa hear the commotion. Tina tells Nick that she defeated Jason, just before we see him punch through the porch roof he was just buried under. Melissa refuses to buy the Jason story, but when she attempts to make her dramatic exit out of the house, Jason meets her at the threshold. He plants an axe in her head, then tosses her body across the room.
Nick attempts to shield Tina with his body, and they make it up the stairs. Inexplicably, Tina then decides to wander back to see how fast Jason's following. (Hint: he's fast.) As he gets to the top, she sends a light fixture crashing into Jason's face, which knocks him back. He falls through the stairs, creating a huge hole. Being imbeciles, they decide to go back down, slowly creeping past the edge of the gap in the staircase.
Just before they can get out of the front door again, Jason crashes through a wall under the staircase. He grabs Nick, throws him across the room, then decides to stomp him through the spine, but Tina uses her kooky, spooky POWERS!!! again, squezzing Jason's mask so hard it makes pus run out past the edges of the mask. He turns to stop her, and Tina makes the hockey mask explode in half.
Here's where we run into continuity issues again. Gone is the deformed eye, replaced by a piglike, flat nose, and a mouth that is crooked. Why do his deformities change so many times after the first couple of sequels? Didn't any of the FX crew WATCH any of the previous movies, to at least get an idea of what Jason looked like? The face looks kinda cool and all, but it doesn't look anything at all like the previous faces of Jason.
Anyway, while he snarls at her, Tina wraps an electrical cord around his neck, which lifts him into the air. While he flails around, Tina creates a crater in the floor, then sends Jason plummeting through it.
She approaches Nick's body, quickly checking the hole to verify that Jason hasn't moved. The nanosecond she looks back at Nick, Jason opens an eye. While she tries to revive Nick, Jason pulls Tina into the basement with him.
Their second battle starts. Jason gnashes his teeth and glares at Tina, and she sends a jar of nails flying at him, hitting him in the shoulders mostly, with a single nail planting itself in his forehead. Grinning and shrugging it off, Jason plucks out the nail.
Next, Tina tries using fire to defeat him. She makes a can of gasoline spray him, as well as splashing newspapers and several other flammable, dry materials lying around. When he's soaked with gas, she causes the furnace door to fly open, then lights him like a birthday candle. The room gets engulfed in flames.
Fortunately, this is exactly when Nick decides to wake up. He joins Tina in watching Jason collapse in a flaming heap, then they rush outside. They get to the dock just before the house explodes, knocking them both down. As Tina and Nick embrace, Jason somehow manages to get behind them, and throws Tina like a frisbee. Nicks fires the pistol he found earlier at Jason, with little or no effect. Jason shrugs his shoulders a bit, gnashes his teeth, then throws Nick into a boat before turning back to Tina.
She sees him coming, and makes one last-ditch effort to use her POWERS!!! to raise her father from the dead. Here's where we get another plothole so huge you could pilot a jumbo jet through it: Her dad rises up through the wooden dock, and grabs Jason. But the thing is, apart from from moss on his cheeks, he hasn't decayed at all. In fact, he blinks and screams at Jason, indicating that he is very much alive now. Even his hair looks the same. Since he died when Tina was a little girl, shouldn't he have decomposed at least A LITTLE?
This never gets explained. Tina's dad wraps a chain around Jason's neck, then drags him back to the bottom of the lake. Tina calls out for her father, then faints. When she wakes up again, we see firemen extinguishing the exploded house, and one firefighter finds and picks up Jason's mask, which had split in half. Tina gets taken by stretcher into an ambulance, and is told that Nick is fine.
In the ambulance, they reunite. Tina tells a stunned-looking Nick that she took care of Jason. The ambulance takes off. THE END
WTF??? The end? What about Tina's dad mysteriously coming back to life? What happens to her now that her mother's dead? Who gets blamed for all of the killings this time around? "The End", my ass!
I've always hated this one, and seeing it this week reminded me exactly why I did. The kills are way too similar, Jason's face and costume is altered, the iconic music's gone, Tommy Jarvis is only mentioned in clips, the kills happen too fast...the movie's a mess. Sadly, it's still not the low-point of the series,as Jason still has to get to New York, Outer Space, and Elm Street. 2 killer trees, for at least the production values, make-up gore, and humorous touches.
No clue what the next slasher flick in my queue is. I actually may start on Part 8 of the franchise, as the later ones are all currently on the Netflix Instant menu. But hopefully, I can get a break with a holiday-themed slasher flick first. These later sequels are horrible, some much worse than I remembered them being. See you next week?
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Don't Go in the Woods...Alone!
Don't Go in the Woods Alone! Seriously, just don't. It won't make any sense, and you'll be disappointed. The movie comes from 1982, and is hilarious, if not always coherent. As always, there will be SPOILERS, but I'm pretty sure that I'm one of about 12 people who've seen this thing all the way through. You won't be missing much if you never rent this, trust me.
Anyway, the DVD began with a short intro by some guy I've never seen before, and he proclaimed it a classic. In both the opening and the closing credits, one actress in particular, "Angie Brown", had her named singled out by a rectangle, for some reason. Oh, and the theme song during the title sequence keeps stopping and starting, punctuated by what sounds like a cuckoo clock...ay yi yi, what have I gotten myself into this week?
As the movie finally starts, we get several scenes depicting the aftermath of "something"...an attack by the killer, is my guess. There's something that looks like a bandanna beneath a tree ranch, a camera lying in a stream, stuff like that. Before long, we see a woman in short-shorts and a tank top screaming and running away from some unseen threat. She falls once or twice, and flails around quite a bit. Then the scene ends. Yup, it ends right there.
Next, we see 4 people backpacking, presumably in the same area as the woman we just saw. Before we get to know any of THEIR names, the scene shifts yet again, this time showing us a birdwatcher. The birdwatcher, who also has no name, is wandering around like "Monty Python"'s Upper Class Twit of the Year, when he gets pegged in the face by something. His cheek starts bleeding, and a guy dressed up like Captain Caveman chops his arm off. As the one-armed Twit tries to defend himself, that scene also ends in an abrupt cut.
Back to the 4 people hiking. At least now we start getting some names: There's Peter, a young biker-type who hates being out of the city, and is unable to say "air conditioning" in a normal way; Craig, a loud, whiny outdoorsy type whose voice sounds like it was dubbed by someone who just learned English the week before filming started; Jody, a dark-haired female who looks kind of butch; and Ingrid, an equally masculine-looking female with short red hair, who unfortunately looks like Ron Howard after a sex-change. Poor Opie.
The other 3 listen to Craig prattle on and on with survival tips, including the film's title, while I consider pulling a Van Gogh to spare myself from the irritating voices. The scene changes AGAIN, this time introducing a wildlife photographer named Dale(who looks like a gay version of Sam Kinison), and his wife. The wife apparently has no name, so I'm calling her "Chip". So there, nyah, nyah.
While Dale is taking pictures of twigs and bearshit, Chip is sunning herself in a folding chair. Dale decides to climb a small mountain for a better view, and Captain Caaaaaaaaaveman strangles him with the camera-strap from behind. Dale falls to his death, mere feet away from our other campers, who never notice his corpse. Chip is also killed, but the method and the aftermath are never clearly shown.
The 4 campers, meanwhile, are still wandering around. Craig consults a map, then offers them a choice: they can either keep going straight, which is rough terrain, or they can circle around the next morning, and find the trail instead. Tired of listening to Craig being a buzzkill, they opt to camp out.
Guess what happens next? If you guessed "another scene transition, where we meet another group of dumb characters in yet another location", you WIN!!!! Yup, this time we get to meet the local sheriff and his bumbling deputy. The sheriff looks like Jabba the Hutt, if you can picture Jabba squeezed into an ill-fitting uniform and wearing bad '70's hair and a moustache. His sidekick looks like Stifler from the first 3 American Pie films. Oh, and we get a weird cameo by Napoleon Dynamite at the end of the scene. Gosh!
When Stifler brings the latest "Missing Person" report to his attention, Sheriff Jabba throws a hissy fit. Together, they go to the general store to question a witness. The missing person turns out to be the birdwatching twit from earlier. When Jabba gets up to leave, he has to force Stifler to go with him, as he's deeply engrossed in an action-packed pinball game. At the national park, the sheriff has a very brief encounter with a cute girl on roller skates.
Then we return to our "main" characters. They hiked a little further, then set up camp. Craig tells them a scary campfire story, and the only reaction to his dull, lifeless narrative is a single "Huh?" from Ingrid. Jody then tells him not to finish the story, and I came very close to applauding. He continues anyway, garnering another "Huh?".
The movie shifts the scene to a mobile home(complete with a Farrah Fawcett poster on the ceiling), and we meet still more under-developed characters. I swear, this movie was made for people who have the attention spans of hyperactive hummingbirds. There's a woman in the mobile home who looks like David Schwimmer, and she's screwing a guy who resembles Dauber from the old sitcom "Coach". This movie would be the scariest thing ever, if I was tripping out. To no one's surprise, the guy's name is Dick.
There's a sound effect that sort of resembles the sound of a rattlesnake, and Dick theorizes that it's probably a bear. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, WHY am I watching this junk??? Anyway, Schwimmer urges Dick not to leave, and he shows her a gun. They have about 3 lines of dialogue before he leaves, and they repeat them over and over again. Wait, I now know why I'm watching this one: I must've died, and this is Hell, right? It all makes sense now!
Dick draws the killer out by calling him a jerk and a pencil-neck geek. Boy, that sure is some pretty strong language. It worked, because Dick is killed pretty soon after that, and his bloody face is pressed against one of the windows. Oddly enough, he appears to have been killed by jelly doughnuts, because his face is covered in white powder and red jam. As Horse-Face freaks out, Captain Caveman pushes the camper over the side of a cliff. There's even a half-assed fire inside after it finally lands on its' side. Wow.
The following morning, Peter wakes up from a nightmare with a start, causing Ingrid to let out another Shakespearean-level "Huh?"...I swear, you could make a drinking game out of all the weirdness in this film. Someone get on that. After they all "Huh?" about 60 more times, they resume their hike to this mythical cabin they keep talking about. Jody wanders away from the main group without realizing it, and stops to get her bearings at a stream. While she contemplates what to do, a number of rocks sail toward her from above!
Oh, it's just her friends, playing a prank. Everyone knows the best practical jokes are the ones that could lead to massive concussions. Duh!
Sheriff Jabba, meanwhile, decides to rent a plane to haul his fat ass around. He wants to see if he can locate some of the people from the reports his deputy brought to his attention. Hell, he probably ate them (the people, not the reports)! He and the pilot fly around a bit, but see nothing out of the ordinary. The sheriff announces he'll give the missing folks another day or so to turn up, and the pilot looks like he could give a shit.
In the next scene, we see someone dressed in khaki dipping a jar into a stream. The person gets back to their campsite, and we see that they brought a baby along for the fun as well. Wow, is this movie cynical enough to kill a baby?
The person collecting the water turns out to be female, and an artist. She is busy painting a watercolor, while her baby is jumping around in her makeshift cradle/sling. As she paints, the woman detects the presence of our hillbilly nearby, and stops to look around. When she resumes painting, he attacks her from behind, impaling and attaching her to her own canvas. Blood gets all over the canvas and her camping gear, and the baby's swing-thing is shown empty. Wow, the movie called my bluff! Is Captain Caveman going to eat the baby or raise it?
The movie then kicks into Screensaver Mode, showing several scenes of outdoor footage, before somebody behind the camera hits their mouse and gets the movie started again. Peter decides that all the rests they take are too time-consuming, so he announces that he's going to walk ahead of them for a bit. He tries to convince Ingrid to go with him, but she'd rather stay with the group.
Walking along the path, Peter hears something. He keeps moving, and tries to track any movement as he goes. Something comes toward him, so Peter gets scared and starts running back toward the camp. He runs into his friends as the pursuer catches up, and it turns out to be some doofus wearing Gilligan's fishing hat. He passes the group after a brief conversation, and everyone shares a laugh at Peter's expense.
Later, as they refill their canteens, they discuss where to set up camp for the night. Jody jokingly suggests that they should set up their sleeping bags in a circle around Peter to protect him from monsters, and he gets pissed off. Peter tells them that he'll find his own spot for the night, and starts walking away from the rest of the group. Craig tells the girls not to worry, because he believes that Peter will cool off and return before too long.
That night, some couple I don't remember seeing before now gets attacked by Captain Caveman. He swings one of the campers up into a tree, trapped in their own sleeping bag, while he stabs the other one to death. Then he turns the one in the tree into a pinata.
Craig makes a campfire and starts peeling potatoes, while Jody keeps an eye out for Peter's return. Both he and Ingrid assure her that Peter will be fine, and that they will all be together again in the morning. Yeah, right.
Peter, in the meantime, is freaking out faster than Freakazoid. He's made himself a campfire, and is waving a stick around, yelling to all of the woodland critters that his stick is a shotgun, and that he's quite proficient at using it. He spends the whole night yelling. Chicken.
The next day, when Peter still hasn't returned, Jody starts to really get worried about him. Ingrid and Craig tell her that they plan to go off somewhere alone, to learn more "survival tips". Jody decides to stay close to the camp, in case Peter returns at some point.
Speaking of Peter, he's collecting firewood. He stops to reminisce about the good ol' days, about 20 minutes earlier in the film. While he's daydreaming about androgynous women splashing him, his fantasy is interrupted by the fisherman who freaked him out earlier. He sees the guy approaching the water to catch fish, and watches as the man gets a bear-trap to the face. Above Peter's little hiding spot is Captain Caveman. Peter watches Captain Caveman approach the flailing man and stab him with a spear several times. Then, when Peter screams and flees, Captain Caveman sees him and decides to hunt him as well.
Following that, we get Jody and Craig frolicking in a field. I shit you not. It's more annoying than Julie Andrews on that friggin' mountainside by about a billion percent. Craig decides to show Jody how to build a rudimentary animal trap, using string, a stick and a heavy rock, and she repays the favor by bringing the rock down on his hand. Why the frack are there pranks always borderline psychotic? Given a choice, I think I'd rather camp out with Captain Caveman. He's less deranged. Oh, and when Jody apologizes, she then slams her fist down on his hurt fingers. Psycho....
Back at the tent, Ingrid hears them screaming and laughing, and contemplates asking Jodie Foster to go out with her, so the tabloids could dub them IngDie, or maybe JoGrid. Hey, it could happen!
Next, we finally get back to Peter. Tired of running, Pete's decided to collapse at the foot of a tree to catch his breath. Bad plan, because he soon hears Captain Caveman heading his way. He frantically snatches up a gigantic branch, and runs the other way.
Craig returns to camp eating a bag of trail mix, and Ingrid suggests that they should get moving again, in case Peter's in trouble. Craig agrees, but first he declares that he wants to get even with Jody. He then sneaks over to her sleeping bag and ties it shut. He then strings her up to a tree, much like the anonymous camper CC killed earlier. Ingrid hears her screams and continues sipping her morning cup o' joe.
Jody continues screaming at Craig, but he doesn't respond. She manages to find a small hole in the sleeping bag, and uses her fingernails to rip it wider. Jody peers through the tear, and sees the Cap-man heading her way. Craig returns, but when he uses a tree branch to make the sleeping bag swing a little bit, Captain Crunch shows up to stab him in the gut.
With Craig down, Jody finally manages to get out of the sleeping bag. Ingrid runs to see what all the commotion is, as Craig is dragged away by the killer. Oh, and Captain Caveman took a swing at him before that was hard enough to remove the guy's arm. When Ingrid comes along after everyone has fled the scene, she sees the blood and starts running aimlessly as well.
Peter gets back to the deserted camping site and starts rummaging through supplies, trying to find anything to use against Captain Caveman. While he's on the ground distracted, Ingrid emerges from the tent with a massive rock in her hand and tries to bash his head in. They hug when she realizes he's not the killer.
Reunited(and it feels so good!), the pair try to escape the woods while also searching for their friends. They find a cabin, and decide to ask for help. Heck, maybe it's the cabin Craig told them about! Being a useless ninny, Peter decides the best course of action would be to approach the cabin at a run, while shouting several greetings. Good plan, bro. Ingrid even points out that it might not be safe, making her officially smarter than Peter.
They enter the cabin anyway, with Peter taking the lead and thrusting his spear out in front of him. Wow, that sounded kinda dirty, didn't it? Yeesh. As the soundtrack gets louder and louder(the music sounds like what your washing machine does when you have an "unbalanced load"), Peter tells it to keep quiet. I swear to God, that actually happened.
While looking for weapons or clues or the frickin' Holy Grail, the uncover Craig's body. Ingrid just keeps saying no over and over again. In her defense though, Peter doesn't do anything useful either. The do agree, however, that they should leave quickly, before the killer finds them in his home.
Little do they know, Captain Caveman's pretty busy at the moment. He sees a young guy strolling around and decides to make him the next meal. Oh, and he has the dumbest plan since any Looney Tunes cartoon ever aired: he simply waves his stick around, while waiting behind a tree for the guy to come investigate. And the idiot does.
Well, as it turns out, it wasn't such a dumb plan after all. See, Captain Caveman knew that Ingrid and Peter were nearby, so he lured the hiker over. That way, when the guy takes the stick and starts walking around with it, they'll hear the jangling noise it makes and assume that it's the killer. Kind of smart, actually.
Sure enough, they hear the guy walking with the stick, and run the other way, toward danger. They hide behind a fallen tree, and Peter jumps at the stranger, stabbing him with the makeshift spear he carved. Hilariously, he screams at the dying man how sorry he is, which I'm sure helps quite a bit. Oh, and now that he knows where they are, Captain Caveman chucks a spear through the dying guy, and goes after the terrified couple once more.
Captain Caveman starts throwing sharpened branches at them, and hits Ingrid twice: first in the arm, then in the side of her head. Peter tells her to run, because he believes that the killer wants her in particular. Oh, and the killer's reaction to hitting her is classic, sort of demented jump-dance thing, with lots of grunts and growls.
The two survivors stop at a babbling brook, and Peter cleans and dresses Ingrid's wounds. He then washes the blood off the spear, while Ingrid watches in a daze. Oh, by the way, there's still about a half hour left in this thing. In case I don't make it, can somebody please tell my friends and family that I died peacefully? They don't need to know the horror I faced this week.
Oh, guess who decided to rejoin the movie? Yup, it's Jody, and she's wandered her way back into the campsite. As she looks for food, a corpse drops out of a tree, and she takes off running once more. Oh, that wacky Jody!
Ingrid and Peter hike through rocks, trees, water...you name it, they stepped in it. That night, they huddle together in front of a small fire, and Ingrid tries to tell Peter the sort of stuff you only say when you know you're going to die. He assures her that they'll make it, and he tries to stay up all night to ensure their safety.
The following morning, Peter wakes up first and sees something that makes him ecstatic: telephone poles. In the dark, they had wandered close to civilization again without ever realizing it. After another "Huh?", they limp into town to find some help. THE E--
Wait, what? It's not over yet, even though they got away? Nope, Peter and Ingrid speak to Sheriff Jabba at the local hospital. Tell ya the truth, I had completely forgotten about him even being in the movie. Sheriff Jabba and Deputy Stifler compare notes and discuss whether or not the mysterious mountain man even exists. They eventually decide to stage a huge manhunt, using every available man and emergency vehicle they can find.
They stop to talk with "Dr. Maggie", one of the doctors taking care of Peter and Ingrid. She tells them that Ingrid lost a lot of blood, but it's Peter who is the real problem. His mental instability, coupled with his obsession over going after Captain Caveman himself, makes him a loose cannon.
Speak of the Devil! Peter escaped the hospital, and is on his way back to the park. He has the same ripped, dirty clothes on from before, no weapons to defend himself with, and not a single other person to watch his back. Smart guy, that Peter.
Oddly enough, Jody's still alive. She's been dodging under fallen trees, crouching behind rocks, drinking from streams...who knew she'd make it this far? I sure didn't. At any rate, Jody feels stronger after washing up and eating her last candy bar, so she returns to Captain Caveman's Dream House, armed with a big rock she found. Wow, she found a rock in the woods...What're the odds?
On her way to the house, Jody finds a cooler, and roots through it for anything edible. After licking a paper plate that looks like it dates back to the Triassic Age, she enters the house, ready for battle. She trips a few times, and finds a cardboard box that grosses her out, before she realizes that Captain Caveman is standing in the doorway, just watching her. Eek!
She backs away as he raises his weapon, and finds a small window above her head. As Jody frantically tries to reach it, Captain Caveman slices several deep cuts into her back, and she rolls away to try to defend herself. He keeps stabbing her through the stomach and chest, until she stops moving. Buh-bye, Jody.
In the woods, meanwhile, Peter stops to take a sip of water before arriving at Captain Caveman's House of Carnage. Oh, and he defends himself against a very scary tree. Then he runs away, before the tree's friends decide to retaliate. Smart decision.
Next, we meet a fat guy in a wheelchair. He's been struggling to push himself uphill, and when he pauses to wipe the buckets of sweat from his face, the chair starts rolling backwards--FAST! Before we get to witness either the most awesome or the most politically incorrect death in the film(or both), the scene ends right there. Damn!
Jabba, meanwhile, has assembled his posse. Deputy Stifler advises the gun-toting rednecks to "hang loose", right before the sheriff tells him that Peter is somewhere in the woods as well. As luck would have it, Peter is watching the whole scene unfold from a safe spot higher up in the forest. Jabba also delivers the news that the helicopter has been cancelled...I guess the film's producers realized that they spent most of their budget already. Darn!
Anyway, back to Martin Mull's wheelchair-bound twin brother. He's finally managed to get back up the path, when his chair tips over. D'oh! As a guy with a leg injury myself, I shouldn't be laughing. But, boy AM I!!! This shit's better than "Cats".
Just to recap Our Story So Far: Peter's running around with a sharp stick; Jody and Craig are dead; Ingrid's in the hospital fighting for her life; Sheriff Jabba is wandering the woods alone, looking for a fast food joint; Deputy Stifler's trying to keep a bunch of slack-jawed redneck yokels from shooting themselves; and Captain Caveman's looking for love(in several wrong places). Got it? Okay then, let's move on.
Jabba waddles his fat ass right to the killer's house. He calls out several times, to let the killer know his position, then enters the house. After a brief search Jabba finds a shiny hatchet, and Jody's corpse falls on him when he bends over to pick it up. As Jabba tries to drag her body outside(aren't they supposed to preserve crime scenes for, y'know, EVIDENCE???) to snack on, Deputy Stifler rushes in and scares him. Peter watches the two lawmen drag her body outside, and he gets all worked up.
The posse helps the sheriff and his deputy find more bodies. There turn out to be a total of six. Let's see how well they did: we have the Twit birdwatcher; Chip and Dale; Dick and his wife whose face looks like a foot; the painting lady whose baby was taken(and maybe eaten!); the anonymous couple; the fisherman; the anonymous hiker who gets Captain Caveman's club; and Jody and Craig. That comes out to...uh...carry the one...12(13 if you include the missing baby). Whoops, sorry posse, KEEP LOOKING!
Dr. Maggie swings by to bring Jabba a steaming cup of decaffeinated lard, and reveals that she also brought along Ingrid. Ingrid, for the most part, is just staring straight ahead at a knife in an evidence bag. Foreshadowing? The sheriff and the volunteers all spread out, looking for the killer.
Wheelchair guy again. Y'know, just for the heck of it, I'm going to nickname the guy Cutter John, after one of my favorite characters from Bloom County. To his credit, Cutter John has FINALLY made it to the top of the hill. Yay! As he surveys the amazing landscape before him, Captain Caveman unceremoniously removes Cutter John's head. Yay! His chair sails down the mountain, never to be seen again. Yay?
The next(and hopefully, LAST) morning, Captain Caveman sets up some kind of trap, a wooden box. Peter resumes running around the woods and waving his spear. Oh, and the posse resumes their search yet again.
Peter's the first to get results. The mountain man charges at him like a furry rhino, knocking the weary warrior off of his feet. As Peter takes off his shirt, Ingrid pops up out of the blue, swinging a knife and charging at Captain Caveman. Yay, the cavalry's here!
Turns out that Peter removed his shirt so that he could make a stick-figure decoy to draw the killer out into the open. The plan backfires, because it's Ingrid who sees the shirt first, and runs toward it, joyfully screaming Peter's name. She realizes at the last minute that it's not him, and hides just as Captain Caveman arrives on the scene. He sees the shirt, jibber-jabbers his usual nonsense, and Peter leaps up and chucks a spear through his shoulder. Down he goes!
Peter and Ingrid leap into each other's arms, neither one noticing as the killer uses his good hand to pull the spear out of his shoulder. As they kiss and hug, Captain Caveman leaps up and chases them, and Peter tells Ingrid to run in a different direction. He gets the killer on the ground, and bashes his repeatedly with a heavy, thick branch in the gut. Ingrid, not wanting to be left out, grabs the machete and helps turn Captain Caveman's torso into a pile of red mush.
Jabba and the posse hear the commotion, and arrive at the scene. A short distance away, the missing baby is watching the couple kill Captain Caveman, and she mimics them, hitting the dirt with an axe. Hey, he didn't eat her! Yay! The sheriff, his deputy, and the members of the posse all raise their guns, until Jabba sees who is killing who. He lowers his gun and just shakes his head in disbelief.
After most of the posse has gone home, Jabba and Stifler stare up at Peter and Ingrid, cleaned up and wrapped in blankets. Stifler calls them a cute couple, and Jabba throws him a dirty look. The final scene shows the little girl still playing on the ground, whacking the dirt with an axe. THE END. "HUH?"
Boy, what a disjointed, confusing movie this was. Bad enough that the killer is someone we find out NOTHING about, but then we get the stuff at the end about the baby? Are we seriously supposed to believe that the police, the couple, and the large group of volunteers ALL missed seeing a baby at the crime scene? Outdoors? In daylight??? Oh, and what about only finding half of the bodies? Geez, this movie had plotholes so massive, even the sheriff's ass wouldn't plug them up! 2 and a half killer trees, just for the massive body count, although half of them were people who didn't even have friggin' NAMES!
Ugh... next week we're back in Jason territory with Friday the 13th Part 7:The New Blood. See you then!
Anyway, the DVD began with a short intro by some guy I've never seen before, and he proclaimed it a classic. In both the opening and the closing credits, one actress in particular, "Angie Brown", had her named singled out by a rectangle, for some reason. Oh, and the theme song during the title sequence keeps stopping and starting, punctuated by what sounds like a cuckoo clock...ay yi yi, what have I gotten myself into this week?
As the movie finally starts, we get several scenes depicting the aftermath of "something"...an attack by the killer, is my guess. There's something that looks like a bandanna beneath a tree ranch, a camera lying in a stream, stuff like that. Before long, we see a woman in short-shorts and a tank top screaming and running away from some unseen threat. She falls once or twice, and flails around quite a bit. Then the scene ends. Yup, it ends right there.
Next, we see 4 people backpacking, presumably in the same area as the woman we just saw. Before we get to know any of THEIR names, the scene shifts yet again, this time showing us a birdwatcher. The birdwatcher, who also has no name, is wandering around like "Monty Python"'s Upper Class Twit of the Year, when he gets pegged in the face by something. His cheek starts bleeding, and a guy dressed up like Captain Caveman chops his arm off. As the one-armed Twit tries to defend himself, that scene also ends in an abrupt cut.
Back to the 4 people hiking. At least now we start getting some names: There's Peter, a young biker-type who hates being out of the city, and is unable to say "air conditioning" in a normal way; Craig, a loud, whiny outdoorsy type whose voice sounds like it was dubbed by someone who just learned English the week before filming started; Jody, a dark-haired female who looks kind of butch; and Ingrid, an equally masculine-looking female with short red hair, who unfortunately looks like Ron Howard after a sex-change. Poor Opie.
The other 3 listen to Craig prattle on and on with survival tips, including the film's title, while I consider pulling a Van Gogh to spare myself from the irritating voices. The scene changes AGAIN, this time introducing a wildlife photographer named Dale(who looks like a gay version of Sam Kinison), and his wife. The wife apparently has no name, so I'm calling her "Chip". So there, nyah, nyah.
While Dale is taking pictures of twigs and bearshit, Chip is sunning herself in a folding chair. Dale decides to climb a small mountain for a better view, and Captain Caaaaaaaaaveman strangles him with the camera-strap from behind. Dale falls to his death, mere feet away from our other campers, who never notice his corpse. Chip is also killed, but the method and the aftermath are never clearly shown.
The 4 campers, meanwhile, are still wandering around. Craig consults a map, then offers them a choice: they can either keep going straight, which is rough terrain, or they can circle around the next morning, and find the trail instead. Tired of listening to Craig being a buzzkill, they opt to camp out.
Guess what happens next? If you guessed "another scene transition, where we meet another group of dumb characters in yet another location", you WIN!!!! Yup, this time we get to meet the local sheriff and his bumbling deputy. The sheriff looks like Jabba the Hutt, if you can picture Jabba squeezed into an ill-fitting uniform and wearing bad '70's hair and a moustache. His sidekick looks like Stifler from the first 3 American Pie films. Oh, and we get a weird cameo by Napoleon Dynamite at the end of the scene. Gosh!
When Stifler brings the latest "Missing Person" report to his attention, Sheriff Jabba throws a hissy fit. Together, they go to the general store to question a witness. The missing person turns out to be the birdwatching twit from earlier. When Jabba gets up to leave, he has to force Stifler to go with him, as he's deeply engrossed in an action-packed pinball game. At the national park, the sheriff has a very brief encounter with a cute girl on roller skates.
Then we return to our "main" characters. They hiked a little further, then set up camp. Craig tells them a scary campfire story, and the only reaction to his dull, lifeless narrative is a single "Huh?" from Ingrid. Jody then tells him not to finish the story, and I came very close to applauding. He continues anyway, garnering another "Huh?".
The movie shifts the scene to a mobile home(complete with a Farrah Fawcett poster on the ceiling), and we meet still more under-developed characters. I swear, this movie was made for people who have the attention spans of hyperactive hummingbirds. There's a woman in the mobile home who looks like David Schwimmer, and she's screwing a guy who resembles Dauber from the old sitcom "Coach". This movie would be the scariest thing ever, if I was tripping out. To no one's surprise, the guy's name is Dick.
There's a sound effect that sort of resembles the sound of a rattlesnake, and Dick theorizes that it's probably a bear. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, WHY am I watching this junk??? Anyway, Schwimmer urges Dick not to leave, and he shows her a gun. They have about 3 lines of dialogue before he leaves, and they repeat them over and over again. Wait, I now know why I'm watching this one: I must've died, and this is Hell, right? It all makes sense now!
Dick draws the killer out by calling him a jerk and a pencil-neck geek. Boy, that sure is some pretty strong language. It worked, because Dick is killed pretty soon after that, and his bloody face is pressed against one of the windows. Oddly enough, he appears to have been killed by jelly doughnuts, because his face is covered in white powder and red jam. As Horse-Face freaks out, Captain Caveman pushes the camper over the side of a cliff. There's even a half-assed fire inside after it finally lands on its' side. Wow.
The following morning, Peter wakes up from a nightmare with a start, causing Ingrid to let out another Shakespearean-level "Huh?"...I swear, you could make a drinking game out of all the weirdness in this film. Someone get on that. After they all "Huh?" about 60 more times, they resume their hike to this mythical cabin they keep talking about. Jody wanders away from the main group without realizing it, and stops to get her bearings at a stream. While she contemplates what to do, a number of rocks sail toward her from above!
Oh, it's just her friends, playing a prank. Everyone knows the best practical jokes are the ones that could lead to massive concussions. Duh!
Sheriff Jabba, meanwhile, decides to rent a plane to haul his fat ass around. He wants to see if he can locate some of the people from the reports his deputy brought to his attention. Hell, he probably ate them (the people, not the reports)! He and the pilot fly around a bit, but see nothing out of the ordinary. The sheriff announces he'll give the missing folks another day or so to turn up, and the pilot looks like he could give a shit.
In the next scene, we see someone dressed in khaki dipping a jar into a stream. The person gets back to their campsite, and we see that they brought a baby along for the fun as well. Wow, is this movie cynical enough to kill a baby?
The person collecting the water turns out to be female, and an artist. She is busy painting a watercolor, while her baby is jumping around in her makeshift cradle/sling. As she paints, the woman detects the presence of our hillbilly nearby, and stops to look around. When she resumes painting, he attacks her from behind, impaling and attaching her to her own canvas. Blood gets all over the canvas and her camping gear, and the baby's swing-thing is shown empty. Wow, the movie called my bluff! Is Captain Caveman going to eat the baby or raise it?
The movie then kicks into Screensaver Mode, showing several scenes of outdoor footage, before somebody behind the camera hits their mouse and gets the movie started again. Peter decides that all the rests they take are too time-consuming, so he announces that he's going to walk ahead of them for a bit. He tries to convince Ingrid to go with him, but she'd rather stay with the group.
Walking along the path, Peter hears something. He keeps moving, and tries to track any movement as he goes. Something comes toward him, so Peter gets scared and starts running back toward the camp. He runs into his friends as the pursuer catches up, and it turns out to be some doofus wearing Gilligan's fishing hat. He passes the group after a brief conversation, and everyone shares a laugh at Peter's expense.
Later, as they refill their canteens, they discuss where to set up camp for the night. Jody jokingly suggests that they should set up their sleeping bags in a circle around Peter to protect him from monsters, and he gets pissed off. Peter tells them that he'll find his own spot for the night, and starts walking away from the rest of the group. Craig tells the girls not to worry, because he believes that Peter will cool off and return before too long.
That night, some couple I don't remember seeing before now gets attacked by Captain Caveman. He swings one of the campers up into a tree, trapped in their own sleeping bag, while he stabs the other one to death. Then he turns the one in the tree into a pinata.
Craig makes a campfire and starts peeling potatoes, while Jody keeps an eye out for Peter's return. Both he and Ingrid assure her that Peter will be fine, and that they will all be together again in the morning. Yeah, right.
Peter, in the meantime, is freaking out faster than Freakazoid. He's made himself a campfire, and is waving a stick around, yelling to all of the woodland critters that his stick is a shotgun, and that he's quite proficient at using it. He spends the whole night yelling. Chicken.
The next day, when Peter still hasn't returned, Jody starts to really get worried about him. Ingrid and Craig tell her that they plan to go off somewhere alone, to learn more "survival tips". Jody decides to stay close to the camp, in case Peter returns at some point.
Speaking of Peter, he's collecting firewood. He stops to reminisce about the good ol' days, about 20 minutes earlier in the film. While he's daydreaming about androgynous women splashing him, his fantasy is interrupted by the fisherman who freaked him out earlier. He sees the guy approaching the water to catch fish, and watches as the man gets a bear-trap to the face. Above Peter's little hiding spot is Captain Caveman. Peter watches Captain Caveman approach the flailing man and stab him with a spear several times. Then, when Peter screams and flees, Captain Caveman sees him and decides to hunt him as well.
Following that, we get Jody and Craig frolicking in a field. I shit you not. It's more annoying than Julie Andrews on that friggin' mountainside by about a billion percent. Craig decides to show Jody how to build a rudimentary animal trap, using string, a stick and a heavy rock, and she repays the favor by bringing the rock down on his hand. Why the frack are there pranks always borderline psychotic? Given a choice, I think I'd rather camp out with Captain Caveman. He's less deranged. Oh, and when Jody apologizes, she then slams her fist down on his hurt fingers. Psycho....
Back at the tent, Ingrid hears them screaming and laughing, and contemplates asking Jodie Foster to go out with her, so the tabloids could dub them IngDie, or maybe JoGrid. Hey, it could happen!
Next, we finally get back to Peter. Tired of running, Pete's decided to collapse at the foot of a tree to catch his breath. Bad plan, because he soon hears Captain Caveman heading his way. He frantically snatches up a gigantic branch, and runs the other way.
Craig returns to camp eating a bag of trail mix, and Ingrid suggests that they should get moving again, in case Peter's in trouble. Craig agrees, but first he declares that he wants to get even with Jody. He then sneaks over to her sleeping bag and ties it shut. He then strings her up to a tree, much like the anonymous camper CC killed earlier. Ingrid hears her screams and continues sipping her morning cup o' joe.
Jody continues screaming at Craig, but he doesn't respond. She manages to find a small hole in the sleeping bag, and uses her fingernails to rip it wider. Jody peers through the tear, and sees the Cap-man heading her way. Craig returns, but when he uses a tree branch to make the sleeping bag swing a little bit, Captain Crunch shows up to stab him in the gut.
With Craig down, Jody finally manages to get out of the sleeping bag. Ingrid runs to see what all the commotion is, as Craig is dragged away by the killer. Oh, and Captain Caveman took a swing at him before that was hard enough to remove the guy's arm. When Ingrid comes along after everyone has fled the scene, she sees the blood and starts running aimlessly as well.
Peter gets back to the deserted camping site and starts rummaging through supplies, trying to find anything to use against Captain Caveman. While he's on the ground distracted, Ingrid emerges from the tent with a massive rock in her hand and tries to bash his head in. They hug when she realizes he's not the killer.
Reunited(and it feels so good!), the pair try to escape the woods while also searching for their friends. They find a cabin, and decide to ask for help. Heck, maybe it's the cabin Craig told them about! Being a useless ninny, Peter decides the best course of action would be to approach the cabin at a run, while shouting several greetings. Good plan, bro. Ingrid even points out that it might not be safe, making her officially smarter than Peter.
They enter the cabin anyway, with Peter taking the lead and thrusting his spear out in front of him. Wow, that sounded kinda dirty, didn't it? Yeesh. As the soundtrack gets louder and louder(the music sounds like what your washing machine does when you have an "unbalanced load"), Peter tells it to keep quiet. I swear to God, that actually happened.
While looking for weapons or clues or the frickin' Holy Grail, the uncover Craig's body. Ingrid just keeps saying no over and over again. In her defense though, Peter doesn't do anything useful either. The do agree, however, that they should leave quickly, before the killer finds them in his home.
Little do they know, Captain Caveman's pretty busy at the moment. He sees a young guy strolling around and decides to make him the next meal. Oh, and he has the dumbest plan since any Looney Tunes cartoon ever aired: he simply waves his stick around, while waiting behind a tree for the guy to come investigate. And the idiot does.
Well, as it turns out, it wasn't such a dumb plan after all. See, Captain Caveman knew that Ingrid and Peter were nearby, so he lured the hiker over. That way, when the guy takes the stick and starts walking around with it, they'll hear the jangling noise it makes and assume that it's the killer. Kind of smart, actually.
Sure enough, they hear the guy walking with the stick, and run the other way, toward danger. They hide behind a fallen tree, and Peter jumps at the stranger, stabbing him with the makeshift spear he carved. Hilariously, he screams at the dying man how sorry he is, which I'm sure helps quite a bit. Oh, and now that he knows where they are, Captain Caveman chucks a spear through the dying guy, and goes after the terrified couple once more.
Captain Caveman starts throwing sharpened branches at them, and hits Ingrid twice: first in the arm, then in the side of her head. Peter tells her to run, because he believes that the killer wants her in particular. Oh, and the killer's reaction to hitting her is classic, sort of demented jump-dance thing, with lots of grunts and growls.
The two survivors stop at a babbling brook, and Peter cleans and dresses Ingrid's wounds. He then washes the blood off the spear, while Ingrid watches in a daze. Oh, by the way, there's still about a half hour left in this thing. In case I don't make it, can somebody please tell my friends and family that I died peacefully? They don't need to know the horror I faced this week.
Oh, guess who decided to rejoin the movie? Yup, it's Jody, and she's wandered her way back into the campsite. As she looks for food, a corpse drops out of a tree, and she takes off running once more. Oh, that wacky Jody!
Ingrid and Peter hike through rocks, trees, water...you name it, they stepped in it. That night, they huddle together in front of a small fire, and Ingrid tries to tell Peter the sort of stuff you only say when you know you're going to die. He assures her that they'll make it, and he tries to stay up all night to ensure their safety.
The following morning, Peter wakes up first and sees something that makes him ecstatic: telephone poles. In the dark, they had wandered close to civilization again without ever realizing it. After another "Huh?", they limp into town to find some help. THE E--
Wait, what? It's not over yet, even though they got away? Nope, Peter and Ingrid speak to Sheriff Jabba at the local hospital. Tell ya the truth, I had completely forgotten about him even being in the movie. Sheriff Jabba and Deputy Stifler compare notes and discuss whether or not the mysterious mountain man even exists. They eventually decide to stage a huge manhunt, using every available man and emergency vehicle they can find.
They stop to talk with "Dr. Maggie", one of the doctors taking care of Peter and Ingrid. She tells them that Ingrid lost a lot of blood, but it's Peter who is the real problem. His mental instability, coupled with his obsession over going after Captain Caveman himself, makes him a loose cannon.
Speak of the Devil! Peter escaped the hospital, and is on his way back to the park. He has the same ripped, dirty clothes on from before, no weapons to defend himself with, and not a single other person to watch his back. Smart guy, that Peter.
Oddly enough, Jody's still alive. She's been dodging under fallen trees, crouching behind rocks, drinking from streams...who knew she'd make it this far? I sure didn't. At any rate, Jody feels stronger after washing up and eating her last candy bar, so she returns to Captain Caveman's Dream House, armed with a big rock she found. Wow, she found a rock in the woods...What're the odds?
On her way to the house, Jody finds a cooler, and roots through it for anything edible. After licking a paper plate that looks like it dates back to the Triassic Age, she enters the house, ready for battle. She trips a few times, and finds a cardboard box that grosses her out, before she realizes that Captain Caveman is standing in the doorway, just watching her. Eek!
She backs away as he raises his weapon, and finds a small window above her head. As Jody frantically tries to reach it, Captain Caveman slices several deep cuts into her back, and she rolls away to try to defend herself. He keeps stabbing her through the stomach and chest, until she stops moving. Buh-bye, Jody.
In the woods, meanwhile, Peter stops to take a sip of water before arriving at Captain Caveman's House of Carnage. Oh, and he defends himself against a very scary tree. Then he runs away, before the tree's friends decide to retaliate. Smart decision.
Next, we meet a fat guy in a wheelchair. He's been struggling to push himself uphill, and when he pauses to wipe the buckets of sweat from his face, the chair starts rolling backwards--FAST! Before we get to witness either the most awesome or the most politically incorrect death in the film(or both), the scene ends right there. Damn!
Jabba, meanwhile, has assembled his posse. Deputy Stifler advises the gun-toting rednecks to "hang loose", right before the sheriff tells him that Peter is somewhere in the woods as well. As luck would have it, Peter is watching the whole scene unfold from a safe spot higher up in the forest. Jabba also delivers the news that the helicopter has been cancelled...I guess the film's producers realized that they spent most of their budget already. Darn!
Anyway, back to Martin Mull's wheelchair-bound twin brother. He's finally managed to get back up the path, when his chair tips over. D'oh! As a guy with a leg injury myself, I shouldn't be laughing. But, boy AM I!!! This shit's better than "Cats".
Just to recap Our Story So Far: Peter's running around with a sharp stick; Jody and Craig are dead; Ingrid's in the hospital fighting for her life; Sheriff Jabba is wandering the woods alone, looking for a fast food joint; Deputy Stifler's trying to keep a bunch of slack-jawed redneck yokels from shooting themselves; and Captain Caveman's looking for love(in several wrong places). Got it? Okay then, let's move on.
Jabba waddles his fat ass right to the killer's house. He calls out several times, to let the killer know his position, then enters the house. After a brief search Jabba finds a shiny hatchet, and Jody's corpse falls on him when he bends over to pick it up. As Jabba tries to drag her body outside(aren't they supposed to preserve crime scenes for, y'know, EVIDENCE???) to snack on, Deputy Stifler rushes in and scares him. Peter watches the two lawmen drag her body outside, and he gets all worked up.
The posse helps the sheriff and his deputy find more bodies. There turn out to be a total of six. Let's see how well they did: we have the Twit birdwatcher; Chip and Dale; Dick and his wife whose face looks like a foot; the painting lady whose baby was taken(and maybe eaten!); the anonymous couple; the fisherman; the anonymous hiker who gets Captain Caveman's club; and Jody and Craig. That comes out to...uh...carry the one...12(13 if you include the missing baby). Whoops, sorry posse, KEEP LOOKING!
Dr. Maggie swings by to bring Jabba a steaming cup of decaffeinated lard, and reveals that she also brought along Ingrid. Ingrid, for the most part, is just staring straight ahead at a knife in an evidence bag. Foreshadowing? The sheriff and the volunteers all spread out, looking for the killer.
Wheelchair guy again. Y'know, just for the heck of it, I'm going to nickname the guy Cutter John, after one of my favorite characters from Bloom County. To his credit, Cutter John has FINALLY made it to the top of the hill. Yay! As he surveys the amazing landscape before him, Captain Caveman unceremoniously removes Cutter John's head. Yay! His chair sails down the mountain, never to be seen again. Yay?
The next(and hopefully, LAST) morning, Captain Caveman sets up some kind of trap, a wooden box. Peter resumes running around the woods and waving his spear. Oh, and the posse resumes their search yet again.
Peter's the first to get results. The mountain man charges at him like a furry rhino, knocking the weary warrior off of his feet. As Peter takes off his shirt, Ingrid pops up out of the blue, swinging a knife and charging at Captain Caveman. Yay, the cavalry's here!
Turns out that Peter removed his shirt so that he could make a stick-figure decoy to draw the killer out into the open. The plan backfires, because it's Ingrid who sees the shirt first, and runs toward it, joyfully screaming Peter's name. She realizes at the last minute that it's not him, and hides just as Captain Caveman arrives on the scene. He sees the shirt, jibber-jabbers his usual nonsense, and Peter leaps up and chucks a spear through his shoulder. Down he goes!
Peter and Ingrid leap into each other's arms, neither one noticing as the killer uses his good hand to pull the spear out of his shoulder. As they kiss and hug, Captain Caveman leaps up and chases them, and Peter tells Ingrid to run in a different direction. He gets the killer on the ground, and bashes his repeatedly with a heavy, thick branch in the gut. Ingrid, not wanting to be left out, grabs the machete and helps turn Captain Caveman's torso into a pile of red mush.
Jabba and the posse hear the commotion, and arrive at the scene. A short distance away, the missing baby is watching the couple kill Captain Caveman, and she mimics them, hitting the dirt with an axe. Hey, he didn't eat her! Yay! The sheriff, his deputy, and the members of the posse all raise their guns, until Jabba sees who is killing who. He lowers his gun and just shakes his head in disbelief.
After most of the posse has gone home, Jabba and Stifler stare up at Peter and Ingrid, cleaned up and wrapped in blankets. Stifler calls them a cute couple, and Jabba throws him a dirty look. The final scene shows the little girl still playing on the ground, whacking the dirt with an axe. THE END. "HUH?"
Boy, what a disjointed, confusing movie this was. Bad enough that the killer is someone we find out NOTHING about, but then we get the stuff at the end about the baby? Are we seriously supposed to believe that the police, the couple, and the large group of volunteers ALL missed seeing a baby at the crime scene? Outdoors? In daylight??? Oh, and what about only finding half of the bodies? Geez, this movie had plotholes so massive, even the sheriff's ass wouldn't plug them up! 2 and a half killer trees, just for the massive body count, although half of them were people who didn't even have friggin' NAMES!
Ugh... next week we're back in Jason territory with Friday the 13th Part 7:The New Blood. See you then!
Sunday, November 28, 2010
A Nightmare On Elm Street(remake)
Sick of remakes yet? I sure am, especially in the horror genre. Most of the time, they remake films that were great to begin with, which boggles my mind. I mean, how about taking a film that had flaws, and doing a better version of the story instead? Anyway, this week's slasherfest is the recent remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, replacing Robert Englund with Jackie Earle Haley as the iconic Freddy Krueger. How is it? Well, strap in, get ready for a buttload of SPOILERS, and let's see what we've got.
The film opens with several shots of children playing in a schoolyard. Most of the cast is the usual CW "teen soap"-type crowd, but there's also Connie Britton and Clancy Brown, so this thing might actually be good. Oh, and Thomas Dekker, from the show "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" is in this as well. Wow, is that optimism in my voice?
Anyway, the film starts off in a diner, which seems like something that was used in every other movie in the series, not to mention Craven's show "Nightmare Cafe". This guy Dean is drinking coffee, and the only waitress working looks like she could care less. When he asks for more coffee, she walks right on by. Dean gets up to ask again, and she's seemingly vanished.
Well, if that were the end of that, there'd be no movie, right? Dean decides to look for the waitress, and when he moves behind the counter and goes exploring in the kitchen, we get or first brief glimpse of Freddy sneaking up behind the kid. Freddy makes a noise, the kid turns, and when Freddy starts to slash at the kid, he wakes up to find the waitress, Nancy, staring at him. When he looks down at his hand, there's a nasty gash across his palm. Dean grabs some napkins and starts dabbing at the blood.
This leads into an introduction to Dean's girlfriend, Kris. She asks Nancy about Dean, then quickly sits with him to try to figure out why he's so agitated. Nancy, meanwhile, is busy settling the check with some other teens, Quentin, Jesse and a third kid whose name I didn't catch. Jesse seems pretty interested in the conversation between Dean and Kris, and Quentin tells Nancy that it's because Jesse used to go out with Kris. Damn, we're less than 7 minutes in, and I already feel like I need a cheat-sheet to follow all these characters! Was the original this complicated? Because I remember it being fairly straight-forward.
Anyway, where the heck was I? Oh yeah, the soap opera love-lives of teens in horror remakes. Yeesh. Well, Dean opens up to Kris, telling her that he's been seeing a shrink. That's where his nightmares originated, because the shrink insisted that he should delve into his past to figure out why he seems so troubled. While Dean is explaining all of this, he spills his coffee on Kris, so she gets up to use the restroom.
Bored, Dean begins playing with the silverware on the table. He zones out for a second, then rubs his eyes when he realizes how tired he is. Without warnig, Freddy grabs him from behind, which actually made me jump. Dean tells Freddy that he isn't real, and Freddy enigmatically responds, "I am now."
By this time, Kris has returned from the bathroom. From her perspective, Dean is holding the knife at his own throat, she can't see Freddy at all. She watches as Dean cuts his own throat open, then we get the title screen. Nice.
At Dean's funeral, they get a crowd of hundreds. Kris watches as a young girl throws a rose into the open grave, but it becomes a nightmare, and she realizes that she dozed off at the funeral. Jesse approaches Kris at a collage of Dean's childhood photos, and they start talking. She asks him about what Dean was saying when he died,what sort of trouble he was in and so on, but he refuses to fill in any of the blanks. When Nancy interrupts to say that she knew some of the stuff that had been bothering Dean, Jesse lashes out at both of the girls and walks away with Kris.
Later that same evening, Nancy is listening to some music with earpieces in, and closes her eyes. The wall behind her bed ripples, and Freddy pushes through, right above her. As he flexes his knife-gloved hand, she snaps out of it with a start. She looks around uneasily, but there's no sign of Fredy anywhere.
Kris is also awake, looking through old photo albums. A picture of her and Dean as children was part of the graveside collage, but she can't remember knowing him at such a young age. Even stranger still, no photos in the album show her as a very young child. There are places in the albums where pictures were removed, but Kris is told by her mother that they were probably just stored in the attic.
When Kris goes to bed that night, she waits for everyone else to settle in so that she can start looking for the missing pictures. She heads to the garage and climbs up to the attic. The attic is spotless, probably cleaner than the house itself, which seems kind of kooky. It doesn't take long for Kris to find a series of boxes, each one clearly marked with a name, year, and school grade she was in that year.
In one box, she finds some stuff from before she was in school, which would be around the time period of the photo at the funeral. Inside the box she finds a disheveled doll, a slashed blue dress, and a few other items. Then the lights go out. When Kris stands up, Freddy leaps on top of her. He asks if she remembers him, and she screams and wakes up in her bedroom.
The next day at school, Quentin sees Nancy put a grotesque sketch into her locker. He asks her about it, and even offers her a shoulder to lean on if she should ever ned to talk, but his father, a teacher, interrupts the conversation. They both go to class without any further discussion.
In some type of ancient history class, Kris dozes off while reading her textbook. A rather nifty transition occurs, where the clasroom is covered in ashes. Freddy admonishes Kris about sleeping through her classes, and she rushes out the door, only to re-emerge back into the room she had just left. Frightened now, she asks Freddy who he is. He responds by creeping toward her and telling her that she is as beautiful as ever. Ewwwwww...He leaps at her, and Kris wakes up screaming. In her open textbook is a lock of hair that Freddy lopped off before she woke herself up. Jesse tries to catch up with Kris after class, but she rushes down the hall.
She drives home as quickly as her car will take her, and finds Rufus, her dog, waiting outside for her. Kris wanders back into the garage, but her mother reaches her before she can get back into the attic. Mom, a flight attendant, is working a late flight, and won't be home until the following day. Gosh, what's the worst that could happen?
Being the lunkheaded ditz that she is, Kris nearly goes narcoleptic AGAIN while reading the newspaper. Geez, this chick obviously has a deathwish, Freddy, what are you waiting for??? A sudden movement at her bedroom window startles her awake again, but it's only Jesse. He tells her that he's been petty and jealous, but wants to know what happened to Dean as much as she does.
Kris tells him about her recent nightmares, and her belief that Dean was having them too. She starts to describe Freddy, and Jesse finishes the details, confirming that he's been having the exact same nightmares. They make a pact to keep each other awake all night.
Kris wakes up in the middle of the night. D'oh! She gets up to look for Rufus, and eventually wanders outside. She finds the dog mutilated, and Freddy laughs and tells her that he was just petting it. She jogs back into the house, and the interior changes into a school. A little girl grabs her by the hand, urging her to find a hiding place. They run past some open classrooms where ghost-children are doing the infamous "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." chant, and stop in front of a class where Freddy himself has been waiting. He threatens Kris, and she wakes up in her own bed again. As she tries to calm down, Freddy pins her down in the bed and strikes.
Jesse sees her body convulsing, and assumes that Kris is having some type of seizure at first. When her body starts to levitate, then flies around from wall to wall like a pinball, he quickly realizes that her nightmares are killing her. Helpless and unable to wake Kris up, Jesse watches her slam into the ceiling, sees her shirt and abdomen rip open, and she bleeds to death right before his eyes. Traumatized, he grabs his clothes and escapes the house, tripping the burglar alarm in the process. A neighbor sees Jesse with blood on his clothes, and threatens to call the cops.
Nancy is still awake, working on one of her pictures, when her mom comes in and orders her to go to bed. She continues her drawing, but is grabbed from behind by Jesse. When she sees the blood on him and hears him rambling about how Kris just died in her sleep, she naturally assumes that he's confessing to murder.
When Jesse recites the poem from the dream though, Nancy knows that he's telling the truth. He begs her not to fall asleep, and escapes back out of her bedroom window. Back on the lawn, Jesse is cornered by cops and arrested. As Nancy and her mother watch him being taken away, he screams that she knows the true murderer's name.
While Jesse's getting acquainted with the term "prison bitch", Nancy is calling Quentin. They arrange to meet the next day. Jesse, in the meantime, is pissing off his cellmate with his noisy attempts to stay awake. I think he's on the verge of getting his Shaw Shanked.
The following day, Quentin uses the local bookstore's computer to read up on sleep deprivation. As he discovers that it can cause hallucinations and psychosis, the nimrod falls asleep right then and there. When he opens his eyes again, he's alone. Quentin wanders from bookshelf to bookshelf, and when Freddy tries to snatch him, he finds Nancy shaking him awake. Phew! Good thing Freddy is so bad at killing his intended victims the first time, huh?
Jesse is told that his parents posted his bail, and he leaves his cell. It's a dream, of course(duh), and Jesse soon discovers that the jail has transformed into Freddy's boiler room lair. Freddy chases him around for a short while, before cornering the frightened teen and hounding him with questions about life and death, and poking him a bit with an outstretched finger-knife. When Jesse backs down, Freddy seems to leave him alone, until he stands up again. Then Freddy drives his glove through the boy's abdomen, and his cellmate watches him die in the jail at the same moment. The original's death was better, with him dying by being hung.
Interestingly, this isn't the end of Jesse's death scene. Back in the nightmare, Freddy tells the dying kid that even after his heart stops, his brain continues to function for up to 7 more minutes. Yikes! Unfortunately, we don't get to see those extra minutes.
Back in the real world, Quentin shows Nancy a bottle of pills. The pill is called Zoneral, and he was put on it for ADD years earlier. She also observes that he's wearing religious medallions, and he comments that a person should believe in something. Deep, man. Now shut yer trap and die!
Nope. He shows her the book The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and purely for the sake of exposition, Nancy's never heard of the story. Yeah, right. Pull the other leg, movie. Quentin compares the story to what's been happening to their friends, which I already knew about 3 decades before I ever rented this movie. He then tells Nancy that a person's brain can start malfunctioning after being deprived of sleep for nearly 3 days, at which time the person could slip into a coma and not even realize it. He even dumbs down the definition of a coma. Do today's audiences really need this much spoon-fed exposition, or are the screenwriters a group of dudes who've been secluded in a bomb shelter since the 60's??? Seriously: if audiences are this stupid, what are the odds that they can dress themselves, never mind watching a movie without assistance?
That evening, Nancy's mom comes home to find Nancy sketching scary pictures. When her mother tries to scold her about how late she stayed at the bookstore, Nancy confronts her directly about the recent deaths of her peers.She asks her mother if she and the other children ever knew each other as children, and if the name Freddy has any special connection to the past. When she sees her mother lie to her face, Nancy decides to look into it a little deeper.
Her mother, on the other hand, has a panic attack. She calls another parent to report that Nancy is starting to have repressed memories return. Before we get to explore this any further, the scene grinds to a halt.
There's good news and bad news now. The good news first: the next scene is the infamous bathtub sequence. The bad news? This new version still doesn't show us anything good. Daaaaamn. It pretty much plays out the way the original did: the gloved hand emerges from the soapy water, Nancy wakes up, then she gets dressed again. Ho-hum.
When the leaves the bathroom, Nancy discovers that her nightmare isn't over yet...it's snowing in the hallway. Also in er bedroom. She discovers that, as the house disappears, she's been brought back to a childhood memory, a preschool called Badham. She walks toward the front entrance, before noticing that Freddy is following close behind.
Freddy and Nancy have a brief, strange conversation. He tells her that he wants her toremember him before he kills her, because she was "special" to him. Then he gets up close and personal, and tells her that she smells different, and Nancy lets him know that she set an alarm. He replies that the alarm clock was another dream, but she does appear to wake up. Depending upon how literal this scene is, I'm going to asume that either: A) Nancy DID set an alarm, and that she is now awake, or B) until explicitly shown otherwise, the movie from here on in is all a dream. Any theories?
It turns out that her "alarm" was actually her cell phone. Quentin's calling her to tell Nancy that Jesse died, and they agree to meet up. Before heading to Nancy's house, Quentin leaves a note for his dad, to let him know where he's gone. Quentin decides to take some more Zoneral before leaving, and realizes that it's the last pill in the bottle. Aw, shit.
In Nancy's room, they look up "Badham" on the Internet, and discover that it used to be a preschool on the other side of town. Nancy shows Quentin a picture of the school that she drew after her bathtub dream. Neither one of them can figure out how the murdered kids are related to Freddy or the school, and they decide to confront Nancy's mother.
Before talking to Mom, they find a class picture, hidden away beneath a desk drawer. It shows them, the murdered teens, and others were all at Badham together. Nancy's mother comes into the oom, and when she tries to take back the picture, Nancy demands an explanation. Boy, howdy!
According to her mother, Freddy was the gardener at the preschool. So basically, that episode of "The Simpsons" where Groundskeeper Willie became Freddy Krueger was exactly right. Anyway, he loved playing with the children, but when parents started seeing wounds and behavioral problems with the children, Freddy was blamed. Supposedly, the story ends with him leaving town before he could be questioned, but I think we all know this is an obvious lie, right?
Quentin's dad shows up to take him home. The next day at school, Nancy does more online research into the photo and the preschool itself, while Quentin prepares for a swim meet by doing laps with the rest of the team. First Nancy: her online search of the names on the back of the picture reveals that several are already dead. All, like her friends, seemed to die in their sleep.
Quentin, meanwhile dives into the pool, and is pulled under. When he swims back to the surface, Quentin finds himself in a swampy, smaller pool in the town's factory district. As he watches, Freddy runs by, still alive and being pursued by several carloads of angry parents out for vengeance. Quentin calls out to Freddy, who seems to have possibly heard him.
As the past continues to play out in front of Quentin, he sees Freddy duck into one of the factories. Bracing the door with his body, Freddy begs the townspeople for mercy. He claims that he is innocent of harming the kids, and appears genuinely frightened and confused, which is weird. Robert Englund always potrayed the human Freddy as pretty much the same monster he was when he died, with the exception of Part 6, where he was shown as ashamed when his daughter saw his darker side.
Anyway, Nancy's mother tries to be the voice of reason. While the others are carrying gasoline and making torches and molotov cocktails, she urges them to stop and let the police handle Krueger instead. They refuse to listen, claiming that the courtroom experience would just traumatize the kids even further. Yeah, unlike finding out your mom or dad burnt someone to death.
Clancy Brown's character, the teacher(and Quentin's dad), lights the molotov cocktail and flings it through the closest window. Inside, the blaze gets out of control in seconds, and Freddy gets lit up like a birthday candle. The fire sputters out fairly fast, and the angry mob just stands there, shocked by how quickly it all went down. That's when Freddy bursts through the door, engulfed in flames and thrashing around in agony. As Quentin stares at him, Freddy stops right in front of the boy and snarls with rage as his face is consumed by the fire.
Quentin wakes up, and finds the swim team standing over him. He apparently went unconscious in the pool and nearly drowned. The coach asks him if he's okay, and Quentin spazzes out.
Nancy is still typing the names of students into the library computer, trying to find survivors on the photo list. She types one of the names into the search engine, and finds a video blog written by the teen, Martin. In it, Martin describes dreaming of Freddy many times. She watches each video in order, and sees Martin's sanity deteriorate right before her eyes. In the final video, he begs for help, and seems to be thrust headfirst toward the camera. Nancy never sees it, because she falls asleep for a brief moment.
Luckily for her, Quentin comes along and wakes her up. Together, they confront Alan, Quentin's father, in his office. The conversation swiftly devolves into a shouting match, with Quentin on the side of Freddy! He points out that the kids might have made up the story to cover for something else that happened, and that the one detail each story had in common, a cave that Freddy took them to, has never been found. Again, the idea that Freddy might be innocent of molesting and murdering kids could be a pretty inventive twist.
Quentin stomps out of Alan's office, ashamed and angry that he and the other kids might have caused an innocent man to die. Nancy catches up to him in the hall, and proposes a plan: that they should visit the abandoned preschool and search for evidence that either proves or disproves Freddy's innocence.
Before they can work out the details for this task, Nancy hears Kris down another corridor. As she look on, Nancy sees Kris in a plastic sheet being dragged along the floor. Kris shows up again, still bloody and wrapped in the plastic sheet, and laughs with Freddy's voice.
Quentin finds Nancy in a trance and snaps her out of it. He tells her that they need to find the school in a hurry, before her fatigue overcomes her. But before they get there, he stops at a pharmacy first, to refill his prescription. Nancy stays in the car, which is the most recent dumb idea in a recent series of dumb ideas that she's had.
As expected, Freddy attacks her as she keeps taking "micro-naps" in the car. Each attack increases his intensity. Looking for any way to remain awake, Nancy grabs the car's lighter and burns herself with it. Ouch!
In the pharmacy, Quentin gets into an argument with the pharmacist. There are apparently no refills left, and the pharmacist wants to call the doctor, which could take waaaay too long. Quentin even begs him for just a few pills until the rest of the prescription comes through, but the guy refuses. Nancy finally gets tired(heh) of waiting in the car, and goes into the pharmacy to find him.
The muzak in the pharmacy plays a song about dreams...gosh, I wonder if that means that Nancy is still in the car, dreaming this? This movie is so dumbed-down, it's starting to get insulting. Before too long, the interior of the store transforms into Freddy's boiler room, and he immediately appears to begin taunting her.
She backs up, and when Freddy seems ready to lunge at her, Nancy grabs his arm and tears off a piece of his sweater. The scenery keeps flickering from pharmacy to boiler room and back again, and Freddy stabs her in the arm with his glove. In the film's most inexplicable line of dialogue(so far, at least...), Freddy tells her that she needs to wake up because she's bleeding. Huh? Isn't making these kids bleed and suffer your whole point?
Nancy does wake up, and her scream brings Quentin running to help her. He gets her on her feet so they can get her arm looked at in an ER, and Nancy reveals that the fragment she tore off of Freddy's sweater survived the journey back into the waking world. Surprise, surprise.
At the hospital, Quentin steals some medication to keep him awake until his prescription is ready. Nancy's mother rushes in to see her, and asks her what happened to her arm. When Nancy shows her the wound, she STILL doesn't believe it's Freddy that attacked Nancy! To make matters even worse, the attending physician wants to sedate Nancy before they begin to treat her wound.
The physician's hand wear's Freddy's glove briefly, and Nancy pitches a fit. Outside the cubicle, Nancy's mother hesitates to sign the consent form needed to administer pain meds. When she finally does sign it, they discover that Nancy has escaped from the gurney and is now missing.
It turns out that she's with Quentin again. He reveals to Nancy that he stole adrenaline from the hospital, and a couple of syringes. Nancy hesitates to take an injection without knowing the full effect, but Quentin plunges one of the shots into his own leg.
Nancy starts feeling drowsy on the way to the old school, and asks Quentin to talk to her. They have a little heart-to-heart where he basically asks her why she never said yes when he would ask her out. She confesses that she never felt like she fit in with his friends, and he asks her again. Before Nancy can say no, Quentin asks her to sleep on it. Cute.
The tender moment is ruined when Freddy appears on the road and Quentin swerves, crashing the vehicle. Quentin freaks out over seeing Freddy, as it implies that the adrenaline isn't potent enough, and they walk the rest of the way. Considering that it appears that they only walked several feet, it doesn't seem so bad.
Inside the abandoned school, the place is wrecked. They start walking past old dusty classrooms, and Quentin sees Freddy decapitate Nancy without warning. AAAAH!!
Oops, just a dream. Given that he took his last pill that very afternoon, and has adrenaline rocketing through his system, doesn't it seem kinda odd that HE'S the one seeing Freddy everywhere, instead of Nancy? Quentin doesn't trust his perception of reality anymore, so Nancy leads the way.
They end up in a maintenance room, and Nancy finds a torch to light up the room. The couple find another, smaller room, which turns out to be where Freddy basically lived. He had a heater, a workbench, several tools and knives...oh, and a wall featuring some of Nancy's drawings. Hmmm...
The drawing that they're staring at flutters, and the teens realize that it's covering some sort of hiding place. Behind the picture is a small door. Behind the door is ANOTHER room, also featuring Nancy's artwork. As she examines the weird distorted facesin the drawings, Quentin finds a small box and opens it. He makes a sound of revulsion, and Nancy turns to look at him.
When she sees Quentin holding Polaroids, she asks to see them, and he refuses. She grabs them anyway, and discovers that all of them are pictures of her. Although we only get fleeting glimpses of them, the implication is that some of the photos are pornographic in nature. Nancy and Quentin were completely wrong about Freddy, as it turns out.
They realize that Freddy is killing the teens he molested, and is saving Nancy for last. She proposes a plan to Quentin, wherein she falls asleep and tries to brikng Freddy out of the nightmare, just like she did with the sweater. Quentin tells her that he should do it, but she refuses. She only asks him to revive her if he sees things going badly, and to be ready to kill Freddy if she succeeds in bringing him into reality again.
Nancy lies down, and Quentin begins searching for a weapon. He finds a paper slicer, and decides that it will be sharp enough for the task ahead. Nancy falls asleep quickly, and as luck would have it, so does Quentin. Dumbass.
Quentin finds himself trapped in the boiler room, and Freddy shows up while he looks for an exit. Freddy roughs him up a bit by slamming him against the pipes a few times, before taking a sharp swipe at the boy's stomach. Before Freddy can finish Quentin off, he hears Nancy arrive, and leaves to claim her first.
Nancy wanders around aimlessly, until Freddy pops up. He taunts her a little bit, and seems amused by her defiance. She tells Freddy that he's not real, and he replies that he is still very real, and dangerous. Nancy defies him, but when she runs away, the setting becomes her house again. She sees his shadow at the stairs, and hides in a nearby closet. When Freddy tears through the closet door, Nancy sprints upstairs and tries running to her bedroom. That fails, because the floor turns into liquid when she takes more than a few steps. She starts sinking into the floor, which is now blood, and goes under completely before Freddy reaches her.
Falling through the blood, Nancy lands on her bed, dressed only in a small gown. Freddy looms over her, debating whether to rape her or kill her. She pushes him off of her, but he still keeps cornering her in the small bedroom. Finally, Nancy wraps her fingers around a large pair of scissors and stabs Freddy through the eye, but he just laughs it off, removes the scissors, and grows a new eye.
In the real world, Quentin wakes up, but is badly injured. He tries to shake Nancy out of sleep, but she's too exhausted to wake up. Freddy tells her that it was always his plan to let her try to stay awake, so that when she did fall asleep, he could keep her from waking up ever again.
Too bad Freddy didn't know about Quentin's stolen adrenaline supply. Right before Freddy plunges his glove into Nancy's midsection, Quentin does the same thing to her with a hypodermic. Before she leaves the dream, Nancy grabs onto Freddy.
The plan works. With Freddy now real again, Quentin attacks him with his makeshift machete. Freddy counters the move by stabbing quentin through the throat and throwing him to the opposite side of the room, while Nancy tries to find any object to either block his attacks or to hurt him in some way. Freddy slashes apart every object she finds, and he raises his arm to deliver the final strike, but Quentin stabs him in the leg first.
Freddy gets angry, and forgets about Nancy for the moment. He goes to attack Quentin, and watches in horror as his glove flies off, hand still in it. He realizes that Nancy used his distraction to get Quentin's weapon, and that she chopped his hand off. She uses some of his own taunts against him, before cutting his neck wide open. As she and Quentin watch, Freddy collapses on the floor.
They start to stagger away, but Nancy decides she isn't done yet. She picks up the lamp that she lit earlier, and lings it at the far corner of the room. As everything gets engulfed in the fire, they manage to reach the exit safely.
Paramedics and firefighters arrive, but none of them can verify that Freddy's body was in the burning building. Nancy gets into the ambulance after Quentin is loaded in, and she reassures him that the nightmare is over. The final scene shows Nancy and her mother arriving home from the hospital. As her mother puts down her purse, Freddy reaches through a mirror, impales Mom's face with his glove, and hauls her into the mirror with him as Nancy screams like a banshee on Crystal Meth. THE END(?)
Eh. It wasn't the complete train wreck I had been expecting, but every iconic moment was done better the first time.around. I did, however like the weird scene transitions and some of the effects, like the hallway floor becoming blood. I even like this interpretation of Freddy, though I thought the mystery of his possible innocence should have been developed further. If they do the inevitable sequels, I hope the scripts are written a lot smarter, and I REALLY hope they avoid all the "dream warrior/magic powers" crap that made so many of the sequels seem so generic. And keep Freddy quiet....the original was great because of how quiet and menacing he was. Oh well, enough nit-picking. I'll give this one 3 and a half killer trees out of 5.
What did A Nightmare On Elm Street teach me?
-Pretty much every boiler room, abandoned school, and factory looks alike.
-Great CGI will never be able to overcome terrible dialogue.
-An entire group of people can completely forget how they met, when, and where...
Next week: Another "Don't...." movie, Don't Go in the Woods Alone, which is an alarmingly specific title. After that, the start of the downfall of Jason, The New Blood. Every movie after around parts 4-5 relied on a silly gimmick, and this is one of the worst....pray for my sanity!
The film opens with several shots of children playing in a schoolyard. Most of the cast is the usual CW "teen soap"-type crowd, but there's also Connie Britton and Clancy Brown, so this thing might actually be good. Oh, and Thomas Dekker, from the show "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" is in this as well. Wow, is that optimism in my voice?
Anyway, the film starts off in a diner, which seems like something that was used in every other movie in the series, not to mention Craven's show "Nightmare Cafe". This guy Dean is drinking coffee, and the only waitress working looks like she could care less. When he asks for more coffee, she walks right on by. Dean gets up to ask again, and she's seemingly vanished.
Well, if that were the end of that, there'd be no movie, right? Dean decides to look for the waitress, and when he moves behind the counter and goes exploring in the kitchen, we get or first brief glimpse of Freddy sneaking up behind the kid. Freddy makes a noise, the kid turns, and when Freddy starts to slash at the kid, he wakes up to find the waitress, Nancy, staring at him. When he looks down at his hand, there's a nasty gash across his palm. Dean grabs some napkins and starts dabbing at the blood.
This leads into an introduction to Dean's girlfriend, Kris. She asks Nancy about Dean, then quickly sits with him to try to figure out why he's so agitated. Nancy, meanwhile, is busy settling the check with some other teens, Quentin, Jesse and a third kid whose name I didn't catch. Jesse seems pretty interested in the conversation between Dean and Kris, and Quentin tells Nancy that it's because Jesse used to go out with Kris. Damn, we're less than 7 minutes in, and I already feel like I need a cheat-sheet to follow all these characters! Was the original this complicated? Because I remember it being fairly straight-forward.
Anyway, where the heck was I? Oh yeah, the soap opera love-lives of teens in horror remakes. Yeesh. Well, Dean opens up to Kris, telling her that he's been seeing a shrink. That's where his nightmares originated, because the shrink insisted that he should delve into his past to figure out why he seems so troubled. While Dean is explaining all of this, he spills his coffee on Kris, so she gets up to use the restroom.
Bored, Dean begins playing with the silverware on the table. He zones out for a second, then rubs his eyes when he realizes how tired he is. Without warnig, Freddy grabs him from behind, which actually made me jump. Dean tells Freddy that he isn't real, and Freddy enigmatically responds, "I am now."
By this time, Kris has returned from the bathroom. From her perspective, Dean is holding the knife at his own throat, she can't see Freddy at all. She watches as Dean cuts his own throat open, then we get the title screen. Nice.
At Dean's funeral, they get a crowd of hundreds. Kris watches as a young girl throws a rose into the open grave, but it becomes a nightmare, and she realizes that she dozed off at the funeral. Jesse approaches Kris at a collage of Dean's childhood photos, and they start talking. She asks him about what Dean was saying when he died,what sort of trouble he was in and so on, but he refuses to fill in any of the blanks. When Nancy interrupts to say that she knew some of the stuff that had been bothering Dean, Jesse lashes out at both of the girls and walks away with Kris.
Later that same evening, Nancy is listening to some music with earpieces in, and closes her eyes. The wall behind her bed ripples, and Freddy pushes through, right above her. As he flexes his knife-gloved hand, she snaps out of it with a start. She looks around uneasily, but there's no sign of Fredy anywhere.
Kris is also awake, looking through old photo albums. A picture of her and Dean as children was part of the graveside collage, but she can't remember knowing him at such a young age. Even stranger still, no photos in the album show her as a very young child. There are places in the albums where pictures were removed, but Kris is told by her mother that they were probably just stored in the attic.
When Kris goes to bed that night, she waits for everyone else to settle in so that she can start looking for the missing pictures. She heads to the garage and climbs up to the attic. The attic is spotless, probably cleaner than the house itself, which seems kind of kooky. It doesn't take long for Kris to find a series of boxes, each one clearly marked with a name, year, and school grade she was in that year.
In one box, she finds some stuff from before she was in school, which would be around the time period of the photo at the funeral. Inside the box she finds a disheveled doll, a slashed blue dress, and a few other items. Then the lights go out. When Kris stands up, Freddy leaps on top of her. He asks if she remembers him, and she screams and wakes up in her bedroom.
The next day at school, Quentin sees Nancy put a grotesque sketch into her locker. He asks her about it, and even offers her a shoulder to lean on if she should ever ned to talk, but his father, a teacher, interrupts the conversation. They both go to class without any further discussion.
In some type of ancient history class, Kris dozes off while reading her textbook. A rather nifty transition occurs, where the clasroom is covered in ashes. Freddy admonishes Kris about sleeping through her classes, and she rushes out the door, only to re-emerge back into the room she had just left. Frightened now, she asks Freddy who he is. He responds by creeping toward her and telling her that she is as beautiful as ever. Ewwwwww...He leaps at her, and Kris wakes up screaming. In her open textbook is a lock of hair that Freddy lopped off before she woke herself up. Jesse tries to catch up with Kris after class, but she rushes down the hall.
She drives home as quickly as her car will take her, and finds Rufus, her dog, waiting outside for her. Kris wanders back into the garage, but her mother reaches her before she can get back into the attic. Mom, a flight attendant, is working a late flight, and won't be home until the following day. Gosh, what's the worst that could happen?
Being the lunkheaded ditz that she is, Kris nearly goes narcoleptic AGAIN while reading the newspaper. Geez, this chick obviously has a deathwish, Freddy, what are you waiting for??? A sudden movement at her bedroom window startles her awake again, but it's only Jesse. He tells her that he's been petty and jealous, but wants to know what happened to Dean as much as she does.
Kris tells him about her recent nightmares, and her belief that Dean was having them too. She starts to describe Freddy, and Jesse finishes the details, confirming that he's been having the exact same nightmares. They make a pact to keep each other awake all night.
Kris wakes up in the middle of the night. D'oh! She gets up to look for Rufus, and eventually wanders outside. She finds the dog mutilated, and Freddy laughs and tells her that he was just petting it. She jogs back into the house, and the interior changes into a school. A little girl grabs her by the hand, urging her to find a hiding place. They run past some open classrooms where ghost-children are doing the infamous "One, two, Freddy's coming for you..." chant, and stop in front of a class where Freddy himself has been waiting. He threatens Kris, and she wakes up in her own bed again. As she tries to calm down, Freddy pins her down in the bed and strikes.
Jesse sees her body convulsing, and assumes that Kris is having some type of seizure at first. When her body starts to levitate, then flies around from wall to wall like a pinball, he quickly realizes that her nightmares are killing her. Helpless and unable to wake Kris up, Jesse watches her slam into the ceiling, sees her shirt and abdomen rip open, and she bleeds to death right before his eyes. Traumatized, he grabs his clothes and escapes the house, tripping the burglar alarm in the process. A neighbor sees Jesse with blood on his clothes, and threatens to call the cops.
Nancy is still awake, working on one of her pictures, when her mom comes in and orders her to go to bed. She continues her drawing, but is grabbed from behind by Jesse. When she sees the blood on him and hears him rambling about how Kris just died in her sleep, she naturally assumes that he's confessing to murder.
When Jesse recites the poem from the dream though, Nancy knows that he's telling the truth. He begs her not to fall asleep, and escapes back out of her bedroom window. Back on the lawn, Jesse is cornered by cops and arrested. As Nancy and her mother watch him being taken away, he screams that she knows the true murderer's name.
While Jesse's getting acquainted with the term "prison bitch", Nancy is calling Quentin. They arrange to meet the next day. Jesse, in the meantime, is pissing off his cellmate with his noisy attempts to stay awake. I think he's on the verge of getting his Shaw Shanked.
The following day, Quentin uses the local bookstore's computer to read up on sleep deprivation. As he discovers that it can cause hallucinations and psychosis, the nimrod falls asleep right then and there. When he opens his eyes again, he's alone. Quentin wanders from bookshelf to bookshelf, and when Freddy tries to snatch him, he finds Nancy shaking him awake. Phew! Good thing Freddy is so bad at killing his intended victims the first time, huh?
Jesse is told that his parents posted his bail, and he leaves his cell. It's a dream, of course(duh), and Jesse soon discovers that the jail has transformed into Freddy's boiler room lair. Freddy chases him around for a short while, before cornering the frightened teen and hounding him with questions about life and death, and poking him a bit with an outstretched finger-knife. When Jesse backs down, Freddy seems to leave him alone, until he stands up again. Then Freddy drives his glove through the boy's abdomen, and his cellmate watches him die in the jail at the same moment. The original's death was better, with him dying by being hung.
Interestingly, this isn't the end of Jesse's death scene. Back in the nightmare, Freddy tells the dying kid that even after his heart stops, his brain continues to function for up to 7 more minutes. Yikes! Unfortunately, we don't get to see those extra minutes.
Back in the real world, Quentin shows Nancy a bottle of pills. The pill is called Zoneral, and he was put on it for ADD years earlier. She also observes that he's wearing religious medallions, and he comments that a person should believe in something. Deep, man. Now shut yer trap and die!
Nope. He shows her the book The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and purely for the sake of exposition, Nancy's never heard of the story. Yeah, right. Pull the other leg, movie. Quentin compares the story to what's been happening to their friends, which I already knew about 3 decades before I ever rented this movie. He then tells Nancy that a person's brain can start malfunctioning after being deprived of sleep for nearly 3 days, at which time the person could slip into a coma and not even realize it. He even dumbs down the definition of a coma. Do today's audiences really need this much spoon-fed exposition, or are the screenwriters a group of dudes who've been secluded in a bomb shelter since the 60's??? Seriously: if audiences are this stupid, what are the odds that they can dress themselves, never mind watching a movie without assistance?
That evening, Nancy's mom comes home to find Nancy sketching scary pictures. When her mother tries to scold her about how late she stayed at the bookstore, Nancy confronts her directly about the recent deaths of her peers.She asks her mother if she and the other children ever knew each other as children, and if the name Freddy has any special connection to the past. When she sees her mother lie to her face, Nancy decides to look into it a little deeper.
Her mother, on the other hand, has a panic attack. She calls another parent to report that Nancy is starting to have repressed memories return. Before we get to explore this any further, the scene grinds to a halt.
There's good news and bad news now. The good news first: the next scene is the infamous bathtub sequence. The bad news? This new version still doesn't show us anything good. Daaaaamn. It pretty much plays out the way the original did: the gloved hand emerges from the soapy water, Nancy wakes up, then she gets dressed again. Ho-hum.
When the leaves the bathroom, Nancy discovers that her nightmare isn't over yet...it's snowing in the hallway. Also in er bedroom. She discovers that, as the house disappears, she's been brought back to a childhood memory, a preschool called Badham. She walks toward the front entrance, before noticing that Freddy is following close behind.
Freddy and Nancy have a brief, strange conversation. He tells her that he wants her toremember him before he kills her, because she was "special" to him. Then he gets up close and personal, and tells her that she smells different, and Nancy lets him know that she set an alarm. He replies that the alarm clock was another dream, but she does appear to wake up. Depending upon how literal this scene is, I'm going to asume that either: A) Nancy DID set an alarm, and that she is now awake, or B) until explicitly shown otherwise, the movie from here on in is all a dream. Any theories?
It turns out that her "alarm" was actually her cell phone. Quentin's calling her to tell Nancy that Jesse died, and they agree to meet up. Before heading to Nancy's house, Quentin leaves a note for his dad, to let him know where he's gone. Quentin decides to take some more Zoneral before leaving, and realizes that it's the last pill in the bottle. Aw, shit.
In Nancy's room, they look up "Badham" on the Internet, and discover that it used to be a preschool on the other side of town. Nancy shows Quentin a picture of the school that she drew after her bathtub dream. Neither one of them can figure out how the murdered kids are related to Freddy or the school, and they decide to confront Nancy's mother.
Before talking to Mom, they find a class picture, hidden away beneath a desk drawer. It shows them, the murdered teens, and others were all at Badham together. Nancy's mother comes into the oom, and when she tries to take back the picture, Nancy demands an explanation. Boy, howdy!
According to her mother, Freddy was the gardener at the preschool. So basically, that episode of "The Simpsons" where Groundskeeper Willie became Freddy Krueger was exactly right. Anyway, he loved playing with the children, but when parents started seeing wounds and behavioral problems with the children, Freddy was blamed. Supposedly, the story ends with him leaving town before he could be questioned, but I think we all know this is an obvious lie, right?
Quentin's dad shows up to take him home. The next day at school, Nancy does more online research into the photo and the preschool itself, while Quentin prepares for a swim meet by doing laps with the rest of the team. First Nancy: her online search of the names on the back of the picture reveals that several are already dead. All, like her friends, seemed to die in their sleep.
Quentin, meanwhile dives into the pool, and is pulled under. When he swims back to the surface, Quentin finds himself in a swampy, smaller pool in the town's factory district. As he watches, Freddy runs by, still alive and being pursued by several carloads of angry parents out for vengeance. Quentin calls out to Freddy, who seems to have possibly heard him.
As the past continues to play out in front of Quentin, he sees Freddy duck into one of the factories. Bracing the door with his body, Freddy begs the townspeople for mercy. He claims that he is innocent of harming the kids, and appears genuinely frightened and confused, which is weird. Robert Englund always potrayed the human Freddy as pretty much the same monster he was when he died, with the exception of Part 6, where he was shown as ashamed when his daughter saw his darker side.
Anyway, Nancy's mother tries to be the voice of reason. While the others are carrying gasoline and making torches and molotov cocktails, she urges them to stop and let the police handle Krueger instead. They refuse to listen, claiming that the courtroom experience would just traumatize the kids even further. Yeah, unlike finding out your mom or dad burnt someone to death.
Clancy Brown's character, the teacher(and Quentin's dad), lights the molotov cocktail and flings it through the closest window. Inside, the blaze gets out of control in seconds, and Freddy gets lit up like a birthday candle. The fire sputters out fairly fast, and the angry mob just stands there, shocked by how quickly it all went down. That's when Freddy bursts through the door, engulfed in flames and thrashing around in agony. As Quentin stares at him, Freddy stops right in front of the boy and snarls with rage as his face is consumed by the fire.
Quentin wakes up, and finds the swim team standing over him. He apparently went unconscious in the pool and nearly drowned. The coach asks him if he's okay, and Quentin spazzes out.
Nancy is still typing the names of students into the library computer, trying to find survivors on the photo list. She types one of the names into the search engine, and finds a video blog written by the teen, Martin. In it, Martin describes dreaming of Freddy many times. She watches each video in order, and sees Martin's sanity deteriorate right before her eyes. In the final video, he begs for help, and seems to be thrust headfirst toward the camera. Nancy never sees it, because she falls asleep for a brief moment.
Luckily for her, Quentin comes along and wakes her up. Together, they confront Alan, Quentin's father, in his office. The conversation swiftly devolves into a shouting match, with Quentin on the side of Freddy! He points out that the kids might have made up the story to cover for something else that happened, and that the one detail each story had in common, a cave that Freddy took them to, has never been found. Again, the idea that Freddy might be innocent of molesting and murdering kids could be a pretty inventive twist.
Quentin stomps out of Alan's office, ashamed and angry that he and the other kids might have caused an innocent man to die. Nancy catches up to him in the hall, and proposes a plan: that they should visit the abandoned preschool and search for evidence that either proves or disproves Freddy's innocence.
Before they can work out the details for this task, Nancy hears Kris down another corridor. As she look on, Nancy sees Kris in a plastic sheet being dragged along the floor. Kris shows up again, still bloody and wrapped in the plastic sheet, and laughs with Freddy's voice.
Quentin finds Nancy in a trance and snaps her out of it. He tells her that they need to find the school in a hurry, before her fatigue overcomes her. But before they get there, he stops at a pharmacy first, to refill his prescription. Nancy stays in the car, which is the most recent dumb idea in a recent series of dumb ideas that she's had.
As expected, Freddy attacks her as she keeps taking "micro-naps" in the car. Each attack increases his intensity. Looking for any way to remain awake, Nancy grabs the car's lighter and burns herself with it. Ouch!
In the pharmacy, Quentin gets into an argument with the pharmacist. There are apparently no refills left, and the pharmacist wants to call the doctor, which could take waaaay too long. Quentin even begs him for just a few pills until the rest of the prescription comes through, but the guy refuses. Nancy finally gets tired(heh) of waiting in the car, and goes into the pharmacy to find him.
The muzak in the pharmacy plays a song about dreams...gosh, I wonder if that means that Nancy is still in the car, dreaming this? This movie is so dumbed-down, it's starting to get insulting. Before too long, the interior of the store transforms into Freddy's boiler room, and he immediately appears to begin taunting her.
She backs up, and when Freddy seems ready to lunge at her, Nancy grabs his arm and tears off a piece of his sweater. The scenery keeps flickering from pharmacy to boiler room and back again, and Freddy stabs her in the arm with his glove. In the film's most inexplicable line of dialogue(so far, at least...), Freddy tells her that she needs to wake up because she's bleeding. Huh? Isn't making these kids bleed and suffer your whole point?
Nancy does wake up, and her scream brings Quentin running to help her. He gets her on her feet so they can get her arm looked at in an ER, and Nancy reveals that the fragment she tore off of Freddy's sweater survived the journey back into the waking world. Surprise, surprise.
At the hospital, Quentin steals some medication to keep him awake until his prescription is ready. Nancy's mother rushes in to see her, and asks her what happened to her arm. When Nancy shows her the wound, she STILL doesn't believe it's Freddy that attacked Nancy! To make matters even worse, the attending physician wants to sedate Nancy before they begin to treat her wound.
The physician's hand wear's Freddy's glove briefly, and Nancy pitches a fit. Outside the cubicle, Nancy's mother hesitates to sign the consent form needed to administer pain meds. When she finally does sign it, they discover that Nancy has escaped from the gurney and is now missing.
It turns out that she's with Quentin again. He reveals to Nancy that he stole adrenaline from the hospital, and a couple of syringes. Nancy hesitates to take an injection without knowing the full effect, but Quentin plunges one of the shots into his own leg.
Nancy starts feeling drowsy on the way to the old school, and asks Quentin to talk to her. They have a little heart-to-heart where he basically asks her why she never said yes when he would ask her out. She confesses that she never felt like she fit in with his friends, and he asks her again. Before Nancy can say no, Quentin asks her to sleep on it. Cute.
The tender moment is ruined when Freddy appears on the road and Quentin swerves, crashing the vehicle. Quentin freaks out over seeing Freddy, as it implies that the adrenaline isn't potent enough, and they walk the rest of the way. Considering that it appears that they only walked several feet, it doesn't seem so bad.
Inside the abandoned school, the place is wrecked. They start walking past old dusty classrooms, and Quentin sees Freddy decapitate Nancy without warning. AAAAH!!
Oops, just a dream. Given that he took his last pill that very afternoon, and has adrenaline rocketing through his system, doesn't it seem kinda odd that HE'S the one seeing Freddy everywhere, instead of Nancy? Quentin doesn't trust his perception of reality anymore, so Nancy leads the way.
They end up in a maintenance room, and Nancy finds a torch to light up the room. The couple find another, smaller room, which turns out to be where Freddy basically lived. He had a heater, a workbench, several tools and knives...oh, and a wall featuring some of Nancy's drawings. Hmmm...
The drawing that they're staring at flutters, and the teens realize that it's covering some sort of hiding place. Behind the picture is a small door. Behind the door is ANOTHER room, also featuring Nancy's artwork. As she examines the weird distorted facesin the drawings, Quentin finds a small box and opens it. He makes a sound of revulsion, and Nancy turns to look at him.
When she sees Quentin holding Polaroids, she asks to see them, and he refuses. She grabs them anyway, and discovers that all of them are pictures of her. Although we only get fleeting glimpses of them, the implication is that some of the photos are pornographic in nature. Nancy and Quentin were completely wrong about Freddy, as it turns out.
They realize that Freddy is killing the teens he molested, and is saving Nancy for last. She proposes a plan to Quentin, wherein she falls asleep and tries to brikng Freddy out of the nightmare, just like she did with the sweater. Quentin tells her that he should do it, but she refuses. She only asks him to revive her if he sees things going badly, and to be ready to kill Freddy if she succeeds in bringing him into reality again.
Nancy lies down, and Quentin begins searching for a weapon. He finds a paper slicer, and decides that it will be sharp enough for the task ahead. Nancy falls asleep quickly, and as luck would have it, so does Quentin. Dumbass.
Quentin finds himself trapped in the boiler room, and Freddy shows up while he looks for an exit. Freddy roughs him up a bit by slamming him against the pipes a few times, before taking a sharp swipe at the boy's stomach. Before Freddy can finish Quentin off, he hears Nancy arrive, and leaves to claim her first.
Nancy wanders around aimlessly, until Freddy pops up. He taunts her a little bit, and seems amused by her defiance. She tells Freddy that he's not real, and he replies that he is still very real, and dangerous. Nancy defies him, but when she runs away, the setting becomes her house again. She sees his shadow at the stairs, and hides in a nearby closet. When Freddy tears through the closet door, Nancy sprints upstairs and tries running to her bedroom. That fails, because the floor turns into liquid when she takes more than a few steps. She starts sinking into the floor, which is now blood, and goes under completely before Freddy reaches her.
Falling through the blood, Nancy lands on her bed, dressed only in a small gown. Freddy looms over her, debating whether to rape her or kill her. She pushes him off of her, but he still keeps cornering her in the small bedroom. Finally, Nancy wraps her fingers around a large pair of scissors and stabs Freddy through the eye, but he just laughs it off, removes the scissors, and grows a new eye.
In the real world, Quentin wakes up, but is badly injured. He tries to shake Nancy out of sleep, but she's too exhausted to wake up. Freddy tells her that it was always his plan to let her try to stay awake, so that when she did fall asleep, he could keep her from waking up ever again.
Too bad Freddy didn't know about Quentin's stolen adrenaline supply. Right before Freddy plunges his glove into Nancy's midsection, Quentin does the same thing to her with a hypodermic. Before she leaves the dream, Nancy grabs onto Freddy.
The plan works. With Freddy now real again, Quentin attacks him with his makeshift machete. Freddy counters the move by stabbing quentin through the throat and throwing him to the opposite side of the room, while Nancy tries to find any object to either block his attacks or to hurt him in some way. Freddy slashes apart every object she finds, and he raises his arm to deliver the final strike, but Quentin stabs him in the leg first.
Freddy gets angry, and forgets about Nancy for the moment. He goes to attack Quentin, and watches in horror as his glove flies off, hand still in it. He realizes that Nancy used his distraction to get Quentin's weapon, and that she chopped his hand off. She uses some of his own taunts against him, before cutting his neck wide open. As she and Quentin watch, Freddy collapses on the floor.
They start to stagger away, but Nancy decides she isn't done yet. She picks up the lamp that she lit earlier, and lings it at the far corner of the room. As everything gets engulfed in the fire, they manage to reach the exit safely.
Paramedics and firefighters arrive, but none of them can verify that Freddy's body was in the burning building. Nancy gets into the ambulance after Quentin is loaded in, and she reassures him that the nightmare is over. The final scene shows Nancy and her mother arriving home from the hospital. As her mother puts down her purse, Freddy reaches through a mirror, impales Mom's face with his glove, and hauls her into the mirror with him as Nancy screams like a banshee on Crystal Meth. THE END(?)
Eh. It wasn't the complete train wreck I had been expecting, but every iconic moment was done better the first time.around. I did, however like the weird scene transitions and some of the effects, like the hallway floor becoming blood. I even like this interpretation of Freddy, though I thought the mystery of his possible innocence should have been developed further. If they do the inevitable sequels, I hope the scripts are written a lot smarter, and I REALLY hope they avoid all the "dream warrior/magic powers" crap that made so many of the sequels seem so generic. And keep Freddy quiet....the original was great because of how quiet and menacing he was. Oh well, enough nit-picking. I'll give this one 3 and a half killer trees out of 5.
What did A Nightmare On Elm Street teach me?
-Pretty much every boiler room, abandoned school, and factory looks alike.
-Great CGI will never be able to overcome terrible dialogue.
-An entire group of people can completely forget how they met, when, and where...
Next week: Another "Don't...." movie, Don't Go in the Woods Alone, which is an alarmingly specific title. After that, the start of the downfall of Jason, The New Blood. Every movie after around parts 4-5 relied on a silly gimmick, and this is one of the worst....pray for my sanity!
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