Having been involved heavily in school, work, and editing my video project for Utah State University's Film Festival (which I hope to eventually show pictures of in my FAQ section), I realized that a very decent spring movie season is coming up and I have to get my regularly scheduled A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master review out of the way. You know, I'm aware that it's unprofessional (since when has anybody who has been reading this been expecting professionalism) and this just isn't the time and place, but having spent seven or eight hours today trying to figure out Vegas Video and putting together this project it's right up there in the apex of my mind. I'm not sure if it's any good; I think that it may be very amateurish. It's certainly one of those movies where the real appeal is to see your friends in costume. But it really doesn't have any of the things that I hate in the movies. There is a sensibility behind it. I've made choices and have thrown out things that were pretty good but just didn't work. My drawback is inexperience and a lack of patience, but I think that I might eventually be onto something. It seems sort of pretentious to call myself a filmmaker, but I will anyway, and as a filmmaker I think that I understand that the filmmaker employs both great ego and great self-hatred in the creative process.

Why do filmmakers hate critics so much? For the most part I couldn't fathom being hurt by criticism about my movie; nobody could hate it more than I. I guess there is always the fear that a good critic will expose me as naïve. But I haven't made a message movie, and if I had made a message movie I would know that I could possibly be attacked as naïve, and I would at some level be able to internalize that criticism. Steven Soderbergh said something along the lines that film critics are worthless to him and have rarely told him something that he didn't already know. Their only use is to plunder for lines to put in the ads. I can't imagine that critics would tell me something that I don't already know either, but I don't think that they are worthless and I think that dismissing critics is very much akin to hating film. One of the things that I always loved about Quentin Tarantino is that he loves critics. He does; he even says that he's grown out of Jean-Luc Godard but he hasn't grown out of Pauline Kael's reviews of Godard. He seems to understand that critics are movie lovers also. Tarantino makes the sort of movies that he wants to see and puts things in them that interest him, and so he has a very healthy and honest motivation in being a filmmaker. As I make more videos I find myself leaning more and more towards this position and I feel much more satisfied with what I'm doing as a result. I agree with his whole aesthetic, playing effect for effect's sake and making movies that feel like movies.

Related to this is Tarantino's ability to be self-conscious without being satirical. The self-consciousness isn't to make him look really cool or clever. That Kael review that stuck with him is about Godard's Band of Outsiders. She says something along the lines as "it's as if a bunch of movie-crazed Frenchmen are in a café reading this banal American crime novel and are making a movie out of it. Not of the novel, but of the poetry that they read between the lines." There's the difference between satire and healthy cinematic self-consciousness. You have to dig a little bit to catch the film references in Tarantino's self-consciousness. They aren't there because Tarantino is making a commentary about, say, Deliverance or Psycho; rather, he wants to recreate a bit of the effect of those pictures. Writing and filming my piece, I found myself consciously stealing the ending of The Shining, but I don't think that many people would catch it without my help, as I don't really labor the reference. And because of that it's clearly not my intention to comment on The Shining or to show you how clever I am in putting a Shining reference there. I am trying, I don't know if I have achieved it, to duplicate the effect of The Shining. To end with a bit of a whimper. Stanley Kubrick is the shit at everything, but his endings are often the best part of his films, and in a way I'm stealing from Dr. Strangelove as well. Kubrick doesn't score the nuclear holocaust with "We'll Meet Again" only to be clever or funny. He does it to be funny, tragic, hateful, humanistic and nihilistic. It's long enough that we have to reflect on it, it doesn't exist to get a laugh.

There is a moment like that in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master when we are in a diner and Blondie's "In the Flesh" plays in the background. I used the exact same song in the beginning of my movie and I had decided upon it before I saw The Dream Master. "In the Flesh", "In the Flesh" as a song in a horror movie about a boogeyman that comes for you in your dreams (which is what my movie is also I guess), has that quality that I'm looking for. I know that on some level it's sort of simplistic to have pop songs about loving somebody so much that want to see them in the flesh stand in for the desires of the serial killer, but the effect is fascinating to me. It's self-conscious and funny, but it doesn't exist to take us out of the movie. It exists for no other reason than to terrorize the victims. It's this harsh "fuck you" to the people that he's going to kill. The humor of including "In the Flesh" exists out of a sadistic desire to humiliate these people. It's about the reduction of human beings into a sick joke; it's not about the sick joke itself. That's the quality in the nihilistic horror film genre that I've attempted to incorporate when given a chance to make one. There is a lingering sad poetry to scoring the buildup of a murder to "In the Flesh." It exists for the sake of mood and not for the sake of reaction (both mood and reaction are subsets of the "cinema as experience" that I have repeatedly held up as my "Aristotelian ideal").

Yeah, I've talked about my movie, which you can't have possibly seen, in a review of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master not only because it's on the top of my head, but because I want to convey that this picture took me by surprise and is striking a spot very close to my own heart. I went in thinking that this was going to be a joke-fest, the satirical/comedic elements of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors gone off the deep end, and I came out amazed at how serious and powerful it takes all this. This is a really horrifying movie, and one of the best in the series. You may have heard about a scene where Freddy Krueger conjures up a pizza that is inhabited by the souls of the people that he killed. He sticks his claw in a piece of sausage that has the face of a teenage boy screaming on it, and eats it. Either before or after the tasting he makes a crack along the lines of "Mmmm, soul food." Or how about when Freddy turns a female bodybuilder into a cockroach, gets her in a roach motel and then squashes it, yellow-green goop slipping, no, vomiting out of the entrance. A superficial reading will support the view that the Nightmare on Elm Street filmmakers are getting goofy on us. Maybe. But consider that both of these scenes severely reduce the size of the victims in relation to Krueger. He's this omnipotent giant compared to them. The power dichotomy between the killer and the killee is made overt. Krueger is a deity. The people that he kills, literally in the latter instance, are insects that crawl on shit.

We also need to consider that both of these sequences are awfully nauseating. The Dream Master seems to understand the importance of the gross-out in the horror film. It's about our insecurities about our bodies, topical for a film about pubescent sexually-anxious teenagers of course, but equally important in the broader arena of just terrifying the audience. Good gross out gore, the kind that we see in The Dream Master, makes you want to throw up while disturbing the hell out of you. The gore in The Dream Master isn't only disgusting, it's uncomfortable. I'm not exactly sure how I can explain it. There is a sadism to it; a joy. The film doesn't see the gore as the point of the sequence, but as sort of an afterthought. We actually see it as being invented by Freddy Krueger and not the filmmakers. He comes off as sort of a Marquis De Sade character, wallowing in greasy gobs of guts. To paraphrase a shocking line in Wes Craven's Scream, Freddy Krueger wants to see what your insides look like. The film sells this difficult material so that when the infamous scene of Freddy being resurrected by flaming dog urine came up, I wasn't thinking "This is ridiculous," I was thinking "The devil has a wicked sense of humor."

The film climaxes with the souls of Freddy's victims, which have been bubbling out of his skin, clawing their way out of his skin. This is a demise that proves much more powerful then the wink-wink Nosferatu-inspired death scenes in parts one and three. (I forgot how Freddy passed on in part two.) Even more importantly, it wasn't until this point that I realized that the film was working from the same pool as Hieronymus Bosch's "Hell" and Dante's "Inferno" in dealing with the body as torture chamber. (In Dante I'm thinking of the Wood of the Suicides in the 7th Circle, where former suicides are turned into trees whose twigs break off easily.) The Dream Master is Classic Comix Dante, which proves to be the destination that these movies have been heading all along. That pizza scene; there is a modernity to it, a satirical charge to be sure, but it's certainly akin to the tortures that we see in the Great works. The picture is in bad taste, but it's a classical bad taste. And while these sequences are modern, they aren't too modern. They won't go out of date.

The Dream Master is fifteen years old, but the killings feel fresh. The director is Renny Harlin, famous for action films like Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island, Die Hard 2, and Deep Blue Sea. Roger Ebert has routinely praised these pictures for delivering the goods without really transcending the genre and for the most part I feel that that is a very accurate assessment of his oeuvre. The local alternative newspaper rates movies on a scale of one to four stars, and in translating what the ratings means it offers examples of movies. The category of movies changes every week. Well, Pirates of the Caribbean came out and so their category was pirate movies. They decide that two stars means it's a Pirates, and one star means that it is a Cutthroat Island. Whoa, Cutthroat Island wasn't a great movie, but it had a few good moments, a nice villain with Frank Langella and a cute monkey. Why does Roman Polanski get little demerit for being self-indulgent and dreary, and Harlin get little credit for being slick and innocently entertaining? Anyway, Harlin films all of this like a horror movie. He takes it very professionally, and the film comes off as the slickest of all the Nightmare on Elm Street films so far. Harlin doesn't have a single postmodern bone in his body (none of his films really do) but he has several sadistic ones.

Similarly, the actors who play the victims really give it all they have and don't try and upstage the material or show that they are better than it. I can't imagine that it would have been easy to have your director say to you, "OK, now Freddy has turned you into a cockroach and you turn to see that there is another cockroach trying to free himself from the glue. You realize that you are in a roach motel. Now let's go do something brilliant!" But the scream queens in the picture are hella sincere and they have come to the project with exactly the right attitude. It's the difference between Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and Geoffrey Rush in Pirates of the Caribbean. One is an egoist that wants to come out of the picture unscathed, and the other is a professional that wants to do it right. Rush didn't get praised for his work in Pirates, but he did it right. Similarly if any of the victims in The Dream Master had condescended to their material, they may have earned more praise but it would be all wrong for the delicate effect of the picture. Those cries from that piece of sausage on Krueger's claw come from the heart, and the sequence is genuinely sad and tragic.

Tuesday Knight takes over the Patricia Arquette character from The Dream Warriors. I actually like her much more. Arquette isn't much of an actress in formal terms. Like the much-hated Keanu Reeves, her acting style is pure wood. Flat and sort of blunt. (Which is funny considering that her brother David, also a formerly bad actor, is on the very opposite end of the spectrum: the ham.) Since pretty much everybody knows how to cast her though, she works very well in everything that she does. Ed Wood, True Romance, Bringing Out the Dead, even Holes, they all know exactly how to use her. She wasn't bad exactly in The Dream Warriors, but Knight is a straighter, more traditional actress, and her presence in the picture is much less stylized then Arquette's was. You accept her as a teenager and thus there is a stronger thread of humanity going through the film. Frankly, she's also sexier. She has that "blonde virgin" flavor that you see in Ashlee Simpson. It's wispy, unassuming, childishly angelic. And yet you never think her dim in the movie. She gets one of the film's best laughs when she tells her mother that Freddy Krueger is chasing her from beyond the grave because she and her "tennis pals" burned him alive.

The soundtrack is great also. In addition to including "In the Flesh" in the diner scene, the end credits are scored by Sinead O'Connor's "I Want Your Hands on Me" and a rap with Freddy Krueger and the Fat Boys (?!). This is superior goofiness. There is also a curious bit of pop poetry in the inclusion of "Anything Anything" by Dramarama in a martial arts training sequence. It's great listening but there is also a real sincerity to it and the movie develops a pleasurable John Hughes feel for a moment. Billy Idol's "Fatal Charm" pushes the facial muscles into a smile as well during a sequence where Freddy alarmingly seduces a lonely teenage boy by transforming into a naked centerfold swimming in his waterbed. Sadly, according to some comments on Amazon.com by Jeff Maher, the official soundtrack does not include any of the songs that I just mentioned. I'll have to take Maher's advice and make the album up myself. This soundtrack is Wes Anderson good.

I'm really dying to give A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master an utter and complete rave, but there is a very significant flaw that keeps it down to only becoming slightly above average: It doesn't make a lick of sense. The movie seems to pick up right off from where Part 3 ended, but it took me a while to figure this out (they changed lead actresses of course) and I had thought that several of the returning characters were already dead. The filmmakers are assuming a familiarity with the preceding segment that isn't there. Although it was a direct sequel to the original Nightmare, The Dream Warriors was fairly self-contained and you could watch it cold. The Dream Master starts out with several of the characters going into one another's dreams and we don't know what the fuck is going on! The Friday the 13th films were smart and practical enough to give us briefings through clips from previous outings, satirizing the idea of the Friday the 13th "saga" while telling us the little bit that we need to know to start out the movie. Oh yeah, and I still have no idea what a Dream Master is. The Dream Master of the title is supposed to be the sister of Knight's boyfriend. Being a Dream Master makes her able to control her dreams and fight Freddy. I'm not clear if Knight passed the ability to her, or if it's innate. And I don't understand how she brings people into her dreams. In The Dream Warriors it was a network of similarly gifted people. I think.

I was bothered a little by all the complexities of The Dream Warriors, but The Dream Master really tried my patience and my comprehension. The biggest problem with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies proves to be the excess of narrative and its utter lack of developed internal logic. You seem to see in every subsequent movie that the characters are following rules that weren't established in the previous entry. Why would Freddy want to come into the real world in Part 2 when that is how Nancy killed him in Part 1? Why would the Dream Warriors want to fight Freddy in the dream world where he has more power as opposed to dragging him out into the real one? And now I have to wonder how the lucid dreaming stuff works anyway. Is it a talent or is it something that you can develop? The idea of having a Dream Master makes it sound like the filmmakers are striving to develop some sort of messiah "chosen one" figure but they never follow through.

The script is credited to six different writers, including Harlin and now-he's-a-superstar Brian Helgeland. Michael De Luca, who was later promoted to president of production of New Line (getting his first job as executive producer on Freddy's Dead) before moving to Dreamworks, had a hand in it also. The killings and the dialogue are really fantastic. Having the teenagers describe black bags under the eyes as being matching luggage is pretty forced, but admirable all the same. I love that line about tennis pals, and Freddy delivers one of his most famous lines in this picture: "How sweet, fresh meat." But, yeah, the storyline feels like the product of committee. Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Screenplay (for L.A. Confidential) and the Razzie for Worst Screenplay (for The Postman) in the same year, 1997, and he proudly displays them side by side in his office. His co-written script for The Dream Master is indeed one of the best and the worst that I've seen in a while.

However, the many good elements of The Dream Master are able to raise it up to something sort of inspiring. While it would be putting it lightly to say that it's a flawed picture, there is something here that not only celebrates something omnipresent but generally unexplored in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but something in the horror genre. This is a movie of my own twisted heart. To coin one of Freddy's Johnny Cochran-esque rhymes, give it a peek, at the very least.