With all the hype on the forthcoming remake of Nightmare on Elm St., Dreadcentral.com is taking a look back at Freddy 4 and providing a lil Freddy 101 for us…
Courtesy of Dread Central
“With the remake slinking out of the boiler room and into theaters soon, I became intoxicated with revisiting A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master – the most financially successful Nightmare sequel before it was dethroned by Freddy vs. Jason in 2003. The Dream Master took in $49.3 million domestic gross at the box office in ’88, and inspired the production of more Freddy games, toys, dolls, surfboards, pogo sticks, race cars, planes and railway systems than anyone could’ve predicted.
Indeed, America had completely flipped its shit for Freddy, and the majority of the horror community had no idea how to cope with it.
The psychosexual A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge aggravated audiences by breaking most of the rules set by Wes Craven’s original, and the third film, Dream Warriors, turned some fans off with its enhanced Krueger-the-Clown bits. Yet it was The Dream Master that really set some folks aflame. It’s understandable, to a degree – a friend of mine, Mike Crooke, may have coined the phrase “Vegas Freddy” when recently discussing the film, referring to the way the eye-popping effects tended to thrill rather than chill. That flashy atmosphere resulted in a delicious irony: Krueger was as cruel as ever, but he was no longer scary.
Incredible, considering that the kills are all fairly despicable: Freddy jams his entire glove into a hefty boy’s belly while whispering in his ear, he tosses a long-suffering girl into a lake of fire to burn alive, and even sucks a bookish, asthmatic girl’s breath out of her body via what is presumably her first – and last – kiss. If the deaths themselves aren’t enough, Freddy is so tickled to be murdering the teens that you half-expect him to do The Twist after each kill. All this malice on display, only to leave viewers declaring “we ain’t scared.” What a weird moment in pop culture history …Read More
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