Smiley

Well, I've been saying it since I started this blog, and now I have the proof: Slasher movies are destroying my brain! The movie that I was planning to watch this week, He Knows You're Alone, was one I had done already. Luckily, in a weird twist of fate, I was accidentally also sent Smiley, that movie that I never got around to watching last spring, when I was hospitalized. What comes around, goes around. So, back by no demand whatsoever, we get to finally watch Smiley this week. Settle in for SPOILERS...

So, this one begins with a fairly standard slasher premise: A young teen babysitter named Stacy is texting someone while on the job. A scary face suddenly appears in front of Stacy, but it's just the little girl she's watching, trying to scare her. Stacy puts down her phone to talk to the girl.

She discovers that the young girl is pretty Internet-savvy(What kid isn't these days?), as the kid shows her a Chat Roulette-type of website. Then the girl explains the legend of Smiley, the killer we're waiting for...Good, let's get in gear!

The legend is a basic rip-off of Candyman...You get onto any sort of online video chat. At any point during the chat, you type the phrase "I did it for the lulz", 3 times in a row. After the third time, a figure wearing a Smiley-face mask made out of flesh appears, then he kills you. Or the other person in the chat. Or something.

Believing the story to be nonsense, Stacy laughs it off. Then she gets jumped again! Oh, this time it's the little girl's father. He apologizes for being so late, then offers to write the babysitter a check. The entire time, he's also drooling over poor Stacy. Perv.

When she gets home, Stacy boots up her laptop. She signs on to one of those online chats, then browses through some of the possibilities. An angry-looking guy in thick glasses pops up, and his screen name is "Stranger", which seems kind of ominous. After a short introduction, Stacy tells Stranger that she likes his glasses. He replies that he's going to murder her.

A noise causes her to look over her shoulder, but the bedroom is still empty behind her. Stacy wanders down the hallway, finding a glass door slightly ajar. She creeps back to her room, still afraid that she might not be alone in the house.

She sits down to resume her chat with Stranger, then impulsively types "I did it for the lulz" 3 times. The bedroom door swings open, then Smiley grabs Stacy, stabbing her through the back. Stranger sees the murder, turns to a friend in the room, and starts to laugh. Then the opening credits roll.

Next, we meet Ashley, a cute young coed about to move into a house near her college. Her dad is nervous about her living off-campus, but she assures him that everything will be fine. After a quick hug, they part ways.

Inside the house, Ashley meets a girl with the unlikely name of Proxy. Proxy??? Not "Roxy", which would actually be a name, but PROXY? Really, movie, you want to irk me this early? What are the other characters called, Fallomba, Snik-snik, and Fartknockers? (By the way, if anyone who reads this wants to make a slasher flick with a character named "Fartknockers", I guarantee you at least ONE 5-star review.)

Anyway, Proxy sees Ashley as the stereotypical "innocent young woman trying too hard to fit in", and tries to ditch her by making plans to go to a party that evening. Ashley somehow misses the subtlety of her cold shoulder, and begs to go the party with her. Proxy gives in, and off they go!

They walk around the grounds of the campus, and Proxy reveals that she hasn't ever actually met most of the people at the party that they're going to. She knows them online, through the 4chan website. Ashley starts to get nervous about the party, so she and Proxy get a little bit buzzed on a joint along the way.

The party is pretty huge, and they soon meet a friendly guy by the name of Zane. He flirts with Ashley quite a bit, bragging that he's a bit of an expert on "The strange and retarded," whatever that means. Proxy says that it sounds like the title of a crappy soap opera.

Zane elaborates, explaining that he's fascinated by people who believe in myths that have no basis in reality, like Bigfoot or the Chupacabra. Then he makes a quick joke or two, and disappears to go get wasted, leaving the girls laughing over how strange he is. Or re...nah, too easy.

Proxy encourages Ashley to talk to another guy across the room, so she heads in that direction. His name is Binder, but Zane interrupts the conversation and dubs him "Pedobear". 2 other guys start to bully Binder, and one of them was the guy who laughed when Stacy was killed by Smiley in that online chat.

Speaking of that scene...it plays again, except now we realize that we're seeing it from his side of the chat. After Stacy is killed by Smiley, Ashley screams, and the group at the party just laugh. Proxy assures her that it's just a trick, and then repeats the legend of Smiley, and how to summon him.

The party gets wild and crazy, and so does Ashley. She gets plastered, and soon they're all just laughing and behaving like loons. At one point, she even starts to write stuff on a sleeping guy's face. I hope she doesn't have class the next day...

Ashley sleeps until past noon, and rushes to class. Heh. She gets to her first class just as the professor is giving his introduction, and she gets to the nearest seat. The class is called Intro to Reason and Ethics, and the instructor, Prof. Clayton, asks them why they think the class is a required course. Ashley gives him an answer that he likes, earning her some brown-nosing points. They talk after class, and he assures her that he won't hold her tardiness against her.

That night, Ashley and Proxy compare how their days went. Proxy teases her a little bit about how much she drank at the party. Then they see a video of the guy whose face Ashley drew on in that video chat site, and he viciously get attacked by Smiley. Ashley insists that they should bring the video to the police, but Proxy points out how silly the story would sound.

Ashley tries to laugh it off as well, but she still seems worried. Proxy offers to set her mind at ease by typing "I did it for the lulz" 3 times, just to prove that nothing would happen. They scroll through a bunch of random chats, before settling on some shirtless dweeb. Proxy then advises Ashley to envision Smiley in her mind before typing.

She tells the shirtless guy that he's going to die, and then types "I did it for the lulz" 3 times in a row. Nothing happens at first, so they relax. Then Smiley rises up and stabs the nerdy guy, and they scream.

Ashley declares that they need to go right to the police, but Proxy has a different take on the issue. She argues that going to the cops will bring them unwanted attention, and the killer could then learn who they are. The discussion is disrupted by a call from Ashley's father.

He can tell that she sounds tense, but she explains that she's just nervous about being away from home, and that she misses him. He buys it, then Proxy pops up, prompting Ashley to end the call. She goes back inside, and the matter of the video is dropped for the night.

In class the next day, Clayton gets the class into a discussion about how to prove a hypothesis. With her mind still on Smiley, Ashley asks the professor what you'd do if your hypothesis turned out to be so incorrect, that something seemingly impossible seemed to be the result. Clayton introduces her to the concept of ideology, the idea that you have complete confidence in something you THINK that you know. He lists guys like Hitler and Bin Laden as examples of people who followed their ideologies to extremes.

After class, Ashley decides to do some research at the campus library. While looking at various book titles, Ashley literally runs into Binder. They get friendly, and Ashley asks him if he believes in Smiley. Binder's theory is that some legends grow in strength as more people believe in them, and that Smiley is one such entity.

When Ashley asks him if that means that Smiley is real, he responds that, even if Smiley isn't real, the videos of him are. She likes that explanation, and they exchange phone numbers. Then she heads back to the house, just in time to be invited to another party hosted by Zane.

More crowds, more music, and more drinking. Proxy leaves Ashley to go find the bathroom, and Ashley overhears 2 girls talking about the latest video of Smiley. She spots Zane across the room, and decides to see what he knows about the urban legend.

Zane and his buddies laugh at her questions, but then Zane gets serious after his obnoxious friends leave. He asks Ashley what she knows about the murder of his friend, and accuses her of invoking the presence of Smiley. He admits that he even conjured up the killer, but assumed that it was all just a prank. Then he accuses Ashley of knowing more about what happened to his friend than what she's told him.

She staggers away, but not before Zane demands to know what she's going to do if Smiley comes after them next. She walks back to the house in a drunken stupor, then stop;s in the middle of the campus quad when she thinks that she spots Smiley. She shakes her head to clear her thoughts, and the killer looms right in front of her, so a chase begins.

Ashley runs the rest of the way to the house, but Smiley follows her. The killer lurks at the front door, so Ashley goes from room to room, desperate to find a good place to hide. Smiley finds a way to enter the house, and ambushes the frightened teen, so she screams for help.

The whole thing turns out to have been a dream. Proxy finds her in the bedroom, screaming in her sleep, and doesn't believe that the chase was anything more than a nightmare. Ashley shows her a part of her blouse that Smiley ripped, but Proxy still doesn't see how that proves anything. After all, if Smiley had been there, then why would he have left her alive? Proxy asks Ashley if she takes any medications for mental disorders, and that gives Ashley a reason to awkwardly pause. Uh oh...

Yeah, she takes anti-psychotic pills. Or, she DID take them, at one point. Ashley weaned herself off of the pills gradually, as she reveals to the school shrink, but perhaps she might want to get her prescription updated. Oh, and the school shrink resembles Maura Tierney a little bit, so, you know, "hubba".

She doesn't tell the shrink about Smiley, so the advice she gets is pretty iffy, at best. She merely admits that she's been on edge and frightened with some frequency, and the shrink thinks it might be because she's far from home, and probably missing her deceased mother. Ashley gets a prescription for something that will calm her nerves, then is sent home.

As Ashley is leaving, Proxy collides with her. Apparently, Zane has informed her of another murder that was posted online. They quickly make their way over to his place to figure out the reason behind the killings.

Zane is over the edge. He's got a gun, and he's ranting and raving about security. It turns out that he's not really a student, but an elite computer hacker; the sort of guy who just hacks into national banks when he needs money, and delves in the personal history of anyone he might want to use and abuse.

He points his gun at Ashley, and demands to know what connection she has to Smiley. Then he admits that his hacking might have brought him to the attention of any number of government superpowers, but that wouldn't explain the presence of Smiley. Ashley proposes that the killer is somehow weirder and more powerful than any of those things, and Zane admits that anything might be possible. He sends them away, then returns to hiding out with his gun.

Ashley has another nightmare, then she endures another class. The discussion in class this time concerns the very existence of life itself, and whether or not we exist because something else exists on a level above us, allowing us to have self-awareness. Or something like that. I don't know, maybe this would have been better if I had watched it while high. Certainly wouldn't have hurt.

After class, Ashley decides to do some research about Smiley on the school computers. She searches for more of his murder videos, as well as information about 4chan, and other hacker knowledge. Unbeknownst to her, a dark figure is approaching the computer, and he has a knife in one hand.

It's Binder. She jumps at the sight of him, and he shows her an employee ID card, revealing that he's in charge of the campus computer network. She tells him about her research into Smiley, and he remains skeptical, until she says that she caused a student to die by summoning the killer.

Binder's reaction is...odd. He claims that when he tried to summon Smiley, nothing happened. Ashley explains that you have to strongly desire the harm to inflict it, and that only seems to get Binder more excited. Ashley gets upset, and decides to return to the house.

She returns to the video chat from her bedroom PC, and scrolls through a handful of different subscribers. Then she sees Smiley himself in the last one, waiting for her. She asks him what he is exactly, and he threatens to pay her another visit. She asks him where he is, and he responds, "right behind you", which is freaky. To make matters worse, his screen has gone black all of a sudden, with no indication of where he might be.

Ashley turns around, and finds Proxy standing there, demanding to know what she's up to. They have a fight, and Proxy storms out of the house. Ashley decides to call her father, but something at the window scares her, and she drops her phone on the sidewalk below, smashing the phone to pieces. Proxy is standing there, and she assumes that Ashley was throwing the phone at her.

Ashley decides to pay another visit to the school shrink. She tearfully admits that she's having some kind of breakdown, and the shrink decides that they should meet on a daily basis...starting tomorrow. For now, she just wants Ashley to get some sleep. She prescribes a stronger pill, then sends the poor girl back home.

On her way across the quad, she texts a quick apology for her abrupt exit at the library to Binder. He lets her know that he's been upset about the recent events as well, and that seems to ease some of her tension. She decides to pay a visit to Professor Clayton's office, and he's there to greet her.

They discuss whether or not the human race is doomed to kill itself off, and Clayton offers her a stiff drink. She declines, but he pours himself one. Then he launches into a diatribe about how our instinct to survive at any cost, and to use up every planetary resource to further our own progress makes us all parasites.

Oh, and he starts to close all of the blinds in his office, in the most menacing way possible. Clayton then hovers over her, whispering all of his crazy, menacing crap about death, all while slowly getting drunk. Ashley finally decides that she's had enough, gets up, and leaves his office.

She returns to the library to work on a school assignment, but gets the unnerving sensation that she's being watched. A glance around reveals nothing, but then Smiley appears on her computer monitor. He waves at her in a mocking manner, and she overreacts, smashing the computer, and yelling and screaming. She collapses onto the floor in tears, then becomes aware that other students are watching and even filming her.

Ashley returns to the house, where she has a brief hallucination of Smiley. She takes a couple of the new pills that she was prescribed, looks at them, then decides not to ingest them. She cries, and heads to her bedroom.

Another nightmare or hallucination occurs. In this one, several versions of Smiley appear in the bedroom, and one of them starts to strangle her. Ashley screams, and a shadowy figure darts past her bed. It appears to be her deceased mother at first, but then it transforms into Smiley.

Ashley screams and wakes up yet again, only to find Proxy at her bedside, holding her hand over her own face. Apparently, she came into the room to check on Ashley, and was punched in the face for her efforts. Ashley apologizes to her, then places a call to the police, to tell them everything she knows.

She meets a weary detective named Diamond, and gives him her statement about the killing spree. After making her recount every detail, he informs her that they've never found a single shred of evidence that a crime was ever committed. No bodies, no crime scenes, no murder weapons, just a big, fat pile of nothing. Oh, but they do have one thing: a video of Ashley, showing her destroying a school laptop.

The cops tell Ashley to stop wasting their time, and just go home. Detective Diamond also suggests that perhaps Ashley should get help from a psychiatrist, to which she sobs that she already is. That doesn't go over too well.

After a brief chat with Proxy, Ashley keeps her next appointment with her doctor. She admits that her sense of reality might be a bit off, and is told that she's making progress toward recovery. The positive feedback gives Ashley a reason to smile.

She calls Binder, and he visits her to give her some advice on how to keep her computer information encrypted. He even goes a step further, giving Ashley an old laptop of his, complete with the latest security updates. She thanks him, and they share a few impulsive kisses. Proxy breaks up the intimacy, and we discover that she's going away for the weekend.

That night, Ashley assures her dad during a call, that she's doing much better. She gets a message from Proxy, and the roommate is in a tizzy because her boyfriend isn't returning her calls. Ashley offers to go check on him, and she takes her phone with her.

At the boyfriend's place, no one appears to be home. Ashley finds the front door open, but no Zane in sight. A room-by-room search reveals that Zane has been added to the list of Smiley victims. Ashley calls Diamond to report the crime, but he hangs up on her.

She returns to the house, but Proxy urges her to place another call to the police. Ashley has a different plan in motion. She locks herself into the house, then tells Proxy to type "I  did it for the lulz" 3 times, to lure Smiley to the bait.

It's a terrible plan. Not only does he now have her trapped inside, but now he can be anywhere he wants to be, and just take her right out of existence. As if to prove their point, all of the Smileys come at her at the same time.

Ashley backs away from the many killers, then dives out of the nearest window. She dies. and the killers watch her from the window. Then they congratulate one another for the way they all pulled it off. Binder, Zane, Stacy, all of them. The rest leave, and only Proxy and Zane remain behind to chat. They grin into their webcams, then Smiley attacks Proxy, mauling her in front of  Zane. During the credits, we get one final scene, showing that Ashley isn't quite dead yet, but that she is ready to get back at them. the end...?

Let's hope so! I hate watching a slasher flick where there aren't any victims. And they wasted what could have been an interesting concept on such a dull film. I can't imagine what I would have thought back in April, when I was felling sick and confused. Yuk. 1 out of 5, for at least the concept of Smiley. Now just place him in a better story.

And what did I learn from watching this?

-Never assume that your "clever twist" is actually that clever, because it probably isn't.

-Colleges are filled with insane people.

-Friends don't let old friends murder new friends, especially if it's just for "lulz", or whatever.

Up next, a heartwarming tale about killer kids, and the families that have to murder them to survive. Fun, lighthearted stuff!

Dark Floors

Well, now that we've all survived Thanksgiving(barely...I feel like I might burst at any second!), let's finish the week with some leftover turkey. But which one? If you recall, Netflix sent me 2 scary movies, one about a group of people in a haunted hospital(Dark Floors), and the other about some partying kids being killed by a pinata(Pinata: Survival Island).

Well, after flipping a coin and getting my meenie's eenied, I went with Dark Floors. I figured I needed some distance between Doll Graveyard and my next "inanimate object kills people" movie(heh, next week...), so that left a clear winner in the battle for my attention. So, put down your utensils, skip the last piece of pumpkin pie, and let's get this turkey SPOILED!

Okay, opening credits: somebody's drawing all over my screen, with a red crayon. Apparently, some kind of hard-rockin' band named Lordi made this film. And I think they're Swedish or something, because the names of the film's crew all look like they're hard to pronounce.

Anyway, the first scene is of a young girl in an MRI machine. She looks scared, and she's mumbling "not again" over and over. From an observation room, we see the girl's father, a nurse and a doctor watching her brain activity on some monitors. Her father asks if the test is hurting her, but the doctor assures him that the machine doesn't inflict pain.

The girl seems to fall asleep, then she regains consciousness with a sudden jolt. As she starts to scream and demand a red crayon, the MRI has a power surge. The lights flicker, then the machine starts to smoke. Boy, this would be fun to watch if you had surgery the next day, huh?

So now we finally learn a few names. The young girl is Sarah, and her father is Ben. The nurse is Emily, and the doctor doesn't get a name. That either means he's the first to die, or he gets to live. Eh.

Ben rescues Sarah from the equipment before she gets burned, then plops her into a wheelchair. He gives her the red crayon, then threatens to take his daughter to a different hospital. Maybe one where crap doesn't explode at random intervals? Doctor Anonymous and Emily try to calm him down, and we find out that Sarah is autistic. They've been studying her case for quite some time, but have never come to any definitive conclusions.

As Ben tucks Sarah back into her hospital bed, a storm rages outside. Sarah still seems agitated, and ske keeps saying, "not again", even after her father backs away. At some point during the night, Ben wakes her up, after deciding to take his daughter to a different hospital.

They get as far as the elevator, then Sarah starts to ramble about her crayons again. The noise gets the attention of the staff, and Nurse Emily asks Ben to reconsider moving his daughter. As Ben backs the wheelchair into the elevator, Sarah grabs the wall.

Emily gets on the elevator with them, as well as a businessman on a phone, a security guard, and an elderly man who looks homeless. The elevator descends toward the lobby, then grinds to a halt after the seventh floor. As the lights go out again, one of the characters mutters, "Not 6, not 7. Not Hell, and not Heaven." Oooh, symbolism!

The homeless man, Tobias, looks like he passed out, so the security guy tries to revive him. When that doesn't work, Emily steps in to assess his condition. She advises them to call for further assistance, but no one has a working phone anymore.

The security guy, Rick, tries the emergency call button in the elevator. No response from that, either. Eventually it works, but all he hears is his own voice. While that's going on, Emily tries to save Tobias with CPR. When he finally starts to breath again, the power also seems to come back on. Tobias stands up, then demands to know why they didn't let him die.

The elevator doors finally open up, but the corridor is empty. No nurses, no janitorial staff, the place is like a museum. Even the patients have deserted the area. Rick suggests that there might have been a fire drill or something, so they wander off to find the nearest stairwell. As the walk away, Sarah eyes a suspicious shadow lurking behind an office door. Hmmm...

At an intersection in the hallway, Ben stops the group to listen to something. It's a machine, and it's in a room right next to them. Rick opens the door, and they discover that a copy machine was left on. Emily examines a few of the images that came through, revealing a screaming mouth.

Emily tells Ben that it's almost time to give his daughter a dose of some new medication they've been testing. It helps control seizures, but is still very experimental. Then they all hear another mysterious sound.

It's a woman in a wheelchair, and she's stuck in a corner. The sound was caused by her repeatedly whacking the chair into the wall. Rick offers to help her, but a closer inspection reveals that she's dead. Oh, and it looks like her eyes were torn out of their sockets.

Tobias starts to flip out, so they cover the corpse's face. Then Rick tries a nearby intercom, but hears only his own message coming back to him. Technology and this hospital don't seem to get along...Oh, and as they continue the search for a way out, we see that Sarah was drawing the face of the eyeless woman. Nice touch.

They manage to find the emergency stairs, but that whole area seems to be covered in mold and fungus. They begin their descent to the ground floor, with Ben carrying his daughter, and Rick lugging around the wheelchair. Great, I guess I have time to grow a beard...

A noise from one of the levels beneath them brings the procession, and the movie to a grinding halt. As they glance over the railing, a gun goes off. No one is killed, but Rick gets nicked around his jawline. It's just my luck to pick a movie with no body count.

They all scurry out of the stairwell at the fifth floor, and hide in the nearest open room. After making sure that the door can't be opened by their attacker, Rick has his small wound examined by Emily. As they all make an effort to calm down, heavy thudding sounds are heard moving toward their location. Everybody stares at the blocked door, with the exception of Sarah. She's glancing nervously at a pair of double-doors at the far end of the room.

As they all debate whether or not they should try the stairs again, Tobias watches Sarah wheel herself quietly over to the other exit. They all decide to follow her. Sure, why not?

They come to a security station, where Rick turns on a series of monitors. They realize, as each monitor powers up, that the entire hospital is empty, as if the building has been abandoned. The phones are still dead, yet the lights and intercom system work just fine.

Speaking of the intercom, Jon(the irritable businessman) decides to use it. He call for help from anyone who can hear the message, then gives out their location. Yeah, someone just tried to shoot you, so you should tell them exactly where you are. Jon's a brilliant strategist.

The other pretty much tell him the same thing, and Sarah looks over at another set of doors. Then the nurse sees something on one of the screens: a couple walking around on the third floor. When they walk offscreen, the monitor fritzes out. Actually, they all do.

Sarah wheels herself to a point directly in front of the doorway she was watching, and the doors seem to open under the power of her gaze. The others discuss their next move, and seem to disagree about just what that should be. Emily thinks that the priority should be to figure out where everyone else went, while Rick just wants to keep heading to the exit. Uh, why can't y'all do both?

They notice that Sarah's gone again, and conduct a search. C'mon, she's an autistic child confined to a wheelchair....tie a freakin' bell to her, if you have this much trouble! Before they leave the security station, Ben grabs a pair of walkie-talkies to bring along. Tobias wordlessly points him to the door she passed through.

Sarah's chair is in the middle of the hallway, and she looks like she might be sleeping. As Ben moves closer, he sees a ghastly female phantom reflected in the window of another door, but she swiftly vanishes again. He rescues Sarah, then rejoins the group.

Emily knows that Ben was spooked by something, but he won't talk about the apparition. Then a television and a portable radio both turn on at the same time, and 2 messages are heard: "There's no time like the present" and "...and it's gonna get colder and colder". As they ponder what it all means, Jon's phone rings.

He answers it, but it's just a recorded "out of service" message. The same thing happens to Emily and Ben when their phones go off. Sarah stops drawing to cover her ears, and Tobias decides to follow suit. As nutty as he is, he seems to be the smartest adult in the film.

There's a high-pitched whistle, and the glass in the television begins to crack, as do some of the windows. That female ghost appears again, and she's got the forehead of a Klingon. Rick fires a gun at her, shattering the glass, but leaving the spirit unaffected.

She grins, then emits a sonic shriek, which breaks even more glass around them. They flee down the hall, seeking refuge in the stairwell again. As they relax, the spirit finds them again, leading to a silly, slo-mo chase back into the hall. How is it possible that so many of these things devolve into ridiculous Scooby-Doo episodes?

The banshee swoops closer, raising her hands like talons, and someone accidentally backs into a control panel. An X-ray turns on, and the radiation it emits causes the spirit to disappear. See? Something in that hospital DID work!

Tobias is confronted by Ben, who wants to know how he predicted that the sound would happen before it did. Tobias turns the accusation back on him, wondering if stuff like this has happened in their family before that day. Jon, always the helpful one, thinks that it's just kind of hallucination, possibly brought on by a gas leak.

As the others scoff at him, Jon decides that he's better off on his own. He leaves the group to find his own escape route, and Emily says that they should do the same. The Amazing Race: Hallway Edition begins!

Jon tries to find a signal on his phone, then strolls down a corridor. He comes to an elevator and finds, to his amazement, that it sounds like it might be operational. He senses a presence behind him, but no one seems to be there.

The elevator arrives, and he steps inside. At the very last second, he sees that his watch has stopped, and senses that he's walked into a trap. He manages to stop the doors a second before they shut, and he screams for help.

The rest of the group hear him, and rush over to see what they can do. As they all work together to try and force the doors to slide apart, something appears to be lunging at Jon from underneath the elevator. Jon gets knocked off of his feet, then a pair of large claws tear through the elevator floor.

Rick grabs a fire extinguisher, intending to batter the doors until they open wider, but he manages to knock out Jon instead. Awesome. A demon clad in armor starts to climb up into the elevator, and Rick bashes it in the head until it lowers itself back into the shaft.

Tobias, who has remained back in the previous area with Emily and Sarah, somehow stole Rick's gun when he wasn't looking. He plans to kill himself with it, and Emily can't seem to talk him down. Suddenly Sarah speaks, promising Tobias that he will get to sleep when the ordeal ends, and he allows Emily to take the weapon from him. He rambles about how cold he's getting, and Emily just stands between the both of them,looking perplexed. Join the club, babe!

Rick and Ben pull Jon's slumped-over body out of the elevator, but then the scaly monster comes back. It clenches Jon's ankle in its enormous mouth, and the struggle to free him causes some of the elevator cables to snap. They pull Jon to safety as the creature plummets down the elevator shaft.

Emily bandages the wound when they all reunite, then Ben notices that Sarah's latest drawing looks like the monster they just encountered. He attempt to ask her about it, but she gets fixated on wanting the red crayon again.

Jon antagonizes Ben, and they nearly have a brawl right there. Noise from the intercom interrupts the altercation, and everybody gets excited. Help might be on the way! They go out to the corridor to hear it better, then Emily attempts to make contact with the intercom.

A woman replies, and they hear her say that she's on the third floor. Then the voice warns them that "it" is coming, and the transmission cuts off. They figure that they had better make their way down to that person's location.

They get to the next floor, but find a wall where the door should be. They bash the wall until a large hole is made, but it's been bricked over on the other side. Well, so much for the third floor rescue attempt!

They arrive at the third floor, where Emily finds the body of a doctor named Walter. He's clutching a tape recorder in one hand, and they play a message that advises them to surrender Sarah to the creatures. Ben refuses, so the journey continues.

They find a corridor filled with corpses, and the armored beast comes lunging at them through a doorway. They try to escape, but it chases them. Rick fires his gun at the monster, telling the others to escape. He runs out of bullets, and the others hear him getting killed. Then, everything goes eerily calm again.

Jon pisses off Ben when he asks him to sacrifice Sarah to save the rest of them, and another near-fight begins. Then they see the world outside of the closest window. everything appears to be frozen in time, as is evidenced by a flash of lightning that is just hanging out of the sky. Even the rain is stuck in mid-air. That seems...odd...

The intercom distracts them yet again, so Emily answers it. A voice asks her what floor she's on, and they all realize that it's the very same conversation they had earlier, only from the other end. Emily was answering herself, and never realized it.

As a group, they try to come up with a reasonable explanation for everything that has happened so far. The top ideas are either that timed has stopped, or they've somehow slipped into another dimension. Neither of those concepts explain anything, however. Good job!

Emily and Ben return to the brick wall with a sledgehammer, to see if they can make an exit. Oh, and they find a gun on a body covered in sand. They leave Sarah with Jon, and warn him not to harm Sarah. Yeah, he's really good at following orders. Anyone remember how well he did when he took orders in the movie Aliens? (I checked...he was in that one, and he was pretty inept.)

Ben gets to work on that wall, and Emily reveals that she's also a single parent. Then they have a trippy moment, when they nearly come face-to-face with themselves at the stairwell. It turns out that Ben was the one who shot at Jon earlier. Weird, man.

Jon breaks his promise, of course, and prepares to surrender the autistic girl to the demons. Then Ben breaks through that brick wall, and he and Emily explore the new corridor. A noise leads to the discovery of some more corpses.

Jon loudly announces that he's brought Sarah to be sacrificed, and tries to draw them out into the open. Someone plunges a knife through his back, and we see that it's Tobias, attempting to rescue Sarah. Ben and Emily hear some of it on their end of the transmission, then we see Jon giving Tobias the thrashing of his life.

Sarah draws another image, one that predicts Jon's death. The lights flicker, then Jon is bombarded by a hurricane-like wind, and a large mass of sand and dirt. When it stops, a mummy-like skeleton grabs Jon under his chin with one hand, using the other to rip out his still-beating heart.

Ben thrusts a stretcher at the monster, and it crashes into a wall. He checks to see that Sarah's okay, then he and Emily examine Tobias. Not only has he died, but he's well into a state of decay, appearing to have been dead for a few weeks. Not only that, but they find another mound of bodies on their way down to the second floor.

Ben asks Sarah to draw the exit for him, but she doesn't seem able to do that. As they stop to look for Sarah's medication, Emily remembers that there's a shortcut to the exit in the morgue. They celebrate, but then realize that Sarah is missing for the umpteenth time.

They split up to look for her, and Emily is forced to hide when one of the creatures arrives at her location. Unfortunately, Ben tries to make contact with Emily via the walkie, and the monster hears it. When the creature seems distracted by something else, Emily risks standing up, and attempts to escape.

No, wait a sec, she has another idea first...picking up a pair of defibrillator paddles, Emily sneaks up behind the monster. When it(he?) turns around, Emily places the paddles on each side of the creature's head, electrocuting it. Not wanting to stick around to see if she killed it, Emily runs out of the room.

Ben comes looking for her, and rushes through another pair of swinging doors. There's a flash of white light, and he discovers himself back in a very normal-looking area of the hospital again. It's filled with people and light, but no one seems to be able to see or hear him as he asks for help.

When he tries to tap a woman in a lab coat on the shoulder, his hand passes right through her. Is he a ghost, or is she? He leaves to look through a different corridor, and Emily contacts him. Neither none of them has found Sarah yet.

Ben stops outside of door 235, and Emily claims to be standing in front of the very same door. But where his location is brightly illuminated, hers is dark and abandoned. Emily references a poster of a teddy bear to clarify that it's the same door, and Ben sees it too...but it's very ragged and faded in her reality, while Ben sees it while it's clean and new.

Ben walks through another set of doors, and finds himself back in the decrepit hallway again. A fluorescent light flickers, and Ben sees his daughter at the opposite end of the hall. Then the very meager light goes completely out, and a tall demon shows up, something that resembles a typical zombie.

The monster growls like a tiger, and decides to beat the living crap out of Ben. While he's being tossed like a salad, Tobias suddenly pops up again. He sneaks up behind the zombie for a quick attack, but it anticipates his move, spinning around to gut him. As Ben turns to get his daughter, Tobias whispers that he's going the wrong way.

Sarah's trying to get away again, and she tells her father that she's trying to stop what's happening. Before he can clarify what she means, Emily returns. Oh, and the biggest demon so far also shows up, looming over all of them. Emily and Ben carefully back  Sarah's chair away from this new monster, and they enter the elevator. The demon strides toward them, soon breaking into a full run. Just as he reaches the elevator, the door slam shut.

They watch the various floors light up, and the light on "1" flickers as they reach the first floor. When the doors refuse to open, Ben tries to jam his finger several times on the button. The elevator starts to move yet again, stopping at a floor designated as "-1". It appears to be the hospital basement.

Sarah covers her ears again, and the ghostly woman pops up again. She screams at Emily, who now also has her ears covered. Then she and Sarah look at each other, and the ghost dissolves.

They proceed down the dark and shadowy hallway, and dead bodies chase them into another area, where the parking garage is located. As they look for a better escape route, Emily is cut off from Ben and Sarah by a door that slams shut between them. They try to get the door open, but then something on Emily's side grabs her.

Sarah warns her father that something is coming, so he gets her into an ambulance. They drive away, but there appears to be no exit. Ben crashes the ambulance into a row of cars, and has trouble getting it re-started. Then the largest demon shows up, complete with big, leathery wings and a bushy beard. They get away, but just barely in the nick of time.

Sarah starts to mutter "what happens will happen", while Ben drives around looking for any kind of exit. Ben decides to pull over, and he gently puts Sarah on the ground with a blanket. He promises that somebody will co,me along to rescue her, then he drives off to face the winged demon.

They see each other, and Ben slams his foot down on the gas pedal. Seconds before he strikes the demon, a white light flashes in front of him. He shields his eyes, then stops the ambulance.

It's Sarah. He walks over to her, and then realizes that he was being lured out of the safety of the vehicle. A black, writhing ooze crawls up his body, and he disintegrates. Then Sarah faces down the winged demon, and demands to go home. He snarls at her, and they seem to engage in a weird sort of debate. Sarah tells him that light can't live in darkness, then she closes her eyes.

We see the lobby of the hospital, as well as the elevator shaft, and several corridors. All are still empty. Then, after another flash of brilliant white light, Sarah finds herself back in the MRI machine. She screams and struggles, and Ben carries her out of the room.

Back in her chair, she lets her father hand her a blue crayon. Then they make their way to the lobby, where Sarah sees Tobias again. He leans over, smiles, then tells Sarah that he's not cold anymore. She drops the blue crayon, and it breaks, so Ben and Emily lean over to help her. THE END...?

Man, I  don't know WHAT I just watched. It ultimately wasn't a slasher, even though there were many, many dead bodies. But I'm still not even sure what happened. Were they all dead? Was the hospital even real? Who were the piles of corpses, and why did the demons get overpowered by Sarah? Weird. 3.5 out of 5, because it was pretty great as a visual experience, if nothing else.

And what did I learn after seeing Dark Floors?

-MRI machines are deadly.

-Ghosts are powerless against X-rays.

-Hospitals leaves their dead patients in piles, for anybody to just come across.

Next up: the less grim-sounding Pinata: Survival Island. Happy late Thanksgiving!

The Initiation

This week's SAW is another 1980's slasher, The Initiation. It stars Daphne Zuniga(Spaceballs) in her first lead role in a movie, so it might actually be interesting. Let's cross our fingers! Get your SPOILER goggles on, and follow me....

Right off the bat, it has some B-movie cred going for it, in the form of actors Clu Gulager, Vera Miles and James Read. Vera Miles, of course, was in the first 2 Psycho movies(ie, the GOOD ones!); Clu Gulager has a long history in genre movies, appearing in everything from Nightmare on Elm Street 2 to Feast; and James Read has been a familiar TV actor for years....he's probably most recognizable to current audiences as the dad on Charmed. So again, this one's looking up a bit.

It starts out on the usual "dark and stormy night", in a child's bedroom. There are dolls everywhere...baby dolls, teddy bears, wild animal dolls, clown dolls. You get the idea.(Note to self: Add the movie Dolls to my list of horror movies...for some reason, I have them on the brain now) Then we see a little girl in the Valley of the Dolls, fast asleep.

The girl eventually wakes up, possibly because she remembered that this movie had started filming. Offscreen, the director was probably screaming, "WAAAAAAAAAKE UUUUUUP!" Or not. Anyway, she looks at a doll in her bed that appears to be headless, then decides to go exploring.

She leaves her room, and follows the sound of ghostly whispering to her parents bedroom. Seeing them having sex, the little girl backs away toward the hallway, then she reappears next to the bed, and starts stabbing her father with a very large knife. Then her mother leaps out of the bed, as another man enters the room, and her father is seen putting his clothes on like nothing had happened to him. You know, like getting his leg stabbed or something.

Both men start brawling, so I'm guessing that the second one is the girl's father, and the guy stabbed in the leg was some dude her mother was banging. A bottle of wine is poured all over the girl's father by the man-whore of her dreams, and Dad gets engulfed in flames when he stumbles too close to the fireplace. This would make a great PSA for playing with matches!

So, after her Daddy is oven-roasted to perfection, the girl becomes about a decade or so older, and wakes up a second time. This time, she's surrounded by a bunch of scantily-clad sorority babes who are holding candles and chanting something that sounds like "Delta Ro Kai will never die", or words to that effect.

How did we get from a murder to a cheesy porno? And what magic phrase must I utter to make that happen with every movie I watch? Delta Ro Kai must never die, Delta Burke's thigh would feed a family of 5....did it work?

One of the women tells our lead character that a vote is going down, and she leads the girls away in a single file line. As they exit, they all smile and continue chanting. The one they woke up follows the line. Maybe this is a live action version of the video game Lemmings!

The girl and her fellow pledges are brought before their sorority leader, Big Red Riding Hood. Our main girl is named Kelly, and the other pledges are Beth, Marcia and Allison. The pledges take a pledge(heh heh), and swear to be obedient servants for a week, at the beck and call of the other sisters. After that week, it is ON!

The leader, Maggie also anounces that the following week will involve parties, activities, and Hell Night. When Maggie presses another sister for details about the traditional Hell Night prank, we get to listen in on the dumbest plan since Danny Ocean's crew carried off a heist in 5 minutes, then wasted 2 hours tricking the audience into watching a fake caper go on.

Okay, so here's the prank: Kelly's father just happens to own a mall that has a dress shop that apparently has some nice items in it. She has to steal his keys, let the sorority in to throw a party...oh, and get the night watchman to give them his uniform. I've seen blocks of Swiss cheese with less holes than this plot!

Back in the bedroom that they share, the pledges moan and gripe about the stupid prank. Mostly, they're worried about getting caught, arrested, and expelled. Wow, this group may be smarter than the usual human targets in slasher flicks!

As the 4 pledges keep yammering, they discuss how the pledging process began with 15 girls, and they're the only ones left. Hey, no fair! You guys are supposed to film the SLASHER stuff, not the aftermath! Man...why do I have to think of everything?

As they get ready to sleep, Kelly tells Marcia that her recurring nightmare has returned. Uh, yeah Kelly, that's kind of the point of "recurring" nightmares. Buy a dictionary, dumbass, it may just save your life.

The following morning, the movie takes us on a field trip to a looney bin. A bitchy nurse admonishes various patients for different infractions, then sees someone out on the lawn that she can yell at. It turns out to be the dude who was baked goods in the dream sequence. I assumed before that he was Kelly's father, but I guess not, since we were just told that her dad owns a mall. So this guy must be the one that was having sex with her mother. I'm starting to see why Daphne Zuniga was on Melrose Place...her life in this movie was a soap opera.

Anyway, the nurse screams at him to stop digging up the garden, then she storms away. The guy reveals a pretty lethal(or at least "painful") looking digging tool in his hand, which he continues to plunge into the ground. On an interesting side note, as the nurse stomps off, she brushes past a female patient who has her back to the camera. This mystery woman is pounding her fist against her leg, timing the punches to the tool being plunged into the dirt outside. Kelly's mom, perhaps?

Well, before we can clear up that mystery, the nurse makes an announcement: It seems that some of the patients were refusing their meds at the meals. As she threatens to keep their food from them if they don't start to comply, both the men and women in the different sides of the ward begin banging loudly on the chain-link that separates them from the hallway where the staff walk freely. On an ominous note, the mystery woman is also banging her fist to the rhyhmn of their banging as well.

That evening, still at the mental hospital, we see someone roaming the halls. Nurse Bitchenmoan is then seen walking out of the building after her shift, and heading into the parking lot. She suddenly gets a weird vibe, and turns to see if anything is out of place.

Oh good, it's only the patients. Someone let them out of the ward, and they've decided to play a game of Ring Around The Nursey. She orders them to get back to their beds, but they just keep singing instead. In a tizzy, the nurse runs to her car, quickly gets in, and locks the doors.

As she starts the engine, a hand grabs her from the back seat, pulling her head back. The person then uses their other hand to reach around to stab the nurse, who bleeds profusely as the escaped patients all watch her die. She is stabbed a few more times, but only a single lunatic decides to stay and watch the rest of the show.

The morning after the attack, an elderly couple receive a gift. As they discuss opening it, they refer to Kelly living at college, and how getting away from her family might be good for her. Then the phone rings, and the old man grabs it. He refers to a "Dr. Howe", and the scene just ends right there. Nice, keep us confused.

Kelly drives over to visit these fogeys, and they turn out to be her parents. Wait, really?!? They're not her grandparents maybe? Or some elderly couple whose home she randomly broke into, for the sole purpose of pouting on their couch? Man, she must have been a horrible kid, to make them age like this in a decade or so.

She apologizes for not calling them, and her mom admonishes her. After all of the pouting and nagging, her mother says something nice to her about her complexion. Then dad pops a champagne cork like it's a cannonball, and wishes her a happy birthday.

Back on campus, Kelly and Marcia are walking and talking together. They start with Marcia's lovelife(or lack thereof), then switch to what they want to write for their term papers in Psych class. Marcia wants to write about the disturbed mind of one of the bitchy sorority sisters, while Kelly wants to do her paper on the interpretation of nightmares. Gee, I wonder why?

A guy named Andy runs up to the girls, and Marcia makes a hasty exit. Andy tells Kelly about a dumb costume party that's coming up, and invites her to attend. Then we get this bizarrely hilarious exchange, wherein both Andy and Kelly decide to shout their dialogue back and forth to each other. It's random, and I just couldn't stop rewinding the scene to watch this part over and over again.

When talking to her Psych professor, he more or less accuses Kelly of using her topic to suck up, because he's doing a thesis on dream research. When Kelly angily denies it, Mr. Adams asks her for some details. She tells him about her dream, and he sounds somewhat interested. He then offers to show her "the dream factory", which sounds like a bad pick-up line.

Mr. Adams asks her when the dream started, andc Kelly tells him some bull about a treehouse. Supposedly, when Kelly fell from the treehouse, she had a huge memory wipe of everything that happened before the accident. To make matters worse, she was never allowed to see anyone who could help her with her recovery of those memories.

After she tells Mr. Adams all of this, a girl named Heidi literally pops up. She and Adams explain that they hook willing subjects up to some equipment that can help them to recover and extract images from the human mind. So we've gone from Freedy Krueger territory to Dennis Quaid in Dreamscapes. Weird.

When Professor Adams finishes his sales pitch, Kelly catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She freezes up, and her entire demeanor changes. She tells the professor that she needs to think about it first, then leaves Heidi and Adams to ponder what just happened. Maybe she saw Heather Locklear in her future.

When Kelly walks down the hallway, the lights begin to flicker and dim around her. She picks up the pace(I wish the movie would...), and soon reaches a lit corridor with other students hanging out. She goes into a restroom to freshen up, and sees an image of herself as a little girl, with her blouse covered in blood. Of course, when she glances back to see the girl, nothing is behind her.

That evening, someone is lurking outside her house. The folks are inside, having a conversation that even David Lynch would find perplexing. There's a reference made by her mother to "living a lie" and some kind of attempt to fool Kelly about something. Then a noise outside distracts them. Do I need a decoder ring to watch this crap?

In the front hall, Dad draws a gun. He opens the front door and sees some Halloween decoration down the street, but decides not to shoot it. Then Mom also goes outside, but appears not to see what he saw, so they return to the house. Does anyone have crib notes for this thing?

On campus the following day, a guy in a striped shirt strolls past the camera. I bet he3's the key to the whole plot! Tell us your secrets Stripe Man!

In the lab, Kelly is calling out "Daddy!" in her sleep. I'll be her daddy....oops, am I still typing? So, yeah, they show a highlight reel from THE NIGHTMARE: bedroom, blood, burning. The 3 Blahs. Kelly wakes up screaming, and Professor Adams asks her to lie back and tell him what she remembers.

They skip over that, and show the teacher explaining some of the dream symbolism to Kelly. As they go over it, Heidi interrupts to tell them both that Kelly's brainwaves indicated very little dreaming, if any, at all. Adams chalks it up to a malfunction in the technology. A class bell rings, and Kelly gets mesmerized when she looks into a mirror. Again. The professorv makes a cryptic comment about her parents and mirrors, and the scene ends, just to confuse us further.

At dinner that night, Dad bores the family with business talk. When he gets up to make a phone call, Kelly tells her mother about her professor's dream research, and keeps calling him "Peter" instead of "Professor Adams". Someone's hot for teacher!

The chat becomes a heated discussion soon enough, as Kelly gets tired of having to bow to her mother's wishes concerning her romantic life. She leaves the dining room, only to catch a snippet of the conversation her father is having on the phone. It sounds like he's calling someone "babe", and making plans to meet them that night. Oops!

Someone is seen lurking outside again, and an owl tries to give a warning hoot. Seriously, this actually happens. The stalker moves in closer as Dad turns away, then stabs him in the neck with the very same(or similar) digging tool that Butterface was using at the asylum. Well, at least that narrows down the suspect list to only a couple of possibilities. Plus we finally started the slasher portion of this accursed film! Yay!

As Dad gets stabbed several more times, Mom gets drunk. The lush. She gets tired of drinking alone, and goes to the front door to see what's taking so long, only to see his car driving away. She then makes a snarky joke about how he'd lose his head if it wasn't attached, which would be awesome if we had seen him beheaded. But we didn't. If he was, it was removed from the version I watched.

Next, the killer approaches the sorority house. They're all in various states of undress, which is unusual for these kinds of films. There's even a full frontal scene, featuring a young Hunter Tylo. Maybe they figured if the slasher stuff didn't pan out, they could do a college comedy instead.

As Kelly leaves the shower room to get dressed, she notices that a window has been left wide open. She shuts it, then dresses as someone watches her from a hiding place in the closet. She shuts the closet door as well, and out pops Andy, I believe. Frankly, I had forgotten about him almost entirely after his early scene in the film. Oh, and for some reason, he's dressed like a singer from Oingo Boingo, and his date is Maggie, the Ice Queen of the sorority. That should be a fun date.

The "party" is like watching bad outtake footage from American Bandstand. People are aimlessly moving their arms and legs around when the camera is on them, but none of them seem capable of anything resembling human dance movements. I've seen zombies dance better, and I'm not even referring to Thriller.

Kelly and Professor Adams find a place to talk, and tease each other about their costumes. Then we see a guy dressed as a gigantic penis, next to his mortified date. I'll bet it took balls to put that costume on.

What follows next I'm not even going to bother fully describing. It's a stupid-ass montage, showing various characters trying to pick each other up. It's like the portion of the show HeeHaw where they all just stand around in a fake cornfield telling jokes, minus about a zillion IQ points, if that's even possible.

Marcia's date, "Ralph", asks her to confirm some rumor, but the DVD glitched out the portion about the rumor. It picks up with her leaving him alone. Confusion reigns supreme in this stupid movie!

Back in Adams' office, Kelly reveals what she remembers about her past. They kiss, and night turns to day. Kelly is hypnotized, and she's describing what happened at the treehouse. Her dolls were all broken, but not by her. Meanwhile, her mother is seen arriving at the school, but she can't locate Kelly. She finally asks a student where the Psychology Department is, and is pointed in the right direction.

As she walks in on the dream study, Professor Adams is unable to get Kelly to wake up from her session. Counting doesn'tv work, his soothing voice fails to calm her, even saying her name. Her mother gives them a different surname for Kelly, and that does the trick. Sure it does.

Kelly reluctantly leaves the room, so that her mother and teacher can speak in private. They have a shouting match, and Mom threatens to sue the school if the instructor continues to try to experiment with Kelly's memories. Adams demands to know why Kelly has a different last name, and that makes Mom leave his office.

Alone again, Professor Adams and Heidi realize that Kelly isn't having a nightmare, but a repressed memory. He also theorizes that she has a split personality, and that the mother might have one as well.

The night of the mall prank has arrived! The guard sees a light on his security panel go off, and leaves his station to investigate. He strolls through the mall, stopping in a room with red, flashing lights. Using a key, the guard goes outside to the loading dock, where a tin can rolls in his direction. He crushes it under his shoe, then heads back in.

As he starts to backtrack to his desk, he hears his radio get turned off. He picks up the pace, and discovers evidence that someone may have messed with his control panel. He does some more looking around, and stops to admire a rack of sunglasses, but detects a presence close to his location.

He calls out and returns to the main lobby area, where he backs up into the killer. He gets stabbed by the same gardening tool in the chest, and several dolls and mannequins watch his murder. I'll bet they make lousy witnesses.

There's a silly scene where we see Megan "bless" the pledges, minus Kelly. Megan tells the others that Kelly doesn't ever need to be told about the blessing, and will never get one. Bitch of the Year goes to....

As the pledges arrive at the mall, one girl has a hissy fit. She refuses to go in, even after Maggie threatens to kick her out. They should have done a sequel, where this girl gets stuck in a different slasher scenario, and is the first one killed. That would have been mildly amusing, at the very least. More than this snoozefest, at any rate.

After she exits the realm of slasher movie history forever, we see a trio of frat boys sitting drunk in a car. Then Maggie catches up with the pledges, and takes the keys that Kelly absconded from Dad. She locks the pledges inside the mall, and the plot finally kicks into gear.

The trapped girls sneak over to the night watchman's desk, then worry when they can't find him. Kelly reassures the others that he's most likely making his rounds. She devises a plan, and asks Allison to create some type of distraction, while Marcia will remain at the desk, in case he comes back, so that she can explain that Kelly needs him to be discreet and give them his uniform.

They ask Kelly what her part in the plan is, and she tells them that she's heading to the employee lounge, because the guards keep spare uniform in there. That's actually somewhat clever. What couild go wrong? I mean, besides the whole "splitting up and getting slaughtered individually" thing...

Well, Maggie could screw it up for them. She gathers the trio of guys we saw earlier in that red room. and tells them that they'll split into pairs: her and Andy, and the remaining 2 guys. They have 2 goals, to be sneaky, and to scare the pledges when they are spotted.

While strolling through the mall and looking for Todd, Alison(I think....this cast is pretty bland) is seen trying on tight clothes, then puts on a pair of roller skates(???). Also, Kellly ransacks a closet for a uniform, and the killer briefly checks out the knife selection in a hunting/camping equipment store.

Marcia gets bored at her hiding spot. As she decides to leave the guard station, Alison skates out of the store in her tank top and short-shorts. She skates past the hunting goods shop, never noticing that it's been broken into, and that the display case has been tampered with. She explores the mall, and meets up with Marcia. Both women then realize that they haven't seen Kelly since they all split up. Marcia spots someone on another floor above them, but Alison convinces her that she's just "spooked".

Literally 2 seconds later they bump into Kelly, and she has the uniform. As they wander the mall a bit, a phantom bowling ball frightens one of the girls so much, she almost literally chews the scenery. The girls taunt the person who rolled it, and it turns out to be 2 of the srat boys who were instructed to scare the pledges, Chad and Ralph.

The pledges decide to leave the mall, only to discover that Megan has used the keys to lock them in. They reluctantly decide to go back into the mall, and wait for someone to show up. Good thinking...without them, there'd be no film!

Outside the mall, a motorcycle cop sees one of their cars in the mall parking lot, and decides to check it out. He whips out a flashlight, and examines the interior as he circles the vehicle. Then he sees a Texas license plate, and that just clears all of the confusion right up. Not.

Megan decides to ditch her boy toy Andy, and he chases her, even though he's half-naked. Andy sees lights on various floors flickering on and off, then hears her voice, and follows the sound of it. He slows down near a Christmas sisplay, then runs in the diresction of the elevator. The elevator door opens, and Andy gets a forehead full of aze. And we're not talking about body spray!

Megan/Maggie/Whocarespeople? then appears, saying that she was just joking around. Before anything happens to her, we return to Marcia and Alison. They decide that either the night watchman is pranking them, or that maybe he was paid to leave early. They decide to out-prank the pranksters, and split up to hide.

Still looking for Andy, Megan/?Jane Doe heads to a shadowy satairwell. She then wanders through a lamp shop, and gets rattled as entire sections of lamps begin to switch on around her. She runs away, and the killer fires an arrow into her chest.

Kelly reunites with Marcia, and they start to look for the other various characters running around in the mall. Chad and Ralph put on rubber masks and wield rubber knives, and leap out at the pledges from inside a curtained booth. They all realize that Alison, Andy and Megan/Jane Doe are missing, and the guys tell the girls that they're spooked.

Back on campus, Professor Adams is interrupted in his very serious coffee ritual by Heidi. She has a ton of papers and folders in her arms, and she shows Adams a newspaper article from a Texas newspaper. Dated a decade earlier, the article is about an act of arson, in which a man was severely burnt. It turns out that the man in Kelly's memory was her father, and that the "father" she was living with was her mother's lover. The man Kelly thought of as her father was actually the chairman of the board at some department store.

After showing Professor Adams a second article, about Kelly's mother marrying her lover a short time after the fire, she drops a piece of info: Kelly's real father was ome of the patients who had escaped the asylum the previous week. Adams tries to call Kelly in her room at the sorority to warn her, but he doesn't know that she's out at the mall....

When no one picks up, the professor tries to call the house where Kelly's "parents" live. Someone picks up the receiver, but places it on the table next to the phone. Adams calls a second time, gets a busy signal, then rushes out of his office to find Kelly. Heidi is left behind, and she bitches and moans after he leaves.

In the mall, the remaining group get drunk together. Then Marcia is teased by Alison about being a virgin, so she tells a story about a teacher who molested her when she was a child. Awkwaaaaaard. The group disbands, and Alison is ditched by her boyfriend so he can take a leak. The lights in the restroom turn off suddenly, but the scene just ends there.

Alison sees a wedding display and tries on a veil, while Kelly announces over the loudspeaker that she wants Megan and Andy to meet them at the entrance and unlock the doors....or else! Boy, there's a huge threat, huh? Oh, and Alison finds a dead body, then another.

She runs back to Kelly, who wants to see the bodies for herself, but Alison is too frightened to return, so Kelly tells her to hide at the security desk. Alison scampers off, leaving Kelly to investigate the area by herself.

She finds Chad, and starts to break down. Then she hurries away, and we see Megan and her main squeeze boinking. Then the killer rises up from out of nowhere, and stabs them both several times, as Megan screams. Kelly arrives just in time to witness the bloody aftermath.

Professor Adams meets up with Mrs. Fairchild, and she tells him that her husband is dead. Adams calls the soroity house, and a girl named Becky informs him that the rest of them are at the Fairchild Mall, pulling a prank. He hangs up on poor Becky, then yells into Mrs. Fairchild's face, asking if she has KEYS! I NEED KEYS! to the mother-flunking mall.

She gives him a set of keys, and he tells her to CALL...THE...POLICE! When he takes off, we see Marcia and her boyfriend Ralph getting dressed after sex. Seriously? After she literally just revealed that she was molested? Dude, choose your moments better! He reveals that he only jokes to cover his inner pain, then his outer pain is revealed with a swift arrow in the back.

As Marcia realizes that he's not joking, another arrow sails past her head. Kelly hears her screams, and rushes to rescue her. When they find each other, both are screaming into each others' faces. This would make a great screwball comedy.

They huddle together in a freight elevator. Marcia's cries waver between donkey brays and mouse squeaks. The scene ends with her making this bizarre open-mouthed face that has to be witnessed, as it truly is beyond words to describe. This movie is so horrible that nit's awesome.

We see the professor speeding to the mall, then we see the girls still hiding. Just as Kelly gets Marcia to calm down a little, the freight elevator is plunged into darkness. Both girls are now screaming, and then we get the best moment in this movie, thus far. Both sides of the elevator open up, and Kelly ditches Marcia the first chance she gets! She then turns back, only to witness Marcia being dragged back into the freight elevator by the killer, right before the door shuts again. That's what friends are for....if you're an asshole.

Professor Adams is STILL driving, which could make his arrival at the mall a post-credits sequence at this point. Kelly is seen walking around in the loading/unloading area of the mall, and spots the killer dragging a body around a corner. Then she spots her father, the Krispy Kritter, and he tries to approach her.

After another split-second of the longest car ride ever filmed, we see Kelly attempting to escape from her father via a ladder. He follows, but why not just say something like, "Hey Kelly, who's your Daddy?ME!" That would work....maybe....okay, probably not.

They both climb up into a dark, shadowy area, and he DOES try to talk to her. Man, I called that one! Kelly hides from him, and she pushes him off of the roof. Then she cries and whines because she has second thoughts. Your timing sucks, Kelly.

And that's when Professor Adams finally arrives. He finds the dad's body, then enters the mall. As he and Kelly embrace, she stabs him in the side, and ANOTHER Kelly arrives on the scene. Ah, okay. The killer was her twin sister. That was why she seemed to be in 2 places in her flashback scenes, and why they had to hide the face of the woman in the mental hospital. Kinda clever.

The sister smiles at Kelly, taunts her, then they run around in the mall. Kelly begs for her life, but the sister hates her for being free while she was locked up. After another short chase, she reveals that the scarred man was their real father, and that she plans to kill Kelly, then assume her identity.

Just as Kelly is about to get stabbed, a shot rings out. It turns out that their mother showed up at the mall, armed with a small handgun. Then we see that the professor survived, and he, Kelly and Mom watch the bodies get carted away. Then some soft jazz starts playing. THE END

Boy, this movie was all over the place....part soap opera, part comedy, part horror....and mostly crap. The effects were good, though. They just needed a good movie to be featured in. Since this was a pretty average film, I'm giving it an average score: 3 killer trees out of 5.

And what did The Initiation teach me?

-Telling your boyfriend about that time you were molested doesn't make him any less horny.

-When you reunite with a parent you haven't seen in a decade, it's customary to throw that person off of a rooftop.

-Walking away from an obvious slasher scenario is actually an option! Why has no one tried that before?

My next movie will probably be either Pranks or Pieces, depending mostly upon which one arrives first. Oh, and next Saturday is my birthday, so if you see me that weekend, offer to dry my big, pathetic, middle-aged tears! It'll take a beach towel.

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!