I finally saw: A Nightmare on Elm Street

A couple times on this blog I've sought your feedback on what movie I'm most embarrassed I haven't seen.

I've mostly considered the true classics as primary contenders for this honor, but there are plenty of movies it's surprising I haven't seen because of my audience demographic. In other words, everyone else my age with more or less my background has seen this movie, but I haven't.

A Nightmare on Elm Street would certainly qualify. That is, until I finally saw it on Saturday night.

So I'm introducing a new feature on my blog called "I Finally Saw," where I'll discuss movies that were new to other people in the 1980s or 1990s, but are only new to me today. Will they hold up? Will I be able to put myself in the mindset those people had when they originally saw these movies? That kind of thing.

I may never have seen it, but I've definitely had impressions of A Nightmare on Elm Street since it came out in 1984. A lot of my friends saw it right around that time, even though we were only 11 going on 12. I wasn't one of those kids who gravitated to horror movies at a young age. I didn't like to be scared until the past decade or two, and the disturbing things I imagined happening in A Nightmare on Elm Street (I found this poster particularly disturbing) were things that I ran from rather than embraced.

Before I go on, I'll say that if you are like me and hadn't seen this, you deserve a SPOILER WARNING.

So one of the things that surprised me about this movie is the low body count. Unlike many other slasher movies, which offer up a good six or eight characters to kill off, Nightmare introduces us to a mere four teenagers, only one of whom ends up getting killed by Freddy Krueger's famous finger knives. Of the other two, one gets hanged and another (Johnny Depp) is basically vaporized into a geyser of blood.

Some of the structuring of the deaths kind of surprised me as well. In what should be a scene with life-or-death stakes, Depp's character falls asleep while standing guard as Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) enters her dream to confront Freddy. Given how much emphasis is placed on not falling asleep, thereby letting Freddy kill you in your dreams, it's rather amazing that the script doesn't kill off either of these characters when Depp starts to snooze. Under ordinary horror movie morality, death should be the just punishment for a weak character not taking the threat seriously enough and falling asleep on the job. But Depp's death occurs later under sort of lame circumstances. He's supposed to come over to help Nancy (a second time) at midnight on a particular night, but falls asleep. What's lame about it is that he actually falls sleep twice, and the first time is awoken at about 11:40 -- in other words, with plenty of time to cross the street to Nancy's house before midnight, but not so much time that he'll accidentally fall asleep again while waiting. Yet he does accidentally fall asleep again, and this is when he buys it.

Another thing I found strange is that none of the deaths show Freddy's actual participation at the moment of death. On the one hand, that's by design. Freddy is not actually present in the real world; he's only killing them in their dream. So when the first victim's stomach is sliced to ribbons and she's dragged up a wall, it's appropriate that we don't see it, because Freddy isn't actually "there." It's useful for the audience to see what her boyfriend perceives is happening to her. But once this is accomplished, wouldn't it be better to see Freddy taking a more hands-on approach in the next two murders? Instead, we just see a guy in a prison being hanged by his own bed sheets, and a volcanic spray of blood coming out of a bed.

Now, the stuff that surprised me in a positive way. The Freddy stuff we actually do see managed to be pretty disturbing. Oh, I'm not saying I had nightmares myself about it, just that it was objectively more scary than I thought it would be. Like, when he's struggling with one victim who manages to peel the features off his face, revealing a cackling skull. Or the ominous quality of Freddy's arms as they extend 15 feet out the side of his body. Or like when another victim asks Freddy what he is, and he slices open his skin as his wordless answer, unleashing worms and maggots.

And that leads to another surprise about Freddy: I thought he was a lot more of a talker, and specifically, a wisecracker. In fact, he doesn't talk nearly as much as I expected, and there are almost no groan-inducing puns. My guess is that this aspect of his persona doesn't really take off until the sequels -- all of which, not surprisingly, I have also not seen.

Still, A Nightmare on Elm Street seems a bit more dated than other seminal horror movies from this period. It doesn't have the timelessness of Halloween or even the original Friday the 13th, which is probably a reflection of it being filmed deeper into the 1980s than either of those films. (In fact, Halloween wasn't made in the 1980s at all, having come out in 1978.) So perhaps I'm just expressing a preference for the 1970s horror aesthetic over the 1980s horror aesthetic.

I can tell you one place that Nightmare steps horribly wrong. In an ending that leaves things wide open for the multiple sequels, and expresses for certain that Freddy isn't dead (the way he's dispatched barely even suggests he might be dead), Nancy's mother is pulled through the window of her front door in the film's final shot, presumably by an unseen Freddy on the other side. You're supposed to be chilled by this, right? Uh uh. It's so obvious that the body being pulled through the window is a doll that it's downright funny. The doll's legs even catch on the side of the window in a way that make them bounce in a completely doll-like and completely inorganic manner.

Regardless of this unintentionally funny image the film left me with, I'm glad I "finally saw" A Nightmare on Elm Street, and ultimately I rate it pretty highly simply for its place in horror history.

Also, now I finally get that Simpsons Halloween special where Groundskeeper Willie gets burned in the boiler room and attacks Bart and Lisa in their dreams.

Series I'm glad I've seen none of

1. Big Momma - Big Momma's House (2000), Big Momma's House 2 (2006), Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son (2011)

2. Ernest - Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), Ernest Saves Christmas (1988), Ernest Goes to Jail (1990), Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), Ernest Rides Again (1993), Ernest Goes to School (1994), Ernest Goes to Africa (1997), Ernest in the Army (1988)

3. Ghoulies - Ghoulies (1985), Ghoulies 2 (1987), Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991), Ghoulies IV (1994)

Series I'm surprised I've seen none of:

1. Dirty Harry - Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), The Dead Pool (1988)

2. Nightmare on Elm Street - A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989), Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

3. Transporter - The Transporter (2002), Transporter 2 (2005), Transporter 3 (2008)

Series I'm embarrassed to have seen all of:

1. Left Behind - Left Behind: The Movie (2000), Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002), Left Behind: World at War (2005)

2. Harold and Kumar - Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

3. Saw* - Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw IV (2007), Saw V (2008), Saw VI (2009), Saw 3D (2010)*

* - I have yet to see Saw 3D, now called Saw: The Final Chapter. But I thought having seen six of the seven Saws was embarrassing enough to be worth including.

A disappointing decline

There were two new major studio releases this week: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance.

Neither of them was reviewed in this week's Entertainment Weekly.

Which is hardly the fault of Entertainment Weekly. In fact, I'm getting accustomed to seeing the following feature, almost every week, in the magazine's pages: Reviews Online. It's a little box graphic with one (or in this case, two) photos in it, and the following text:

"The studios behind the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance declined to screen them in time to include in this issue. You can find our reviews at EW.com."

EW has to include the Reviews Online box almost every week, but this week I really noticed it, because both of the new prominent releases were not reviewed. Usually one of them would lead off the magazine's movie section, but in the absence of that, Lisa Schwarzbaum had to write an essay called "Directors and their muses." (During which she does also submit a review of Nicole Holofcener's new movie, Please Give, whose studio was gracious enough to make it eligible for critical dissection. Then again, Lisa gave it an A-, so I guess the studio was pretty confident in it.)

There was once a time when a movie could not escape the glare of critics, no matter how wretched it was. You made the movie, you had to stand behind it, at least to the extent that working professionals were given the chance to view your product and let others know whether or not they should consume it.

Not now. If you're the least bit skittish about whether your movie is any good, it's all too easy to avoid the kind of critical lambasting that would kill your movie's opening weekend box office. And why shouldn't a studio avail themselves of this opportunity? It's only business. Granted, a shrewd viewer will probably be even more frightened off by learning that a studio refused to screen a movie for critics, than for reading a bad review. Of course, the movie industry's entire infrastructure is based on the fact that most people are not shrewd viewers.

I should comment here that both of these films are currently reviewed on the website I write for, and were up at a reasonable hour during the day yesterday. Which means either our critics scampered out to a midnight Thursday night screening (which may have been available for Elm Street, probably not for Vengeance) and wrote something up in the wee hours of Friday morning, or more likely, there were critics screenings of the films, they just were not held in time for Entertainment Weekly's deadline.

But I don't find this much of an excuse. Studios are fully cognizant of what they need to do to get a movie reviewed in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, one of our country's leading resources for film criticism, and in the pages of other weekly magazines. Not setting up a screening until the Wednesday night before the film's release is not an "accident," not some low-level functionary's failure to meet the deadline due to inexperience. It's a calculated attempt to add a couple million to the film's box office, because those 300,000 people won't have read how bad the movie was in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.

If I were speaking from the perspective of a studio, I might consider this a smart move. Perhaps I consider it a smart move, even not speaking from that perspective. But I'm coming at it from the critical side, from the judicial branch, from the perspective of someone who thinks that every movie should be judged on its merits. In fact, I use the language of government intentionally here. I would almost be in favor of the existence of a body that required films to be screened a certain amount of time prior to their release. No such body will ever exist, but it should.

So I guess both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Furry Vengeance are pretty bad. I can't say I'm surprised. For about five minutes my wife and I talked about seeing Furry Vengeance. See, she's from Australia, where they don't have squirrels, so she loves loves loves squirrels -- and that's spilled over to me having a renewed love for them. Our mutual love of squirrels has spilled over to loving other critters and woodland creatures.

Furry Vengeance gave us the hope of speaking to us specifically, even if it stars Brendan Fraser and looks stupid. Well, not now. I'm part of a system, Furry Vengeance, and you need to participate in that system as well if you want any love from me.

Bad news

I'm not very interested in seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street. Not only am I more than a little skeptical of Hollywood's recent binge of horror remakes, but -- and I can't believe I'm about to admit this -- I did not actually see the original, so I don't have a built-in hunger to see what director Samuel Bayer has done with the concept.

The part of me that is interested, however, is interested entirely because of Jackie Earle Haley.

Haley, who's been on a major career upswing in the last couple years, is not a household name or anything. But connoisseurs of cinematic creepiness should be plenty familiar with him.

It wasn't always this way for Mr. Haley. In fact, long before anyone knew him as Freddy Krueger, they knew him as Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears. I'm not talking about the Richard Linklater remake -- I'm talking about the actual, original Bad News Bears from 1976, in which Haley played one of the players on the titular little league team.

He was a bad kid, granted. But nothing like we've seen in the last few years. Haley has gone from being a Bad News Bear to just being bad news.

It all started in 2006 -- a whole 13 years after Haley had made his last film. (Which, for the record, was Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence.) Now past his awkward "middle years" (otherwise known as his thirties), Haley made a splash back onto the scene in a movie I did not like as much as most people, which may be a candidate for my Second Chances series: Todd Field's Little Children. Creepiness personified, Haley received an Oscar nomination for his role as a child molester. Something about his physical stature (he's short and thin) and his physical appearance (he looks ... weird) made him the perfect candidate to play an emotionally fucked-up abuser. And he took the role and ran with it.

But it was really starting about a year ago that he became the new go-to guy for all things disturbing. Haley played arguably the most depraved character, Rorschach, in Zack Snyder's Watchmen. And though his face was covered by a mask that looked like a roving inkblot for much of the movie, it's the scenes where he's not wearing the mask that stick with me the most. Rorschach's alter ego, Walter Kovacs, gets captured and sent to prison, where he kills nearly a half-dozen different men, one with boiling oil, another with (I think) a chainsaw, and a third -- a dwarf -- in a way seen only in flashes through a closing bathroom door. Awesomely brutal.

Haley's third really creepy role is basically a cameo in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. This time, his whole appearance occurs in a jail cell, and it's one of those scenes that may actually occur in the mind of Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels. Beaten, bruised, spittle flying from his mouth, Haley plays George Noyce, a patient who has been in and out of Asheville Prison, and apparently, in and out of sanity as well. Haley can make someone seem insane better than anyone these days.

Enter A Nightmare on Elm Street. When I heard about who was chosen to play Freddy Krueger, I could think of no better choice. If you want someone who can growl his lines, make everything seem sick, sadistic and twisted, and freak you the fuck out, Haley is your man.

Maybe what I'll do, later this year when the remake comes out on DVD, is watch the original and the remake back-to-back, then compare and contrast. That would make a nice little blog project. And though Robert Englund became an icon for his performance in Wes Craven's original 1984 film, I wouldn't be the least surprised if Jackie Earle Haley makes this part all his own. The way he has with everything else he's touched in the last few years.

Did I say "touched"? I meant ripped, mauled and strangled.

Like I said, bad news indeed.