I'm a huge Wes Craven fan, so I was expecting to like this, but I didn't expect it to unsettle me as much as it did. It's silly in the special way Craven movies are, and often very funny. Lots of the special effects look weird and dated (though they do look more 2002 than 1994, so congrats I guess), and for maybe 90 minutes of the 110 minute runtime I thought this felt like the buildup to a buildup, the first ten minutes of a suggestion of fear stretched out a little too long. but when the final climax starts up, I have to tell you, it scared the hell out of me. In the back of my mind…

Hooptober 4.0 - 2017 - Film #14

Earlier today I was reading a story about a man whose penis was stolen in 2012. Fei Lin, a 41 year old man from China, was sleeping peacefully when he was rudely awoken by a bunch of men. They shoved a bag over his head, pulled down his pants and then before he knew it they were gone. Taking the bag off his head, he looked down only to be completely shocked that his penis was missing. The thieves had chopped off his dick and had run away with it into the night. The police never found the men who did it, nor did they find his cock.

So, when Freddie's bladed glove…

Every kid knows who Freddy is. He's like Santa Claus, or King Kong.
-Heather Langenkamp

Probably my favorite Nightmare on Elm Street sequel as it might be even better written then the original. Wes Craven comes back for the 7th film and manages to recreate the tone and mood from his 1984 original. What I think is so ingenious is that he does this not by ignoring what went wrong with all the previous sequels, but actually using it for his story.

Craven knows that Freddy Krueger killing the Elm Street teens in their sleep has been overdone and it has become to familiar. It needs to be something that our protagonist knows is a threat, but will be unbelievable…

A lot of times I have a spiral notebook on the coffee table while I'm watching a movie, mainly to write down a quote I find hilarious or the name of a list I have to add the movie to once I find myself on Letterboxd again. I thought I would take the time to let everyone know what I wrote while watching Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

An almost blank page with four possible list additions and the single thought - "crotch grab, SO CGI!"

New Nightmare came out in 1994. This is an awkward time for horror films, a film can either be chock-full of the best practical special FX after a decade of perfection, or riddled with a…

After "Freddy's Dead" leaving many fans with sour tastes in their mouths, Craven came back with full force to give people a brand new "Nightmare" film, but with a twist, and that twist being that it's about him making a new film in the series as a means of containing some form of evil, and the film in question is the one we're currently watching and unfolds as he puts it together.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of meta narratives, but part of the reason why for some (particularly Craven's own "Scream" or most recently "The Final Girls") is because it distracts from the narrative to point out things that the audience themselves can put together and…

Maudit Freddy, t’es pas fin là, s’en prendre de même au p’tit gars d’Un flic à la maternelle. J’pouvais ben avoir peur de ce film-là. J’m’étais pas rendu plus loin que la première scène, qui est encore formidable aujourd’hui, mais le reste est plutôt décevant. Freddy devient une créature lovecraftienne (c’est ma semaine cyclopéenne, comme il dirait), mais la prémisse méta ne sert pas à grand-chose me semble (Freddy peut déjà m’attaquer dans mes rêves, tu peux pas vraiment topper ça en disant qu’il passe dans la « réalité »). Et ça manque de cauchemars, on fait pas mal juste recycler des trucs qu’on a déjà vus, et pas les plus intéressants; il n’y a rien d’aussi inventif que l’ostie…

Reality and fantasy meet in unsettling ways in this installment of the long-running horror series, which finds director Wes Craven and actors Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund all portraying themselves. As Heather considers making another film with Craven, her son, Dylan, falls under the spell of the iconic disfigured villain Freddy Krueger. Eventually, Langenkamp must confront Freddy's demonic spirit to save the soul of Dylan.

A year before Craven reinvented the horror/slasher genre with Scream, he did essentially the same thing with his own iconic creation Freddy. Here we are given a knowing, winking horror film that manages to deliver real scares and an incredibly original story. Freddy is less of a joker here and more of a demon, as…

After the disappointing “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” New Line Cinema decided to make another “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie and return the series to its creator, Wes Craven, who here manages to infuse the long-running franchise with a breath of fresh air: Turning the concept of horror sequelization on its head, the movie features the original cast members playing themselves in a new Freddy Krueger movie only to find themselves under siege in their personal lives by the wisecracking demon. It’s an ingenious way to send off the series, not to mention a great reward for longtime fans of the series, but even better is the fact that it’s a serious, well-done movie. The screenplay is tight, the special…

What better way to explore the repercussions of a genre than by creating a meta installment of one of its greatest franchises? New Nightmare is, in essence, a rehash of the plot of the 5th installment, but with the key difference of incorporating a meta element. The slasher genre, generally speaking, tends to explore a central theme of children paying for the mistakes of their parents; ironically, the widespread popularity of the genre among teenagers seems to indicate a thematic failure on the part of the movies. No stranger to cultural criticism, Wes Craven made the bold decision of creating a semi-fictional world in which the Nightmare series has had a negative effect on Heather Langenkamp (who played Nancy in…