A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
I’ll be honest.
I’m neither a big fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street series generally, nor a big fan of Wes Craven particularly. If I can rely on my sixteen-year old taste, the Serpent and the Rainbow – which I haven’t seen since and had to look up the title for – was pretty good. The Last House on the Left is tolerable, and so is the Hills have Eyes.
I hate Scream and its sequels, however, with the fire of a thousand suns. It's neither clever, nor original: The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre where poking fun at the genre long, long before and better than Scream. The self-aware humor seems mean-spirited and juvenilely hostile rather than light-hearted and loving. Jamie Kennedy’s “rules” – Kennedy is reason enough to hate Scream unto himself– are mostly superstitions and slander hurled at the genre by second-wave feminism. The characters are unbearably annoying, played by actors I both professionally and personally despise. That it was cast with popular actors of the time emphasizes the underlying nastiness. Scream altogether leaves me with a sense that it's is not really a horror movie, but a sarcastic thriller made for people who neither watch nor like horror movies. Any seasoned horror fan could poke holes in Kennedy’s bullshit with one hand while jerking off to a better horror movie on the other. It’s a movie for popular kids who want to watch a horror movie but feel superior to horror movies at the same time.
And its fans continue to be so.
But A Nightmare on Elm Street is ok. Tina’s death scene was something spectacularly awesome not soon forgotten, and Heather Langenkamp has a great performance. But, for the most part, it’s overblown and not all that great. ("Up your's with a twirling lawnmower", however, is an awesome idiom that should have made its way permanently into the language, and I aim to see it so.) Part 2 is a review unto itself. The sequels other than Part 3 I have not, and probably never will, watch in their entirety: they’re immature and make me physically ill.
Part 3 is generally considered the best of the sequels, and not without merit. It takes place in an asylum, which is a minor trend in slasher franchises and sometimes features the best entry within them. Friday the 13th Part 5 is located at a rehabilitation-halfway house that might as well, given what goes on, be an asylum; American Horror Story had an entire season in Asylum (Asylum itself about as good as an AHS season can ever hope to be); and, more recently, the Curse of Chucky (probably the best entry to date) occurs in an asylum. A glaring exception to this trend is the Halloween franchise, which seems particularly well-suited to that locale but, hey – the series did pull off the seemingly impossible feat of making Paul Rudd uninteresting and annoying.
It’s hard, however, to make Patricia Arquette uninteresting and annoying, even before Lost Highway made her unforgettable. Part 3 also stars John Saxon and Heather Langenkamp – who both die. Robert Englund returns as Freddy. I never cared for Freddy. He’s goofy and not-at-all witty. It also features a young Lawrence Fisburne, which affords some well-placed Matrix jokes for those who care for such things.
Arquette is taken to the asylum by her wealthy parents after a suicide attempt, rather than simply giving her Saturday morning detention and letting her fall in love with Judd Nelson. While there, she throws a fit and starts singing that goddamned nursey rhyme that is such a blemish on the series I have at times turned the movie off out of sheer annoyance.
Then we meet the other inpatients, who form a collective of odd characteristics that are used as plot devices later. There’s a sleepwalker, which foretells of a hilarious kill that the movie – sadly – doesn’t exploit to the fullest in bad taste; the tough, street-smart black kid; a wanna-be actress the movie does exploit beyond bad taste; a wheelchaired D&D nerd; a mute; and a drug addict whom, you guessed it, Freddy will pump up with heroin syringes just as A-train killed his bottom bitch in the Boys.
The main plot concerns the kids and their involvement, randomly or through hypnosis, with Freddy; Nancy and the main doctor have a romantic subplot fused with a let's-save-the-kids-at-all-costs saccharine sentimentality. The sleepwalker is held hostage – in a sequence very much akin to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – while the other kids must use their “dream powers” to defeat Freddy. (It’s all like so much Robert Jordan and his Tel'aran'rhiod, which has the distracting effect of making me want to read Lord of Chaos again.)
They face-off against Freddy, with most dying in ways that were much cooler when you first saw the movie, but dramatically decrease in entertainment value as you grow older. Whether this is the dated effects, the humdrum “poetic irony” of the deaths, or the wear-and-tear of weariness with life itself that makes all things formerly fun now forlorn and forsaken, the deaths – and movie as a whole – fail to hold up. It’s a movie you grow to appreciate in the absurd details.
For example, this is the most under-supervised and low-key asylum with patients of mixed genders you’ll find in a movie. The kids are pretty much allowed to go and come as they please, which shows a heavy confidence in the nerdy kids not being able to have sex with either the wanna-be actress or the wanna-be sober drug addict. (This is a suicide-centered asylum, by the way.) There’s a scene where the junkie and the two major geeks play D&D, which was a damn near impossible thing in 1987, and that the geeks don’t even bother to use as a pretext to flirt. Playing D&D with a girl, much less a hot one, was so unheard of that fantasizing about it was too fatalistic and depressing to indulge even involuntarily with wet dreams. But, here they are, with a hot girl rolling dice. And they play rules-lawyers and make it all about the game.
The fools don’t deserve to live.
There’s also a straight-up tangent involving a ghost nun who only floats intermittently into the movie to give exposition about Freddy. Apparently Freddy was the son of a nurse who was raped by hundreds of maniacs. Of course, how crazy and evil Freddy is depends on the magnitude of maniacs raping collectively and not, as biology might suggest, the singular magnitude of crazy comprised in whatever sperm impregnated her. This is hard to imagine. I don’t know what effects insanity has on the sexual response system, but I’m giving each maniac, liberally, a flat minute to work with, which – there being at least two hundred – would make this go on for at least 3 hours, and that’s with each maniac going only once. That – sorry – seems unlikely, given that this was, probably, the first time in so many years they had sex; so seconds and thirds and so forth seem plausible, if not certain. And it’s hard, impossible really, to assume that hundreds of maniacs – the collected mass of a good-sized marching band or two – would stand in a queue and politely wait their turn without fights. And all this going on without the hospital staff calling the police, and us forgetting why there’s hundreds of maniacs in a room all together anyway. Were they about to be gassed?
All in all though, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is a decent movie, the best besides the original and the only sequel worth watching. If you didn’t see it as a kid, it could easily be skipped unless you have a particular hard-on for asylums or Patricia Arquette. The soundtrack is just 80s-metal enough to give it a nostalgic feeling, but not enough to make the movie more enjoyable on its own merits, which weren’t a lot to begin with and haven’t multiplied like gremlins in the past 33 years.
I give it a soft 2 and a half stars.
I’ll be honest.
I’m neither a big fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street series generally, nor a big fan of Wes Craven particularly. If I can rely on my sixteen-year old taste, the Serpent and the Rainbow – which I haven’t seen since and had to look up the title for – was pretty good. The Last House on the Left is tolerable, and so is the Hills have Eyes.
I hate Scream and its sequels, however, with the fire of a thousand suns. It's neither clever, nor original: The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre where poking fun at the genre long, long before and better than Scream. The self-aware humor seems mean-spirited and juvenilely hostile rather than light-hearted and loving. Jamie Kennedy’s “rules” – Kennedy is reason enough to hate Scream unto himself– are mostly superstitions and slander hurled at the genre by second-wave feminism. The characters are unbearably annoying, played by actors I both professionally and personally despise. That it was cast with popular actors of the time emphasizes the underlying nastiness. Scream altogether leaves me with a sense that it's is not really a horror movie, but a sarcastic thriller made for people who neither watch nor like horror movies. Any seasoned horror fan could poke holes in Kennedy’s bullshit with one hand while jerking off to a better horror movie on the other. It’s a movie for popular kids who want to watch a horror movie but feel superior to horror movies at the same time.
And its fans continue to be so.
But A Nightmare on Elm Street is ok. Tina’s death scene was something spectacularly awesome not soon forgotten, and Heather Langenkamp has a great performance. But, for the most part, it’s overblown and not all that great. ("Up your's with a twirling lawnmower", however, is an awesome idiom that should have made its way permanently into the language, and I aim to see it so.) Part 2 is a review unto itself. The sequels other than Part 3 I have not, and probably never will, watch in their entirety: they’re immature and make me physically ill.
Part 3 is generally considered the best of the sequels, and not without merit. It takes place in an asylum, which is a minor trend in slasher franchises and sometimes features the best entry within them. Friday the 13th Part 5 is located at a rehabilitation-halfway house that might as well, given what goes on, be an asylum; American Horror Story had an entire season in Asylum (Asylum itself about as good as an AHS season can ever hope to be); and, more recently, the Curse of Chucky (probably the best entry to date) occurs in an asylum. A glaring exception to this trend is the Halloween franchise, which seems particularly well-suited to that locale but, hey – the series did pull off the seemingly impossible feat of making Paul Rudd uninteresting and annoying.
It’s hard, however, to make Patricia Arquette uninteresting and annoying, even before Lost Highway made her unforgettable. Part 3 also stars John Saxon and Heather Langenkamp – who both die. Robert Englund returns as Freddy. I never cared for Freddy. He’s goofy and not-at-all witty. It also features a young Lawrence Fisburne, which affords some well-placed Matrix jokes for those who care for such things.
Arquette is taken to the asylum by her wealthy parents after a suicide attempt, rather than simply giving her Saturday morning detention and letting her fall in love with Judd Nelson. While there, she throws a fit and starts singing that goddamned nursey rhyme that is such a blemish on the series I have at times turned the movie off out of sheer annoyance.
Then we meet the other inpatients, who form a collective of odd characteristics that are used as plot devices later. There’s a sleepwalker, which foretells of a hilarious kill that the movie – sadly – doesn’t exploit to the fullest in bad taste; the tough, street-smart black kid; a wanna-be actress the movie does exploit beyond bad taste; a wheelchaired D&D nerd; a mute; and a drug addict whom, you guessed it, Freddy will pump up with heroin syringes just as A-train killed his bottom bitch in the Boys.
The main plot concerns the kids and their involvement, randomly or through hypnosis, with Freddy; Nancy and the main doctor have a romantic subplot fused with a let's-save-the-kids-at-all-costs saccharine sentimentality. The sleepwalker is held hostage – in a sequence very much akin to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – while the other kids must use their “dream powers” to defeat Freddy. (It’s all like so much Robert Jordan and his Tel'aran'rhiod, which has the distracting effect of making me want to read Lord of Chaos again.)
They face-off against Freddy, with most dying in ways that were much cooler when you first saw the movie, but dramatically decrease in entertainment value as you grow older. Whether this is the dated effects, the humdrum “poetic irony” of the deaths, or the wear-and-tear of weariness with life itself that makes all things formerly fun now forlorn and forsaken, the deaths – and movie as a whole – fail to hold up. It’s a movie you grow to appreciate in the absurd details.
For example, this is the most under-supervised and low-key asylum with patients of mixed genders you’ll find in a movie. The kids are pretty much allowed to go and come as they please, which shows a heavy confidence in the nerdy kids not being able to have sex with either the wanna-be actress or the wanna-be sober drug addict. (This is a suicide-centered asylum, by the way.) There’s a scene where the junkie and the two major geeks play D&D, which was a damn near impossible thing in 1987, and that the geeks don’t even bother to use as a pretext to flirt. Playing D&D with a girl, much less a hot one, was so unheard of that fantasizing about it was too fatalistic and depressing to indulge even involuntarily with wet dreams. But, here they are, with a hot girl rolling dice. And they play rules-lawyers and make it all about the game.
The fools don’t deserve to live.
There’s also a straight-up tangent involving a ghost nun who only floats intermittently into the movie to give exposition about Freddy. Apparently Freddy was the son of a nurse who was raped by hundreds of maniacs. Of course, how crazy and evil Freddy is depends on the magnitude of maniacs raping collectively and not, as biology might suggest, the singular magnitude of crazy comprised in whatever sperm impregnated her. This is hard to imagine. I don’t know what effects insanity has on the sexual response system, but I’m giving each maniac, liberally, a flat minute to work with, which – there being at least two hundred – would make this go on for at least 3 hours, and that’s with each maniac going only once. That – sorry – seems unlikely, given that this was, probably, the first time in so many years they had sex; so seconds and thirds and so forth seem plausible, if not certain. And it’s hard, impossible really, to assume that hundreds of maniacs – the collected mass of a good-sized marching band or two – would stand in a queue and politely wait their turn without fights. And all this going on without the hospital staff calling the police, and us forgetting why there’s hundreds of maniacs in a room all together anyway. Were they about to be gassed?
All in all though, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is a decent movie, the best besides the original and the only sequel worth watching. If you didn’t see it as a kid, it could easily be skipped unless you have a particular hard-on for asylums or Patricia Arquette. The soundtrack is just 80s-metal enough to give it a nostalgic feeling, but not enough to make the movie more enjoyable on its own merits, which weren’t a lot to begin with and haven’t multiplied like gremlins in the past 33 years.
I give it a soft 2 and a half stars.