A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

Kristen is back (though played by a different actress), along with Kincaid and Joey, both of whom somehow survived the previous movie regardless of their general uselessness. Out of the crazy house, they are living normal lives, going to school with all their awkward late 80s classmates, the most awkward of which is Kristen's boyfriend who also happens to be the brother of Kristen's new friend Alice. Kristen has made some other friends too, so don't worry! When Freddy is resurrected there will be plenty of kids to kill in grotesque and ironic and/or fitting ways.

Freddy kills the remaining Dream Warriors very quickly and that would have been the end of things, but Kristen calls Alice into her dream, apologizes, shoots some magic ball of light at Alice and yells "I GIVE YOU MY POWER." The power to call other people into her dreams. To be killed by Freddy. Thanks Kristen, what a pal.

So like I mentioned above there is a lot of the 80s in this movie, right down to the cool but weird outsider who wears a trenchcoat and sneakers to school (he ends up fighting Freddy with karate!). The script is really bad, and there is some nonsense about Alice inheriting the abilities and mannerisms of her friends as they die.

However, the script is not bad enough to take away from the awesome direction, particularly the scene where Kristen is drugged with sleeping pills and the camera, swooping all around in one single amazing take, follows her as she runs to her bedroom, eventually falling asleep.

By now, A Nightmare of Elm Street is basically an effects film because there is absolutely nothing scary about this one, but the effects are amazing. Freddy turns one girl into a cockroach and squishes her; a far cry from the horrific death of Tina in the first movie, where she is dragged screaming and bloody across the walls and ceiling of her room in front of her horrified boyfriend, but the cockroach transformation is sufficiently gross and impressive.

Overall, not as good as the second film, but a definite close second. Starting with the next movie the series becomes an absolute joke, with Freddy on a skateboard, Super Freddy, Freddy playing video games, and more.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Like most kids in Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Kristen starts having dreams about Freddy. She is the last of the children of the people who burned Freddy alive, so you can understand that he's still angry about that and so that is why he wants to kill her. And so our movie begins.

The first Nightmare on Elm Street buries its excellent concept under a heap of poor dialog and hammy acting. But it gave us Freddy so I will forgive it. The second Nightmare movie is just a great movie, and as far as I am concerned is what an Elm Street movie should be. It's scary and the script is surprisingly good.

So what does Dream Warriors bring to the table? Well, it brings Dream Warriors. Nancy, from the first movie, comes back as a dream doctor or some nonsense like that, and teaches the kids to use their Dream Powers.

Kristen has the ability to bring other people into her dreams (and can also jump around), and luckily for her she is in a mental asylum, surrounded by quirky misfit kids who all have amazing powers:

-Kincaid: Power of Strength!
-Taryn: Power of Beautiful... and Bad!
-Phillip: Power of Getting Killed First!
-Jennifer: Power of Jumping Headfirst Into Wall-Mounted TV To Death!
-Will: Power of Dungeons & Dragons!
-Joey: Ultra-Specific Power of Screaming To Break Mirrors Freddy Has Pulled Your Friends Into!

Somehow, half the kids manage to make it through the movie and anyway the extremely awkward and embarrassing scene where they all explain their new found powers to each other is wonderful.

This is the Elm Street movie where they started not only tailoring the death scenes to each character, but also telegraphing those scenes constantly up until they happen. So the girl that used to be a junkie on the streets and has scars all over her arms from needles... you can be sure that Freddy is gonna use that in some way to kill her.

So in other words, this is where the series turned off horror street, and took detours down groanworthy oneliner avenue, grotesque death scene boulevard, and awesome special effect lane. The special effects are amazing! I will never trust CGI effects: the minute you trust them, bam, there goes your wallet and now your fish are dead. But you can trust puppets and matte paintings and guys covered in slime. You can trust them forever!

So is this movie any good or what? Well, as I mentioned before Nancy is back and Wes Craven from the first movie is involved, so it has more in common with that than it does with the awesome second movie. So for every amazing scene of some guy being controlled like a puppet with his own veins torn from his limbs, you get a scene of Nancy empowering the kids with her crazy dream logic. Oh Nancy, all your friends died in the first movie and you didn't even manage to kill Freddy with your laughable Home Alone booby traps. Why should we listen to you?

The War of the Robots (1978)

This movie is TERRIBLE.

It starts out fine. You've got your future guys in miniskirts and civilization sufficiently advanced to build robots that look just like people and can walk and fight, but not sufficiently advanced enough for those robots to not talk like "PLEASE.COME.WITH.ME.HUMANOID."

All the characters call each other by their first names, which is hilarious. Captain John will be like "I need to stop you Lois! For Julie's sake!" Speaking of Captain John, he is basically Italian Captain Kirk. He is sent to chase some aliens (really robots!) who have kidnapped a genetics scientist, because only that one scientist has the code that apparently stops the nuclear reactor back home from randomly melting down on some schedule. (Little do they know that the code was always with them.. in their hearts.)

So this is an Italian ripoff of Star Trek, with some lightsabers thrown in just in case. Like Star Trek there are tons of scenes of people sitting at starship controls talking on and on about coordinates and vectors and stuff. And there are horribly choreographed alien (actually robot) fistfights. That would all be great, but this movie suffers from reused footage and filler. I can't tell you how many times they show this one scene where they are trying to pretend an alien spaceship is approaching, but all they do is zoom in slowly on the spaceship toy with their camera. There is a thrilling space dogfight, but instead of showing awesome scale models shooting lasers all over the place, 95% of the footage is of Captain John's big head in a space helmet looking at you and telling you about how overwhelmed he is.

When they fight the robots the first time, it takes FOREVER. They shoot the same three guys over and over but shoot it from different angles to make it seem like there is an army of robots. It gets stupid the first time. By the third time they are fighting these robots, you've just about had enough.

Man, what is this movie doing in my Chilling Classics collection? It's on the same disc as Oasis of the Zombies, and while that movie may not be great, you can at least make the argument- on a theoretical level- that, if you were to plot them out far enough on a graph, zombies and general chillingness interact at some point. There is nothing chilling about The War of the Robots. It is just bad.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

All aboard the Freddy Express! Next stop, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge.

Unlike the first movie, NoES2 is generally seen as one of the poorer attempts at a Freddy movie. This is unfortunate, because not only is this film the best of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, it's just a great horror film overall.

Jesse Walsh and his family are having a rough time. Jesse can't sleep without having shriek-inducing nightmares, the air conditioning doesn't work, their pet bird explodes, and then it is revealed that they are living in the house Nancy, the heroine from the first movie, went crazy in. Eventually Freddy starts telling Jesse to kill his friends for him, and it just so happens that Freddy's glove is still in the basement so it's not like Freddy is even asking him to do anything particularly inconvenient.

But for whatever reason, Jesse has a problem with this and it's up to him, his rich girlfriend Lisa, and his best friend Ron to figure things out.

Nightmare Part 2 avoids all the awful stuff from Nightmare the first. The script is much better and I found myself ashamed to like horror movies only a couple of times the whole ninety minutes. The acting is good all around, and Jesse's descent into madness is handled very well (though pretty sudden). This is the third or fourth time I've watched this movie, and I was glued to the screen the entire time.

If there is one thing people will not shut up about when it comes to this movie, like it or hate it, it is the gay subtext. Even the wikipedia article has a section about it, and the font size is the same as that of Cast and Production, which means according to wikipedia the gay undercurrent of this movie is just as important as everything else about it. So I can't avoid it.

Jesse spends most of his time shirtless with his pal Ron, and avoids talking to, looking at, or touching his girlfriend throughout the movie. Then there is the part where he goes to the gay S&M bar, meets his gym teacher, and then they go back to the gym for pushups and showers (this actually happens). So rather than referring to this movie as "that Freddy movie with the gay subtext" it's almost better to call it "that gay movie with the Freddy subtext."

But maybe that is why this is such a good movie. The other movies in the series are unquestionably about Freddy and the kids he kills, and when it comes to that kind of movie you are going to have a hard time outdoing a Friday 13th or a Halloween. This movie, Freddy is just kind of around. And I think it's better off that way.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street is pretty much seen as a horror classic. I guess if you compare it with something like Sister of Death or Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory it is indeed an amazing movie. However, beyond an amazing concept and the solid introduction, where you watch Freddy making his gloves, I have a lot of problems with this movie.

I almost feel like I am insulting your intelligence for having to sum up the plot for this movie, but I'm gonna do it. Nancy and her boyfriend Johnny Depp, and Tina and her boyfriend Rod are having nightmares about a guy with knives for fingers in an old beat up sweater, which is of course the famous Freddy Krueger. All is fun and games until Tina gets killed in her dream. Of course all the adults won't believe anything their kids say no matter how much evidence there is. At one point Nancy brings back Freddy's hat from a dream while in a controlled environment (a lab!!!) and her mom is wondering where she really got that hat from. Yeah, great thinking mom. Nancy probably ate the hat and then regurgitated it while you guys were watching her sleep but you forgot or something. That makes sense.

On top of that, all the adults know all about Freddy and his scissor hands and whatnot but of course they don't say anything about it until the end of the movie. In fact, they pretty much leave all the kids to die, even though each kid is killed in a more and more fantastic way. Even after one kid is reduced to a fountain of bloody giblets shooting all over the ceiling of his room.

But this is not the only frustrating thing about A Nightmare on Elm Street. Oh no, it also relies way too much on jump scares, and the sound effects that accompany the jump scares are just laughable. I know this was the whole point, you'd go to the theater with your girlfriend/boyfriend and Freddy would jump out and go "RARRR" and you'd have your popcorn and then after the movie you'd go stick baseball cards in the spokes of your bicycle and race your buddies and play marbles, or whatever it is kids did back in 1984 before we had video games or DVD players or cars or civilization. But I'm not in a theater and Freddy jumping out and growling just doesn't cut it when you have films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of even Friday the 13th.

But I guess you need the jump scares because while all the kids (even that psychopath Rod) are likable and Nancy is cute, the script is terrible. I mean, italics terrible. I can't blame the actors. We all know Johnny Depp is great, but with this awful script, what can you do? At one point Nancy is talking to her mom about how bright it is outside and her mom says some nonsense about, "It's gonna burn off soon or it wouldn't be so bright." What does this even mean?!?! Is she talking about the sun? Is this something anyone would ever say about anything? The script is filled with this kind of embarrassing nonsense. Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street makes me pine for the nearly Shakespearean-in-comparison Friday the 13th, which has a script mostly consisting of laughable sex talk, macho posturing, screaming, or all of these at once.

Sisters of Death (1977)

Six sorority sisters hold some kind of secret ritual which involves firing an unloaded gun at the new sister (!). Of course, the gun is loaded and the new girl dies. Thus we have the aptly named Sisters of Death.

I have pretty much nothing to say about this movie. It was apparently a made for TV movie or something, or maybe the version I watched is extremely censored, because nothing cool happens at all. Sure, some guy gets electrocuted by the fence regardless of the helpful warning sign the evil insane killer has put up. And I think one girl gets killed by spiders? I might have hallucinated that.

There's one part where these two girls get into a huge fight over whether or not to take a shower. One of the girls decides if she doesn't take a shower, right in the middle of this situation where they are all trapped in a compound being picked off one by one, she will go crazy, so of course she takes a shower and gets killed. Whether or not she would have been killed regardless is an interesting thought experiment for a philosopher of the highest order, but we don't have time for that right now.

Except for that high point, I really have nothing to talk about. The Chilling Classics set has been so good to me up until this past week! What happened?

The Snake People (1971)

Boris Karloff as a Voodoo priest. Midget guy acting weird. Lady dancing with snakes. A guy that brings his dead girlfriend back as a zombie, leading to plenty of jokes about how she is better as a zombie because she can't sass him.

All this and more is to be discovered in The Snake People (aka "Isle of the Snake People," aka "La Muerte Vivente")!

Some guy goes somewhere to investigate some zombie and voodoo stuff or something. Some other guy's niece shows up to try to drum up support for her little temperance movement, which goes as well as you would expect that to go on Voodoo Island. Of course she falls in love with the alcoholic police guy who, in reaction to all the voodoo troubles relaxes shirtless on a hammock and drinks rum all day.

So that is The Snake People in a nutshell. It's an entertaining movie, don't get me wrong, but there is not a lot to say about it. It's not bad enough to laugh at, but not good enough to go and tell everyone about. But check out the movie poster, which has the best Jeopardy answer ever.

Horror Express (1973)

Horror Express, or as my pals in Spain call it, Pánico en el Transiberiano, is one of those slow old horror movies you always figure all old horror movies are like. It's not written particularly well and pretty much every character is detestable or at best boring. It is also really tame as far as monster effects and gore go. So generally, the slow part (which is the first fifty minutes of the movie) is nearly unwatchable by modern man.

There is a monster stalking a bunch of awful people on a train, picking them off one-by-one. By the time the third person gets killed everyone starts to panic and the heroes start getting serious, first by having many leisurely meals in the dinner train, then by waiting for more people to die. Eventually they have no choice but to act when the monster attacks them, but even after killing it the murders continue! What on train could be happening??!?!?

And then the movie suddenly and without warning picks up when Telly Savalas aka Kojak shows up, playing the part of a crazy Cossack. I couldn't stop watching the movie every time this guy showed up. His dialog is nonsensical but is delivered so well you can't help but enjoy it. I personally was rooting for him to kill everyone on the train, including the monster and the train itself, but sadly the script writers and I were not on the same page and before you know it the movie becomes a zombie flick for about thirty seconds and then the ending happens and you get an image of the planet Earth. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, meddling scientists!

So besides Siberian Kojak what else is there to like in this movie. I am particularly fond of the scene where the scientists look at goo from the monster's eyeball in a microscope and are shocked that the monster stores it's memories not in it's brain but in it's eyes. They know this because looking at the eyeball goo under microscope reveals clear as days images of everything the monster has ever seen: the last guy it killed, a brontosaurus, and the planet Earth.

So although this movie has got the goods when it comes to thought-provoking scientific issues ("just what would a race of creatures whose eyeball goo is like an icky ViewMaster be like?"), it comes up short in the Horror (and honestly, the Express) categories.

Horrors of Spider Island (1967)

A bunch of dancers and their possibly sleazy manager, Gary, are on their way to Singapore (to dance I guess) when a toy plane is violently torn asunder and they find themselves drifting on the open sea. The good news is they are saved when they happen upon an island. The bad news is the island is filled with spiders (just a couple actually) and horrors (actually just one). Thus the title, Horrors of Spider Island!

Later on, a couple of researchers also show up and the movie momentarily becomes some crazy teenagers dancing on the beach in the darkness movie. Not for long though, because there is a monster- a hideous half man, half spider beast (a veritable Spider-Man!)- stalking everyone. Plus the spiders (though they are not much of a problem after the first half of the movie).

I have not seen a lot of these 1950s/1960s black and white pop horror/scifi movies, so I cannot compare it to others and I apologize for that. I can tell you that this movie was surprisingly entertaining for about the first half, but then it dragged on for the second half. Like seemingly a lot of pop horror/sci fi movies from this period, the film is short at under 90 minutes but you wouldn't realize it for the pacing.

It's almost like two movies were smooshed together. The first half is a decent "bunch of people who don't like each other stuck in an awful situation" movie, but then the scientist hunks show up and the girls are basically just making out on the beach or screaming and fainting all over the place. Too bad, if they had maintained the tension from the first half of the movie this would have been a great little thriller.

My sources ("the internet") tell me this was originally a nudie flick from Germany. Of course the version I saw was the US release, which has all the good stuff cut out, though you do still get a catfights between girls in skirts and even some stripping down to bathing suits, which I imagine must have just caused massive swooning in the aisles back in puritanical 1967 USA.

The Driller Killer (1979)

The Driller Killer is the story of Reno, a starving artist, his girlfriend Carol, and her girlfriend Pamela. The three are on the verge of being kicked out of their grimy, dark Manhattan apartment since they are behind in their rent. In order to make some money, Reno has been working on a painting for an art dealer named Dalton.

Shortly after our story begins, Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters, a punk rock band, move in to the same building. Thanks to their constant practicing Reno is unable to concentrate on his work and thus we arrive at the actual drilling killing.

It's probably no great surprise that The Driller Killer is in fact Reno (the movie sure doesn't try to hide this). So this is not your typical mystery slasher movie. It's a lot more like Combat Shock or maybe American Psycho, where rather than trying to figure out who the killer is, you just spend the whole movie watching the the lead character going insane. Less Nailgun Massacre and more Naked Massacre. In this movie the change is pretty sudden. In one scene Reno is working on his painting of the majestic buffalo, in the next he is drilling hobos to death in alleyways.

This movie actually has a lot in common with Combat Shock. You've got your absolutely filthy New York, swarming with gangs and violence and crazy homeless people. Was New York ever this awful? Who knows? Probably. But I do know this depiction makes for some skin-crawling gritty viewing and is extremely effective. NY is a character in this movie, just as much as Reno is or anyone else. In fact, it is probably the main character as I can't see this movie being pulled off anywhere else. Just like how Troll 2 could not take place in any other town other than Nilbog, kingdom of the Goblins. Well, I guess it probably could have taken place in Llort, kingdom of the trolls. That probably would have been more accurate.

So while The Driller Killer does not take place in Rellik Rellird, the kingdom of the Driller Killers, Manhattan is a good choice I guess. This is all helped by the dialog which is often terrible, but in a realistic way. I have read that it was all improvised, which explains a lot.

But you really have to be able to appreciate this gritty "NY as a character" thing, or you will probably not get much out of this movie. It is surprisingly not explicit, especially considering how it was banned in the UK back in the 80s. Sure, there is drilling (and killing), and yeah blood goes all over the place, but it could have been much worse. So I have to admit that The Driller Killer shows a lot of restraint, surprising considering the lurid title. Regardless of the sudden and unexplained lesbian shower scene, it is almost classy.