(Long post inc)
So, I've been watching all the Elm Street movies these last two weeks, and it gave me a lot of joy. Prior to this I had only seen the original and the remake from 2010, so this gave me the opportunity to watch all the sequels and Freddy vs Jason which came out 10 years ago. This is how I would rank them, and also descriptions of what I liked/disliked about the movies:
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors - After the second movie which was a big letdown, this sequel did pretty much everything right, and in my opinion even topped the original. Some of the scariest scenes in the whole franchise was in this movie, particularly the early scenes with Patricia Arquette walking around in her dreams. The movie had several memorable scenes and deaths, and it was cool to see some of the original cast as well. Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne in two of their earlier roles (Patricia's first movie), and as a whole the movie was just a great mix of a good cast, an interesting script and concept, and a Freddy that was still more evil than he was a wise-cracking joker.
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street - A classic that I think most people who are into horror has seen. It's a classic movie for a reason and has a lot of memorable scenes and deaths. Johnny Depp makes his first movie role, and it's nice to remember that he used to be a human being before he only started to take weird roles in movies. I don't know what else to say, this is just a great movie overall.
3. Wes Craven's New Nightmare - The seventh movie, and the last of the sequels in the franchise, not counting Freddy vs Jason. Wes Craven was back in the director's chair for the first time since the original, and the result was one of the best movies in the whole franchise. I will say that this movie is unique compared to the other 6, since it's not really a continuation of those 6 movies, but rather a new perspective on the story, as the events in nr7 takes place in "the real world", and Freddy haunting the actors that were in his movies. It might sound weird or lame, I thought it sounded really bizarre the first time I heard the story, but as a movie it really works. Possibly the darkest movie out of the 7, at least has the darkest Freddy, and some cool stuff. You can really see connections in this movie to Scream, which Wes Craven made 2 years later.
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - The fourth movie was really when things started to turn for the worse, but hadn't quite gone over the line yet. This is the movie where Freddy started becoming more of a funny character, and there is a scene where he puts on a pair of sunglasses which is a good example of something he wouldn't have done in the first 3 movies. I feel like this movie was still a very good one, because while it was more to the funny side, it hadn't crossed the line, so there was still some clever writing and some great scenes. It was too bad that Patricia Arquette didn't come back to reprise her role, and I do feel like they killed off the people from nr3 a bit fast, but as a whole, Renny Harlin made a good sequel.
5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge - Oh boy. This one was a mess. There is a phenomenon with remakes and sequels, where they try to change a lot of things from the original, to sort of justify making a new movie. And it felt with this movie like everything they changed, they changed for the worse. They completely fucked with the rules from the original, but few of the new features made any sense. Basically Freddy tried using the main character as an avatar to escape the dream world, and it was just weird. Freddy running around outside in the real world, that was bizarre. This was also possibly the gayest movie I have ever seen. And it's fascinating, because the people behind the movie had no idea, and no intentions in making the movie that way, but it came out so homoerotic, and there are many strong gay-vibes in this movie. The main character is about to have sex with the cute girl who has a fling on him, when he runs out, and goes home to his best male friend, to sleep in his room. And it was just so weird, there was even a line in the movie where the friend said something like "so you came here to sleep with me?", which was just awful. On the plus-side, this movie did have some good stuff too. The openingscene with the bus was really cool, and there were good scenes throughout.
6. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare - The sixth one, and is generally regarded the worst together with the fifth. I'm giving this one a slight edge over the fifth, because in the fifth one, the main storyline or concept was starting to get a bit stale, and in this one they at least tried to change things up a bit. New characters, it felt very Twin Peaks-inspired (which I got confirmed from the documentary that it was), because the setup was a bit more like a mystery, and the town of Springwood was generally frightening in this movie. I feel like the David Lynch-vibe was there, because there were several sequences that felt like "is this dream, is this reality, what is happening?" that Lynch often has in his movies. With that said, the movie still suffers from Freddy being more funny than scary, and the last 10 minutes being in 3D felt a bit out of place, though I have to give them some credit for it. I feel like the way they incorporated it into the movie was kinda unique and cool, with the main character putting on a pair of glasses in the movie, and everything after that was in 3D. It had some memorable scenes, like Freddy killing a character inside a video game, and while I didn't care much for the characters overall (the main female role I liked), it was also a bit cool to see Breckin Meyer in an early role.
7. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - While this is my least favorite for now, it wasn't all bad. The main characters were enjoyable, and there were some memorable death scenes. It had the funny Freddy and a lot of really bizarre scenes, the dinner-scene comes to mind. I didn't really care much for Freddy as a baby and coming back, and I felt like the main plot of the main character getting pregnant and the baby starting to dream about Freddy felt a bit silly. It felt a bit all over the place, though it had some cool scenes, like when Dan gets killed on the motorcycle.
Topic: The Movie Thread v. Order of the Phoenix (Read 212732 times)
