San Francisco Bay Guardian

In honor(?) of the new A Nightmare on Elm Street, we're recapping all of the Elms so far. Find more on the Pixel Vision blog.

The stage was set for Freddy vs. Jason (2003) long before Freddy’s glove made a cameo at the end of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) — yet another in a long line of misleadingly-titled films promising the last stand of the boogeyman in question (lest ye forget, Jason X came out in 2001). Who didn’t want to see the wisecracking scourge of Springwood go glove-to-machete with Camp Crystal Lake’s burly maniac? Truly, it would be a grudge match for the ages, with two of the most franchise-able movie monsters (combined total in 2003: 17 films) poised to lure both long-standing loyalists and new blood into the theaters. (And even if the entire film was simply a canny marketing tactic, it worked -- Freddy vs. Jason was a huge hit, earning $82 million in the United States alone.)

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By Peter Galvin

Birdemic: Shock and Terror: it's heeeere! This underlit, out-of-focus and erratically-edited independent film is America’s newest cult obsession, recently booking a West Coast theater tour (including Fri/30-Sat/1 at the Roxie) on the back of some impressive press coverage and a thumbs-up from Adult Swim superstars Tim and Eric. It’s the story of a freak eagle attack on Half Moon Bay, and there’s no pussyfooting around the reality that Birdemic is an amateur work. If it weren’t for the awkward fades between scenes, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the film was cut entirely in-camera. With all the fuss building around the picture, the allure must be in laughing at it, and setting out to laugh at a bad film can be a tricky endeavor. Searching for whimsy in a poorly-made film can be an infuriating struggle of highs and lows, a pitfall Birdemic avoids by being laughably inept in every frame.

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Before Wes Craven got meta with Scream (1996), he tried his self-referential hand at the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The result was New Nightmare (1994), which reunited Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund as … Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund. Also playing themselves: actor John Saxon, writer-director Wes Craven, producer Robert Shaye, and Freddy Krueger. Yep, that’s how he’s credited.

Where was there to go after the dreadful Freddy’s Dead (1991)? Not because of the title’s finality — see also: the so-called Final Chapter (1984) of Friday the 13th — but rather its inescapable shittyness. Part six offered more comedy than horror, with lazy deaths, bad acting, and weak puns — even by Freddy standards. But New Nightmare was a reinvention in the truest sense. It’s a film that, while far from perfect, was well ahead of its time. In fact, Craven pitched it as the plot for part three, but the studio decided against it.

That’s probably for the best. New Nightmare works well when it’s referencing its predecessors: that’s kind of the whole point. Part three would have been too soon — that film could have been clever, but it wouldn’t be full of the Easter eggs that make New Nightmare such a treat for longtime fans. And, yes, I’ve been rewatching these movies for the past week and am, in general, above-average geeky: this film works for me in a way it might not work for others. But I think that’s OK. Scream is broader (and better) because it appeals to fans of all ‘80s horror — New Nightmare is just for Freddy Krueger devotees.

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