MY LIFE IN HORROR: YOU CAN’T CHECK OUT BY KIT POWER

​My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.
 
You Can’t Check Out
 
Before
 
My memory is I loved this one. Not as much as three, but a whole lot.
 
The video had a making of, that I remember. It ran through how they did some of the big set piece effect shots - Freddie’s death, and of course the roach transformation.
 
Ah, the roach transformation.
 
That’s kind of it, though. The big stuff. Soul pizza. Some kind of time slip (us Who kiddies tend to remember time slips). I had a pretty good sense of the narrative shape of three, at least in the broad brush strokes, but this one, it’s just ‘Absolutely all her friends die in really inventive ways, and then she kills Freddy somehow’ and that’s about it.
 
Which, given how this experiment has gone so far, doesn’t rally engender confidence.
 
But what the hell. We’ve come this far…
 
After
 
Okay yeah, that was a lot of fun.
 
I will start with the negatives, because there are a few. The music and hair are both firmly in none-more-80’s territory, which long time readers will know is epicly not my jam. There’s a moment when one of the fabulously big haired teenage women references watching Dynasty that feels painfully dated (though I guess for nostalgia lovers it’s a thing of beauty). Elsewhere, we have the bespectacled geek friend who Does The Homework, big brother who does Karate to bad 80s AmeriPunk to deal with the Loss Of Mum, and obligatory bad parenting (one overworked alcoholic single dad, one mother perfectly happy to secretly drug her teenage daughter with dream dysphoria to force her to sleep - that last especially egregious considering her daughter survived the last movie). At the point at which the camera scrolled past an MTV ident on it’s way to a particularly amusing death reveal, my 80’s pop culture bingo card had been filled in, and I was only 25 minutes into the movie.
 
Whilst the performances overall are a step up from the last film, the love interest for Alice, ‘hunk’ Dan, is a bit of a plank - though in fairness, there isn’t much going on in the script, either. His job is entirely to look pretty and be ineffectual - so, I guess, kudos to the movie for at least flipping that particular gender stereotype, though this execution does rather ram home the point that, male or female, such characters basically don’t work at all. I guess it’s good that he wasn’t actually killed off, and his removal for the final confrontation did give Alice the needed (and deserved) spotlight - but still, can we please just stop doing this?
 
Probably my biggest beef with the movie is the lack of any explanation as to how and why Alice becomes a sponge for her dead friends personality traits/powers. Unless I missed a line of dialogue somewhere, it seems to make no sense at all, with Kristen passing her power to pull others into her dreams as she dies utterly arbitrarily. Later dialogue seems to indicate Freddie actually needed this to happen, as Kristen is the last of the Elm Street kids, and Freddie could only kill the kids of the parents who killed him, so he needs Alice to have Kirsten’s power so she can keep pulling other kids into her dreams so Freddy can kill them and it literally makes no sense at all because Alice isn’t one of the Elm Street kids, so…
 
It’s particularly galling because it’s such an easy narrative fix. Either make Alice the last of the Elm Street kids, or have Freddy tied more to the location than the bloodline of his killers. As for Alice, The Human Personality Absorber, again, we’ve had Kristen and her powers in part 3, so it can be done easily enough, but either I missed a key line of dialogue, or the film just doesn’t bother even the most cursory of explanations - which is a bold narrative choice, given that this premise is what the entire of the rest of the movie plot hinges on. I await correction on this from seasoned Elm Street fans, but right now it feels like a frustrating and avoidable misstep.
 
Still, for all of that, Elm Street 4 was a hugely enjoyable outing, and in many ways feels like the best yet. Certainly, this film seems to really get Freddy - seems to understand and embrace his status as a horror icon. From the opening shot of him standing in the scrapyard (with the admittedly nonsensical voiceover line/non-explanation for his return; “they shouldn’t have buried me - I’m not dead”), to a reveal shown in a reflection as a soon-to-be-victim lifts weights, through to Soul Pizza and the final confrontation in the church, his appearance has weight. Hell, at one point he even parodies Jaws, with his claws standing in for dorsal fins cutting through the water. It’s funny, sure, but there’s still an edge, with the film walking that classic 80’s horror line of gruesome deaths we enjoy/are repulsed by. In that sense, Freddy is the perfect ringmaster for this kind of movie, because he attracts the same push/pull audience response; He is disgusting, and we are delighted and disgusted by him, and he in turn is delighted by our disgust.
 
This is aided by the best effects work of the franchise so far. You'll Believe A Woman Can Be Turned Into A Cockroach! You’ll also see Joey slaughtered in a waterbed (complete with a nice throwback to his Playboy bunny obsessions, and callback to the Johnny Depp fountain o’blood from Part 1), a nifty trip into a black and white movie, and a Freddy death scene that is as spectacular as it’s trigger is dumb and arbitrary.
 
We’re back to the narrative flaws here, and it’s pretty egregious; the entire story revolves around a re-purpose of the ‘now I lay me down to sleep’ child's prayer, with some gubbins about ‘The Dream Master’ and seeing it’s own reflection, and, um, really? Turns out 4 movies worth of horror could have been resolved if Freddy has just gotten a look at himself? And it’s not like we haven’t seen him in reflective surfaces, like, a lot, over the course of the last 8 hours. For all that I ragged on the incredible disappearing nun in the last movie, the idea behind it was sound, and it created a really fun twin track finale, as the chaps in the real world try and bury Freddy’s remains while the kids in the dream realm try and stay alive. Here, we instead have this basically-unexplained power where every time Freddy kills one of her friends, Alice gains some of their power and personality, and then she literally kills Freddy by remembering a nursery rhyme we’ve never heard all the way through before and I’m winding myself up again with how stupid it is, and it is, but once we’re past the stupid, the effects extravaganza as the souls of the murdered children tear Freddy apart from within is awesome. It’s grotesque, and glorious; one of the few moments in the franchise where the effects work rubs up against Hellraiser territory, albeit with Freddy as victim, meaning we can enjoy the carnage with a clear conscience.
 
Overall, narrative irritations aside, this is a brilliant entry in the franchise. The revamped Freddy makeup reflects the fact that this film understands who the star is, and that’s underlined by some of the most imaginative deaths to date. Add in the uptick in acting from the cast, a well-paced story, and the continuity with the previous title, and what you’ve got is a slice of premium Freddy based entertainment.
 
And, for me, that’s kind of a problem.
 
I had incredibly fond memories of this franchise, and high hopes that revisiting it would be one of the highlights of this project. In most of the other cases where I’ve gone back to the source material, that’s proven to be the case. But not here. I think there’s a lot of ways in which this movie is the best so far in the franchise (though I enjoyed 2 more), and it’s…. just okay. No great shakes. It feels like the series is cursed with mediocracy; like each movie is held back from greatness by some avoidable flaw or another. It’s still a great idea for a series of films, and Freddy is still, here especially, iconic…
 
But we’re four movies in and it still doesn’t know what it is in the big picture. This is the closest we’ve come in four films to establishing a mythos, and it’s perfunctory, muddled, and kinda at odds with what’s gone before. There’s no coherence. I mean, bloody hell, even Friday 13th had, by movie four, worked out a narrative arc that made sense for it’s protagonist. I know with all these movies they were making it up as they went along, but it’s equally clear from this entry that they just don’t care about joining things up in a remotely coherent way. And that’s pretty damning. Doubly so, when you consider the care they’ve taken with the fantastic effects work. Like, they can spend all that time and effort making shit look this good, but nobody can be bothered to sit down and dope out a half convincing arc?
 
What’s dispiriting about this is the realisation that the creative team, by this point, just didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit about getting the story right, because they knew Freddy was the star, and as long as he was right, and the effects were good, they’d be set.
 
And, you know in a narrow view, they were right. There a lot of ways in which this is the most assured entry in the series so far; it knows exactly what it’s trying to achieve.
 
But my issue with that is, by not giving a shit about the story, they are, ultimately, showing contempt for an audience that gives a shit about story. And as a fan of both horror and storytelling my entire life, showing that contempt for your audience is about the worst sin you can commit.
 
I had a good time with Elm Street 4. But it has confirmed what previous entries seemed to suggest to me, which is that this series simply isn’t worthy of the love I gave it as a child. The joy it gave me was real, and the pleasure it’s given me today is too, but it’s not brilliant, earth shattering horror film making. It just isn’t. It’s a fine central premise executed to various degrees of competency by people who didn’t seem to quite understand what they were doing, and apparently never cared to learn.
 
So, I’ll finish the experiment, but, part two aside, I suspect as I do so, this’ll be my last trip to Elm Street.
 
Well, so it goes.
 
 
 
Ratings so far:
 
2
4
3
1
 
KP
28/4/19

READ KIT'S OTHER ARTICLES IN HIS NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET SERIES BELOW