A Nightmare on Elm Street

Last night I went up to the Standing Order bar to meet my Dad, and we had a couple of drinks and a plate of fish and chips. It was a nice trip out.

Today I had the day off work and so I went along to the Cineworld cinema to see A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Samuel Bayer and based on the legendary Wes Craven film from 1984. The film is set in the present day in the small town of Springwood, Ohio, where a group of the local teenagers are all experiencing the same nightmare where they are being stalked by Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley): a man with a horribly burned face and a glove with razor-sharp knives on the fingers. The teenagers soon realise that if they are injured in their dreams then the injury is carried through to reality, and so if they are killed by Krueger in their dreams, then they die in reality. They realise that they have to stay awake long enough to figure out the secret in their pasts that connects them with Krueger and how to stop him before they are killed. The movie really wasn't as bad as I had feared, and actually makes a good stab at reinventing the movie after all the sequels (seven if you count Freddy vs. Jason). Jackie Earle Haley was very good as Freddy, and wisely didn't imitate Robert Englund, who played the role in all the previous films.

Before the movie there were some trailers for some movies that look really good: REC 2 (I really liked the original REC film), Inception (which I have been wanting to see for awhile) and Predators.

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.

The Final Nightmare

Last night I watched Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, a 1991 film directed by Rachel Talalay, that is the sixth in the Nightmare on Elm Street series of horror films. Set in 2001, the film's opening states that by now the ghostly killer Freddy Krueger, who kills victims in their dreams, has successfully wiped out all the children and teenagers in the small town of Springwood, Ohio, except for one teenage boy who manages to escape. Several days later, he is found wandering around an unnamed city suffereing from severe amnesia and carrying a pack of stay-awake tablets and a newspaper cutting headed KRUEGER WOMAN STILL MISSING. He soon winds up in a centre for troubled teenagers, where the head therapist (Lisa Zane) soon takes an interest in him, mainly because the newspaper cutting reminds her of a recurring dream, and she decides to take the boy back to Springwood in the hope of triggering his memory. Unbeknownst to them, a group of teenagers from the refuge stow away in the van they take. Of course it's not long before they meet the man of their dreams. This film is probably the worst in the series. The film is too comic to be scary, and not funny enough to work as a comedy. The effects aren't up to much either. In the original theatrical release the film's final section was done in 3D, which is not used in most DVD and video versions, which to be honest makes that final section even more ludicrous. As with almost every horror sequel which uses the word "final" in it's title, it's a complete lie, because there were further sequels.

My brother telephoned me last night as well, which is extremely unusual. Things are certainly happening for him. He's got a girlfriend now, and he's got trips to France and Australia to look forward to. He seemed happy.

The end of the working week. The office was almost deserted. Already a lot of the other rooms have started putting up their Christmas decorations. So half the building looks as bland as ever, and the other half looks like an explosion in a tinsel factory.

I recorded a TV show last night called Millennium. The show was from the creators of The X-Files, and stars Lance Henriksen as a profiler who tracks down serial killers by using a special talent to see through the eyes of killers. The show was very well-made and genuinely scary in places, but it is also almost unremittingly bleak.

I sent a message to Michele this afternoon but I still haven't heard anything.