Agreed. I'd modify it and say 'art can happen'. In this case, I think the effects guys were doing great art in the second film. But the film itself, if it's art at all, is kitsch at best. Hamburger, more realistically! When a film is thrown together like that with so little care and attention to the storyline, simply as a cash-in, it's not art: it's product. Going from the first film to the second is like like eating a ribeye steak, then being served McDonalds!
Regardless, Freddy is returned from the grave, his power still deriving itself from the souls of the Springwood children he's killed and collected. We get to see Joey, Kincaid and Kristen from the third film again. Kristen is played by actress and singer Tuesday Knight this time. She might as well be playing someone else, as she in no way resembles Patricia Arquette's Kristen physically or in terms of performance. It's the biggest weakness in the film, because Arquette's haunting performance was the heart of the previous movie. I care about Joey and Kincaid, but I only know this is Kristen because Joey, Kincaid and Kristen's obnoxious mother tell me she is.Yes, I've always liked Christopher Young's scores. I particularly liked his Hellraiser work. The second film has the issue of there not being an 'established style.' Failed sequels tend to go in a couple of directions: slavishly photocopy the original or completely fail to understand the original and make a film that barely ties in with the original at all. His score is good for a horror film, but as you say, isn't really an Elm Street score. Angelo Badalamenti really turned that around with his score, even if it lacks the effectiveness of Charles Bernstein's original.
It's almost as bad as Top Cat rapping in the opening titles of Yogi's Treasure Hunt!! It's was terribly 'in Vogue' at the time for pop tracks to have break out sections involving rap. Even the remix version of I Want Your Hands on Me on the fourth film has a rap section on it.
I think some of the Blu-rays are actually worse than the DVDs! It's appalling that the original film on VHS here in the UK was uncut and a Blu-ray from 2010, has one of the most iconic death scenes in horror cinema cut, probably because no one at Warner did their research properly when it came to digging out what was probably a print. I mean, the Elm Streets made New Line. There would have been no Lord of the Rings series at New Line without the Elm Streets. It's terrible to see them treated so badly. I've watched all these films on VHS, broadcast, DVD and now Blu-ray and these Blu-rays are a bad job!! Like I say, I hope there are 4Ks next year for the 40th anniversary. I just don't think New Line's current owners care about the films very much. They forget that by the late 80s, these films were a sensation when they came out.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that in the early days, many Blu-rays were using the same source materials as the DVDs. While it was acknowledged that HD scans made better DVDs, there was often a lot of DNR and edge enhancement applied to the HD scans due to the extreme compression used on DVDs. Additionally there were scans created for the failed HD-DVD format which were of lower quality than a Blu-ray would use that were repurposed when the format war ended.
These Nightmare transfers were created before the 2010 Blu-rays, so they're at least a decade and a half old. Modern Blu-rays would use a 4K transfer from the original camera negative. And, indeed, Warners insist on OCN for everything now. Only Christopher Nolan, with his unusual pulling power, insists on the interpositive being used. I remain a big advocate for the format but the Blu-ray is only as good as its source. I just watched Elm Street 5 and the quality is drastically better than any of the past ones.
Yes, it was a part of my deep dive into horror, inspired by Twin Peaks funnily enough, and a season of Hammer horrors. I simultaneously had an education in 1960s/70 Hammer supernatural stuff and 80s slasher horror. I think the Nightmares on Elm Street attracted me because of my lifelong nightmare problem. I also appreciated the vein of dark humour (also evident in the Hammer films.)
It's daft that my VHS version was more complete than the Blu-ray. Tina's body splashing on the bed freaked me out. I'd only seen the 'friendly Freddy' of the fourth film.
Freddy's so distinctive, yet archetypal, both in full light and in silhouette. Wes Craven plays on that, of course, in New Nightmare, when we see a silhouette and realise that Freddy/the evil force has previously been incarnated as Graf Orlok.
The novelisation of the third film uses the Wes Craven/Bruce Wagner screenplay, so it's very different from the final film. I was disappointed at the time, as I love the third film, but it was an interesting, more serious take. Ultimately, I prefer Chuck Russell's approach.
Yeah, I thought they'd be good for some speedy gardening. Then I looked at Johnny Depp's face in Edward Scissorhands!
I get the impression that in Springwood, it's a bit like Sunnydale in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, in that a lot of people know what's going on there and no one talks about it. Kristen openly berates her mother in ANoES4 for her mother and her tennis friends torching Freddy. So maybe the bodies of Freddy's victims are kept close together. Kristen was the last of the Elm Street children killed by Freddy. After her, Freddy has to use other ways to get at people, because he's had his vengeance, but never wants to stop.
Lisa Wilcox manages to make sure Alice remains the same character, just a more mature, confident version. It would have been so easy to make Alice into someone completely different by the end of the films. Even more, in the fifth film, with a different creative team, she manages to play a convincingly matured version. Without wanting to risk sounding too pseudy, the Elm Street films, like many genre films, encompasses archetypal characters that represent aspects of us all. Alice, as a consequence of absorbing so many of the different archetypal characters, actually ends her tenure in the films as a fully rounded human being, integrating all those characteristics. It's a hell of a performance and it's a shame she doesn't get better recognition for the role. That's the trouble with the way genre films are treated. I've had so much fun rewatching these films and talking about them.
I need to watch these films. I haven't seen them, bizarrely, but they've avoided the horrendous multiple continuity sub-series that we see in the likes of the Halloween, so I know that if I buy the eight films, I can watch them straight through, then grab the other 'Jason' films.
