The Nightmare on Elm Street films, for the most part, have been just a notch below the Friday the 13ths. Comparatively speaking, they've been more carefully and lovingly made, the special effects are incredible and the humor is clever and even omnipresent. But all these movies are able to provide is a flat commercial high. When I was watching them, I think I realized that the grungy simplicity of the Friday the 13ths was a mixed blessing. But they did have a sort of melancholy, sometimes even underneath the self-referential campiness of the latter installments. And you could project onto them, they had subtext. Jason existed as an entity outside of the mainstream cinematic society. The victims were caricatures, but we could read Jason in terms of archetype. In the least of the Friday the 13th films, in particular Jason Lives, The New Blood, and Jason X you saw this very explicitly. The pop culture sludge of the Friday the 13th environment may be in a constant flux, but we could always depend on Jason to provide a straight-faced counterpoint. He was an automaton void of irony. Slitting throats and bashing skulls, unaffected by the modern age. Friday the 13th can not only be explained as being rich in subtext and simplicity; perhaps we could even describe them as being primordial. Even in terms of fairy tales. This value can best be attributed to the Jason character, a simple-minded golem if we ever saw one. The problem with A Nightmare on Elm Street is that it's all pop culture sludge. The victims are the heroes, and Freddy Krueger is manifested into their culture. As there is no golem in these films, no element disaffected by the hipness or irony, there is nothing melancholy about these films. It all comes off as a superficial joke. These films pop and fizzle, and eventually dissolve into the air.

You find that the killings in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: the Dream Warriors don't have the weight that the Friday the 13ths do. It has nothing to do with fully developed characters or the empathy that we feel toward them. There is a feeling that the lives of the victims in the Friday the 13ths have been interrupted. Their lives consist of little more but sex and weed, but the point is that they don't think that they are in a slasher movie. And Jason is detached about killing them. The violence in the Friday the 13th films is arbitrary and cold. In a sense, the killings in the Nightmare on Elm Street films have a greater visceral impact. What they are lacking is that nihilistic moral quality to the violence; the chilliness.

One of the best scenes in The Dream Warriors is the killing of one girl by television. The girl is struggling to stay awake by watching "The Dick Cavett Show" and by smoking and putting out cigarettes on her forearm. Dick Cavett says to his guest Zsa Zsa Gabor, "Let me ask you a question." He then abruptly transforms into Freddy Krueger and slashes at Gabor, following his request with the exclamation "Who gives a fuck what you think!" Gabor is barely able to squeal a Hungarian scream in response. The screen turns to snow and the girl walks toward the screen. Freddy's head pops out of the top of the television, his arms from the sides. He picks her up and shoves her head into the television. "Welcome to prime time, bitch!" he taunts. The problem here, as you can see, is that she knows that Freddy can get her, and so she is feebly trying to stay alive. The violence is inevitable, but it's not arbitrary. From the perspective of the victim, they're experiencing a dread that will eventually be relieved instead of a surprise or a shock. But the Nightmare on Elm Street movies aren't Friday the 13th movies, and that is a fact that I'm gradually becoming willing to accept. This sequence, as was the case with the ceiling rape and slaughter of the original Nightmare on Elm Street, is brilliant filmmaking in an almost pure quantifiable sense. None of the Friday the 13th films had any moments like this; their virtue always laid between the lines. An aspiring filmmaker may be able to learn something from this scene.

There seems to be a cut between Dick Cavett at the desk and Freddy. The transformation isn't smooth. But it happens so fast that we're sold on it; we don't get a chance to analyze the technique. It doesn't seem logical for the girl to walk up to the television when she knows that she is in a nightmare and that Freddy is going to kill her. However, the sequence doesn't have any music until Freddy pops up and grabs her. As she approaches the television, all we hear is the static. With music, I think the sequence would have been insulting. There would have been a threatening feeling to the scene and we would expect her to run away. With just the static however we sense that she's curious, maybe even hypnotized by what she has just seen. She believes that she is still in the real world. And she isn't thinking. She's acting on her immediate impulses. I really admire this sequence. You can find the strings if you look just a little bit, but the film sells us on it. This is a triumph of a filmmaker understanding the limitations of his technology and script and knowing how to overcome them.

There is an anger to the violence in this movie. Not only does he kill this girl, he calls her "bitch" when he does it. "Welcome to prime time, bitch," when he does it. "Welcome to prime time, bitch" is a laugh line. The whole idea of the death by television is a joke. The filmmakers seem to be appealing toward the sick sadists in the audience. I always actively avoided the Jasons and the especially the Freddys when I was a kid. A good part of that was in response to a killing from The Dream Warriors. Krueger wakes up a teenager and pulls out his veins or more likely I fear his tendons and walks him out an open window by them, as if he is playing with a marionette. Then when he's hanging outside, Freddy cuts the strings with his razor claws. I saw this on the Showtime network in the late '80s, and it seriously unnerved me. I hadn't ever seen gore like that before, and I don't think that I have ever seen gore like that in a mainstream film since. It's painful to watch in the same way that the papercut scene in Jackass: The Movie is painful to watch. You can relate to it. Everybody knows how a strained muscle feels. Now imagine if your muscles are torn OUT OF YOUR BODY and Freddy Krueger is tugging you along on them, and he is doing it as a joke, as almost an afterthought. This is worse than the attacks at the eyes in Red Dragon, Audition or Un Chien Andalou. It's the sort of image that you can only get in the surrealism of a Freddy Krueger movie, but it plays on our deepest insecurities about our bodies all the same.

Film critic Danny Peary describes how he was ashamed to be in the audience for Wes Craven's Last House on the Left where theatergoers cheered on the humiliation and rape of one of the teenage girls. Craven understands violence, he knows how to get under your skin. (So to speak for Christ's sake!) When watching Nightmare on Elm Street and Last House on the Left it seemed to me that Craven was using humor to moderate the effects that he has produced. He really pierced into something, and it terrified him. In The Dream Warriors the humor doesn't play as much as a distraction from the cruelty, it has become one with it. There isn't as much room for doubt in The Dream Warriors as there is the original Nightmare on Elm Street. There isn't any room for smarminess either. The film doesn't seem to be smart enough to develop these sort of problems. It doesn't have that ability to be incredibly self-conscious.

I realize that I have not talked much about A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, and I have probably reiterated a good deal of what I said in my review of the original film. The only things that I have really talked about in The Dream Warriors are two particularly impressive murder sequences. The explanation that I'm sure we are all tempted to make is that the Nightmare on Elm Street films are derivative and we are getting basically the same thing again and again. And that Mr. "I Viddied it on the Screen" here is getting to become quite the babbler saying all the same stuff over and over again, even being presumptuous enough to compare the Friday the 13th series to a franchise that he has yet to fully explore. I do hope that my reviews of these films don't all end up sounding the same, but I think a big part of the reason that this review is similar to my review of the first, is that they are indeed very similar films. The second film, Freddy's Revenge, tried to re-invent the series and push it into a new direction, but this film takes it back to square one. I don't see it as a digression; this is certainly a better film than Freddy's Revenge. Rather, I see it as the series becoming codified and standardized. The film seems to be almost everything that you hope for in a young slasher movie franchise. It may be the Once Upon a Time in the West of A Nightmare on Elm Street films; the language and conventions of the series recognized as strongly as possible. In reviewing these films, you seem to really be reviewing the special effects sequences and the killings. While the Friday the 13th films added up to something greater than the sum of their individual parts - some sort of attitude or aesthetic - the Nightmare on Elm Street films seem to exist purely in their individual moments. I don't think that I would say that individual killings or special effects sequences would work just as well or better outside of their context in the film, but those stretches between them are certainly at the service of the arias. Definitely.

The Dream Warriors pays easily detectable homage to (or if you prefer, transparently rips off) E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Poltergeist, and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. It's goofy stuff; the film is acknowledging its adoration of special effects and mainstream acceptance. The Dream Warriors is telling us that it's little more but a geek show, and that it wants to appeal to kids. You would have to be a kid to accept the E.T. sequence, where the Dream Warriors of the title illustrate the powers that they have discovered in the dream world. One of them is a Dungeons and Dragons nerd who turns himself into a powerful wizard in his dreams, a notion that only had to be lightly satirized in The Simpsons Halloween special where they take on the Nightmare on Elm Street series. There is another sequence that I would like to say pays homage to My Left Foot, but of course, My Left Foot was to come two years after this picture. The Dream Warriors predates the whole tardsploitation craze of the late eighties as shown by My Left Foot, Dominick and Eugene and Rain Man, but it seems to be working a bit from the same well of synergy. In response to the puppet killing, the victim's roommate tries to warn everybody by banging on the walls, as the poor guy is unable to speak. He's a mute. We saw the same thing in My Left Foot, where Christy Brown, afflicted with cerebral palsy crawls down the stairs and bangs the walls after his mother had left. Both sequences are quite frustrating and emotionally gut-wrenching to watch, but they play on the same hilariously tasteless premise: that of the handicapped becoming Lassies or Rin Tin Tins. You're reminded of that bit from the classic "Ben Stiller Show" about the boy in the black-and-white fifties series that has Charles Manson as a pet.

While the references to all these inspirational cheeseball pictures does have a sanitizing effect towards The Dream Warriors, its self-consciousness gives it a pleasurable "movie" flavor. While you can easily pick up on the references, they are somewhat embedded into the picture. You aren't distanced from the film by them. The Dream Warriors is more Kill Bill or Boogie Nights than Austin Powers. I like it when movies pay homage to the skeleton swordfight in The 7th Voyage to Sinbad. It gives me a case of the warm fuzzies. I theorize that a film can't be all that bad if it has either a monkey or an homage to the skeleton fight in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Scenes like that are genuine treats.

In addition to these films, The Dream Warriors makes an obvious reference to Videodrome (through the TV killing), and that is much thornier but of course highly in tune with the nature of the Nightmare on Elm Street picture. Videodrome was not a box office or critical success. It made back less than half its budget and Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and was reportedly nauseated by it (Ebert wasn't really a better critic in the '80s, he just had enough balls to give thumbs down to stuff like Videodrome, Blue Velvet, Brazil and Full Metal Jacket). It has developed a decent cult following however, and its presence in The Dream Warriors is plausible. I didn't much care for Videodrome either. As far as Cronenberg goes I'm more interested in the stuff behind addiction than the addiction itself. Crash was a better movie to me. That film was L'Aventurra with body mutilation, and it worked. The real target of that picture wasn't masochism; it was bored bourgeoisie utopians from whom masochism is the only way that they have left to interact. The pessimism of Videodrome just seemed too fashionable for me to buy; I never thought that there was anything behind it. Cronenberg seemed to be making high-profile gross-out pictures, a notion that is admirable only to a certain level. Videodrome was about addictions towards violent pornography. The imagery of the consumption of pornography is intermingled with that of sexual intercourse and drug use. Speaking only in terms of visceral impact, The Dream Warriors is not as good as Videodrome. But it is indeed Cronenberg-esque. In addition to that television sequence, there's a killing in the picture where Freddy corners an ex-heroin addict, transforms his finger knives into finger needles and kills her through overdose. As he is pushing the poison into her body, his eyes roll back in mild orgasm and he exclaims, "What a rush!" There are certainly creepier images in Videodrome, but The Dream Warriors is in the club.

The Dream Warriors is also clearer than Videodrome. It's not totally there, but it's thematically a step above Videodrome. Whereas Videodrome muddied things up with its consistently repulsive protagonist played by James Woods, the heroes of The Dream Warriors are virginal innocents. They aren't asking for it the way that Woods did. The film expands on that brief suggestion in the original Nightmare on Elm Street that the teens are suffering for the sins of their parents (who of course created Freddy Krueger). In The Dream Warriors, Freddy picks off several wealthy suburban kids stuck in a mental institution. Their parents are distant and don't have time for them or really believe them when they say that Freddy Krueger is coming after them. In using Krueger to symbolize the demons of a past junk habit, you may wonder if the heroin addict's addiction was created by being bored and unloved by her parents and the adult world. As they have created Krueger by burning him alive, they have created her addiction through never relating to her. The Dream Warriors is saying that it's not the fault of the kids that they're screwed up; it's the fault of their parents and the society that they inhabit. These people are so innocent, it's impossible for them to take responsibility for what is happening to them. It's all Freddy Krueger, a byproduct of the corruption of the adult world. Early in the movie all of Freddy's killings look like suicides. There aren't really suicides. The kids aren't really killing themselves, Freddy Krueger is. There is certainly something congratulatory and pandering about the film.

This aspect is interesting in examining the narrative strengths and weaknesses of the picture. One of the only good performances in the film is Larry Fishburne as the sympathetic streetwise black orderly. It's a nothing role, but Fishburne is pure pudding here, just understated enough to play the straight man to the craziness and sell the role. The other good performance is, of course, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. If you were to put all his screen time together, I don't think that it would amount to much more than five minutes, but Englund seems to savor every one of them. "Welcome to prime time, bitch" was an ad-lib from Englund. He's getting into the angry sadism of his movie monster. Aside from the cumbersome makeup and special effects, which I can imagine is still a biggie, Freddy Krueger is an ideal role. Englund is barely in the picture but he gets top billing and he has become enormously famous for the role. And it's challenging in a constructive way. He has to be scary enough to justify having a movie made about him, and he has to act in an abstract undeveloped way. I imagine most actors would tell you that if you have a good script and a good character, your job is cake. You just have to get into the character. This takes some work, because it has little to do with human beings. He's playing larger than life.

Englund and Krueger are good. Everyone else is awful, but it's hardly their fault; their roles are thankless. The teens in the movie and the non-believing adults have a broad cartoonish quality. Studying Heather Langenkamp, who was square in the original and very funny, you realize that she has put a complete faith in the project and she comes off as foolish. She does her trademark barking at the unbelievers and in one awful scene where she is reunited with one of the teens she thought dead, jumps up and down giggling in excitement. She's typical of most of the actors in the film who are robbed of depth and are unable to make any other choices but those towards excess. The film seems to be looking for its footing early on. There are some interesting visuals that remind a bit of early Luis Bunuel, particularly when he was working with Salvador Dali. Brutal stuff, like a rotting pig carcass that suddenly comes alive. And there is a sexualized near-killing, where a serpentine phallic Freddy Krueger tries to devour a girl whole. Nobody really has a lot of sex in these movies. The only time you really see sex is when Freddy gets off with his killings. The virgin purity of all the stuff surrounding it makes it all the more disturbing. But The Dream Warriors seems to be perpetuating the major flaw of Dario Argento's Suspiria (the well-lit and brightly colored horror sequences and the utter contempt for suspense) and not including the thing that made Suspiria work (the arbitrariness of the imagery). The Dream Warriors is trying to put the excess in terms of a plot.

Once we get to the institution, and the movie begins developing its characters and theme (a little bit), things begin to work. The film gets a traditional, even musical structure, where a killing breaks up scenes of the teens talking about Freddy and trying to catch him. Four rules for a slasher film series: 1. Keep things simple. 2. Don't break too much from the formula. Expand your creativity towards the killings. The killings are your arias. 3. Love your fans and love your movie. 4. Don't expect to produce much more but a minor high. The Dream Warriors has standardized the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and it has played by the rules. It works.