Nightmareless On Elm Street

Once upon a time in Springwood, Ohio, a child murderer got off on a technicality, so the parents of the community chased him into a boiler room and burned him alive. Years later, he returned in the dreams of their children: a horrid visage in his green and red sweater, brown hat, burned skin, and long blades sprouting out of his gloved hand. He'd torture, terrorize, and kill these children, and when they died in their dreams, they died in real life.

It was a beautiful story that went on for eight movies. It was called Nightmare On Elm Street and he was Freddy Krueger, and all was right with the world until someone decided to recreate it.

I am talking about the 2010 remake of Nightmare On Elm Street.


My problems with this movie:
1. The casting: Throughout the eight Nightmare movies and two spin-off TV shows, Freddy has always been played by Robert Englund and he owned that role. Anyone else playing Freddy is like your step-father asking you to call him "Dad" -- he can try all he likes, but it will never go over well. Jackie Haley is fantastic -- I love his character Guerrero on Human Target and I had to go looking for my socks after he rocked em off as Rorschach in Watchmen -- so it isn't that his feet aren't big enough to fill the shoes left by Englund, it's that they are the wrong shape.

2. The makeup: The scariest thing Freddy did was smile. He was always smiling -- if he was slicing you into bloody chunks, he was smiling, if he was scrapping his blades against a pipe as he stalked you through his nightmarish boiler room, he was smiling. He took so much pleasure in all his violence that it would get to you. This new Freddy doesn't smile. It may have been an acting choice by Jackie Haley, but it was probably because Freddy DOESN'T HAVE ANY FUCKING LIPS. They tried to make this new Freddy look more like a real burn victim, but he ends up looking like someone took a shaved chimp, someone of Asian decent, and Abe Sapien from Hellboy and forced them to have a fucked up three-way baby.

Old Freddy VS New Freddy









3. The plot: This marks the first Elm Street movie to out and out say that Freddy, pre-parental burning, was a child molester. In the '80s he was always just a child murderer: he killed them, but they never said anything about him touching their swimsuit areas. Somehow he was scarier when he stayed away from their no-no parts and just killed them. Maybe it's because when I think of a child molester, I think of a guy in big glasses, Members Only jacket, khaki pants, creepy mustache, and an unmarked white van: I could kick that guy's ass, no problem, and gladly, but some sick fuck who just straight up kills kids just to kill? Not so much.

4. The effects: The world of special effects has greatly improved since the '80s when Freddy first hit the scene, but these new dazzling effects somehow look even less real.

5. The scares: A character would walk around a corner and I knew Freddy would be there, and he'd be there. Predictable.

Things that were okay, I guess:
1. The casting: The girls in it were pretty.

2. The origins: The homages to the original film did make me geek out a little, but not much.

3. The plot: Even though it made him less scary, the whole Freddy-is-a-sex-offender angle was a new take on the series and I applaud the writers for trying to take a new approach to an old classic, even if it didn't work.

4. The effects: Freddy shoving his bladed fingers through someone's head has never looked so cool.

5. The scares: There were a couple of moments when a character would walk around a corner and I knew Freddy would be there, but they'd get around the corner and he wouldn't be there... but then they'd turn around and he'd be there. Surprising.

Your better off watching the original series. For some real chills, watch Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) followed by New Nightmare.

2.3 stars and an offer of free candy if you get in the back of my van.

P.S. The remake was made without Wes Craven's blessing. That right there should be enough to dissuade any horror fan.

Green Hornet

The Green Hornet has about as much intellectual stimulation as the popcorn I ate while watching it, but like the popcorn, it is buttery, delicious, and fun.

Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, your average playboy millionaire who decides to start fighting crime after his father accuses him of being a failure and dies. Seth Rogen approaches the part with his normal stoner/slacker style, and for the most part, it works out well for him. Together with Kato, his right hand man, mechanic, driver, bodyguard, and sidekick, who is also the only part of the crime fighting duo who can actually physically fight crime, he takes to the streets in a pimped-out Chrysler (yo dawg, I heard you like machine guns, so we put machine guns in your cars so you can kill while you drive), posing as a theatrical criminal in order to trick the underworld.

As funny as Seth Rogen is as the lazy and underachieving Britt Reid, that one trick pony only has so many performances left before audiences are going to get tired of rooting for the pudgy, Jewish, stoned underdog, but Green Hornet was a great first step away from the bong-boy and into a real action hero role. The few fight scenes he has, he literally kicks ass.

What was really surprising about Rogen in this picture was not his performance but just the fact that he was such a goddamn fucking workhorse. In addition to starring in it he co-wrote, co-produced, and even did some of the casting.

Jay Chou, who is apparently a huge pop star over in Taiwan, plays Kato, Britt Reid's right hand man, mechanic, driver, bodyguard, and sidekick, who is also the only part of the crime fighting duo who can actually physically fight crime. As Kato (the part formerly played by Bruce Lee), Jay takes the term "action star" and punches it straight in the balls and makes it his bitch. I hope to see more of him. He made a great straight man for Rogen's goofball antics.

The movie has lots of laughs, goes for gizzard when it comes to fight sequences, and the black Chrysler they drive around in, dubbed Black Beauty, just about made me jizz all over the already-sticky theater floor.

While it may not be the kind of flick that makes you think, it did prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I need a tiny Asian sidekick.

3.5 Stars.

Full Frontal Disappointment

I am sorry I haven't been posting movie reviews as often as I was before. It's because I fell into a hole, a hole scientists call the first 7 seasons of The X-Files.

How was I to get myself out of this hole? How was I to return to my endearing trait of obsessively watching movies? The answer was simple. "No shit," I hear you say. "Just watch the X-Files movie."

That is stupid! If we were in the same room, I would point and laugh at you for being so stupid. The obvious answer was to watch a movie starring David Duchovny, kind of like how heroin addicts ween themselves off the H by doing meth.

My Netflix Instant choices were limited in the way of Duchovny. My options were Return To Me, a romantic comedy where Duchovny falls in love with Minnie Driver, or Full Frontal. I choose Full Frontal because it had a better name, and because I didn't feel like watching someone fall in love with Minnie Driver because NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO LOVE MINNIE DRIVER BUT ME!

I should have attempted to keep the raging beast that is my jealousy under control and watched Return To Me, as Full Frontal was a waste of time.

It is the story of several Hollywood types and how their lives crisscross, shot in a documentary style. So it's Crash, but without the depth brought on by racial overtones, and shot in a documentary style.

The movie tries to provide us with a window into the lives of these characters, and it does this well with the natural light, hand held cameras, and the improvisations of the actors. The problem is that it's done too well: it's just like real life, but the problem is that real life is boring. I don't want to see David Hyde Peirce get fired and then go home and have a beer, I want to see him get fired and then get mud on his nice new slacks when a cab drives too close to the curb and splashes a puddle on him. I want to see him get fired and then go fuck a whore. I want to see him get fired, slam his badge down on a desk and shout "FUCK YOU, I PLAY BY MY OWN RULES AND I AM GOING TO FIND THAT BOMB."

The movie looked so good on paper: Steven Soderbergh directing (Oceans 11, 12 and 13), Julia Roberts (Eat Pray Love), David Hyde Pierce (Fraiser), David Duchvony, and a whole slew of other notable actors from TV and movies, but it just didn't pan out on screen.

It was boring, and to top it all off David Duchovny wasn't even on screen for that long, and most of his dialogue was him trying to convince a masseuses to give him a happy ending while he wears a plastic bag over his head (and before you ask, no, they don't show us that scene).

2.5 stars.

I'm going to go see if Agent Scully has given birth to that alien baby yet.

Black Swan

I am, sad to say, your typical American movie-goer. Give me blood, blades, and babes and I will happily sit and munch on over-buttered popcorn 'til my lungs grow too fat to breathe. Give me a plot more complex than a bus that can't stop because it has a bomb on it and I start getting a headache and looking at my watch.

I saw Black Swan and did not look at my watch once.

I know that sounds like I am comparing the cerebral art work that is Black Swan to that of the mental pig slop that is Speed, but that is not what I mean. I mean that I was so enraptured by this film, my head was so filled with the plot twists and the visual symphony of it all, that I had no time for an ache and no thought of my watch.

College theses will be written about this movie, DVD copies will circulate around film school classes like wildfire. It is a movie that deserves to be studied.

Natalie Portman (Garden State, the Star Wars films that must not be named) plays Nina the ballerina, a fragile young woman who has just been cast in Swan Lake as the graceful and poised White Swan and as the lustful and dark Black Swan, a role she has trouble getting into, until her own dark side boils and rises to the top. Portman plays the part with frightening accuracy and sensitivity.

That is the plot in its simplest form, but there is so much more, so many subplots with their own layers of subtext. Watching the movie is like playing with those Russian dolls: every time you peel back a layer you find another doll staring at you.

The movie is dark, but not "dark" as in "twisted," but "dark" as in the way night feels.

Director Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Fountain, Requiem for A Dream ) uses all the senses to paint a magnificent picture; his use of light and dark, CGI, mirrors, music, and makeup all weave together seamlessly to transport you into the world of one persons mental breakdown.

I had heard this movie was a mind fuck: I went in expecting my brain to be battered with metaphors and abstract representation like it was when I watched Mulholland Dr.(that movie DID give me a headache) but it wasn't, it was chased by sexual energy as it was led through a psychological maze that was complicated enough to keep the mind reeling but straightforward enough that it never got too lost.

I will see it again.

5 stars

Oh, and it has this awesome lesbian scene in it.