Saturday, December 13, 2008

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4

Last night I was watching a 1988 film called A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, directed by Renny Harlin, on DVD. The hugely popular series concerns the vengeful spirit of the evil Freddy Krueger (played by Robert Englund) who has the ability to haunt people in their dreams and manipulate their dreamworld in order to attack them, also when he kills people in their dreams they die in reality as well. In this installment Krueger once again is brought back to life to attack another batch of teenagers, with the help of rubbery special effects and bad jokes. The film is quite lavish and filled with special effects, most of which have inevitably dated. The problem with special effects heavy movies is that they don't age well at all. Another thing about is that while it's not the worst in the series there really is very little new. Also by this time the series villain, Freddy Krueger, with his hideously burned face, red and green striped sweater, hat and glove with razor-sharp knives on the fingers, had become a horror icon, appearing in comics, books, music videos, toys, posters, T-shirts and even a short-lived TV series called Freddy's Nightmares. It's one of those movies that, despite being pretty bad, is still fun enough to be enjoyable.

This morning I went along and got my groceries for the week. This afternoon I have been pretty busy putting up my Christmas decorations. I have one larger tree that goes in my front room and one small one that I put up in my bedroom. I have had the small tree for as long as I can remember and I keep it mainly for sentimental reasons. I was decorating them while watching the 1991 film of The Addams Family on TV.

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