After some deliberation, I decided to go with the original Nightare on Elm Street this month. It’ll be a nice break for those who were getting sick of my Friday the 13th reviews, and it will also help set up for my upcoming review of Freddy vs. Jason. Get ready for a classic!
As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!
With these old horror movies, watching them now, sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re scary or hilarious. Sometimes, like with Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan, it’s easy. This one walks the line.
For example, the movie starts with Freddy making his famous murder gloves: Scary.
Then, immediately it cuts to a title card that looks like it was made by a kindergartner, with a musical cue that sounds like dropping a brick on a cheap Casio keyboard: hilarious.
Basically, the backstory of the plot is this: there’s a small suburb which is peaceful until a guy named Freddy Krueger murders upwards of twenty children. He gets arrested, but due to a technicality he is released back onto the streets almost immediately. Enraged, all the parents in the community decide to burn him alive in a furnace and then never speak of it again, so the town can go back to being a quiet suburb again. Years later, Freddy starts haunting the town’s children again, only he has the ability to kill them in the real world if they die in the dream.
So yes, Freddy the supernatural child killer is the bad guy of the movie. But in a way the parents are also the villains of the film, because not only did they murder a man in an incrediby gruesome way, but they covered it up, and continued to cover it up to the point of putting their children in a large amount of danger.
Anyway, back to the plot.
Pretty much every kid in school has a dream about Freddy Krueger, which you can tell because nobody will shut up about it. I’ve never seen so many people talk about their dreams for so long!
Also, one girl remembers that the dream is pretty similar to a jumprope song they sing in that song about how you should be terrified that Freddy is going to murder you. Three questions:
- If you’re a parent trying to keep the secret that you killed a child murderer, why would you teach your kids a jumprope song about him?
- Secret or not, why on earth would you teach your kids a song about a child murderer?
- Why do you even need to sing when jumping rope? I’ve never understood that.
This one girl is scared from the nightmares, and her parents are out of town, so she invites some people over, including the main character, Nancy, and her boyfriend, Johnny Depp. With all those people over she feels safe and falls asleep. Instantly she is sleep murdered.
Nancy’s parents find out that she was at the house when Tina died. Now, if I were her parent I would have said something along the lines of “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry your friend died and you had to be there when it happened.” You know, general stuff to try to make her feel better in what is probably the darkest moment of her life. Instead, Nancy’s parents decide to use a different tactic and yell at her for being at a sleepover with boys. Clearly I still have some stuff to learn about parenting.
Some more people mysteriously dream die. Kids start waking up with strange knife wounds and burns. At one point Nancy wakes up holding a hat that says “This hat belongs to Freddy Krueger, P.S. I’m murdering children in their sleep. For reals!”
The parents respond to this by trying to convince their children that sleeping will solve all problems.
Then Johnny Depp gets pulled into his bed and erupts into a Blood Geyser that puts Spring Break Shark Attack to shame.
At this point, some of the parents reluctantly start to trust their kids. Sort of. Not really.
Nancy hatches a plan to fall asleep, but sets her alarm to wake her up. The plan is to grab Freddy right before she wakes up so she will pull him out of the dream world into the real world. Then as soon as she wakes up, her dad will be there waiting for her to finish Freddy once and for all. It’s a great plan, because the parents in this town can be trusted, right? Her dad promises to help her and then ignores her request immediately.
So she pulls Freddy out into the real world and would be in real trouble, except she military grade booby-trapped all the lightswitches and door. Hey genius! You live with your alcoholic mother and told your dad to come help you. What if one of them had gone through a door or turned on a light? You lucked out. If the adults were human beings instead of apathetic assholes, one of them would have tripped one of those booby-traps FOR SURE.
She gets Freddy into the basement and lights him on fire and he sort of dies. This is where the movie SHOULD HAVE ended. It didn’t end here. Her dad notices that the house is on fire and decides now that there is property damage on the line it is time to start caring. Then the entire logic of the movie suddenly changes. The original idea was that Freddy in the real world would be just a dude without his powers. But suddenly, now Freddy has his powers again. And he’s invincible. And suddenly, he has an interest in murdering adults too, and wake-sleep-murders Nancy’s mom.
Overwhelmed by how futile it is to fight Freddy in his current form, Nancy turns around, closes her eyes, and thinks happy thoughts about how her friends and mom are all alive and Freddy isn’t a mean dude trying to kill her. Then, suddenly, her happy thoughts world comes true! However, she should have been more specific about her happy thoughts, because Freddy Krueger has been transformed from a mean dude trying to kill her into a mean murdercar trying to kill her. Then murdercar Freddy eats her and her friends. The end. Credits.
I take back what I said at the top. This movie’s actually pretty easy to place on the scary-hilarious continuum.
Catch up on past installments:
Valentine
Jason X
Jason Goes to Hell – The Final Friday
Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
