December Update

hey folks,
I promised I'd let you guys know if there was any delayes on the reviews, so here it is: there will be some delayes in the comming weeks.
yes, who would have thougt I'd fall victim to the thing known as Christmas, but here I am, dragged from my home to a place in the middle of nowehere (also commonly known as Belgium) to spend some time with a sweet old lady that keeps calling me Raoul or Micheal (swear to god I couldn't make it up if I tried). so I'll be without internet for the coming days, and I'm really sorry about that, believe it or not, I had my Christmas review of ''Santa Claus conquers the Martians'' done and ready to go, but expect it in Januari along with the third and fourth instalment of the nightmare on Elm Street.
and if you're asking about the poor quality of this update, both in timing and grammar, i'm sorry to inform that i'm typing all of this on my Phone while hogging the only wifi hotpoint in town like a madman.
See you next year guys, merry Christmas for what it's worth and have a safe new year.
Grimmbreak

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge 1985 Review

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

Letdown sequel and Freddy’s strange obsession to get inside teenage boys

And we’re back with the second entry to the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' saga. And with no other than, according to most, the lowest point in the series, Nightmare on Elm street 2: Freddy’s revenge.

Produced only one year after the original nightmare came out, this is the movie that has fans and critics slamming down their fists in union. But is it as bad as most say? Well, let’s take a look at the plot.

Confused teenager Jesse and his family move to a new house, and it would only be logical that the house would be the same house where Nancy ‘banished’ the dream demon, Freddy Kreuger, and she sure did a lousy job of it, because guess who comes knocking down the walls of Jesse’s dreams? And he wants nothing more than his body for him to play with while they together replay the shower scene from 'American History X' with Jesse’s gym teacher and some whips…wait did we just stumbled into a different kind of movie?

Yeah…it’s gonna get weird, but the gist of it is that dear ol’ Fred wants to take over this whiny little bratty kid’s body to…murder around I guess? Ok, fist question here, why does Freddy want to be mortal again? He does know that the last time he was mortal he got burned harder than Taylor Swift at the VMA’s a few years back, there’s the obvious fact that he’ll walk around like a guy that has stuck pancakes to his face, and this time, people will actually be able to waste his scorched ass. I mean, it’s never explained why he was able to haunt kid’s dreams and become practically a god within his own realm, but it sounds like a hell of an upgrade from kiddyfidler groundskeeper to all powerful dream demon that murders all who sleep.

Just seems like a cheap trick have a possession story, but well, beside that gaping plothole, what else can there be said about this movie? Well, ok, disregarding the fact that Fred’s got a death wish, why does he want Jesse in particular? He even says at the beginning that he’s special or something, how is he special? Was he born under the star of plot convenience when all the BS planets were aligned? It’s never explained, Jesse’s got a younger sister, why didn’t Fred go after her? guessing with his past he’d probably think ’the younger the better’, and kids are much more easily fooled, why didn’t he just show up in her dream as a giant fluffy bunny or goddamn Justin Bieber or whatever.

But no, he wants Jesse, not any other kid in the neighborhood , just him and his awkward teenage romance with the girl next door.

Ah yes, the girlfriend Lisa, played by Kim Myers. She practically carries the movie in the third act, and why isn’t she the main character of the movie? She has a much more interesting personality and she is probably the best girlfriend any one could ever wish for,  you start telling about how you have dreams in which you brutally murder left and right? She accepts it and actually tries to help. You think you might have a spiritual connection with a child murderer that has been dead for the better part of the past decade? She believes you and search for a way to sever the connection. I mean really, faithful, helpful, cheery, nice and cute as a button? Do girls like that even exists?

So yeah, the story and the protagonist aren’t exactly the strong points of this movie, so what is?

Well, the effects are nice. Sure, they ain’t as good as the first one, shocker there, but at times they were creative, well, except for when the movie decide to pull a Hitchcock and redo a scene from “Birds” with an extra kamikaze ending. Seriously, exploding birds, what the hell where they thinking?

But for the rest, I guess credit is due where it is, and some of the effects where interesting. One of my favorite being at the very beginning where a school bus is being driven of the road as the landscape changes into a hellish abyss. Pretty neat scenery, but the whole movie does feel a little cheap. But all that good is being ruined by the fact that the first movie did everything a tenfold better, and the things they try to do just seems strange. For example, the entire movie, Freddy doesn’t have his glove, weird right? The knives just come out of the fingertips . I first thought it might be because the glove actually plays in the movie as an object of both rejection and temptation for Jesse, and is actually a physical object in the real world. But then the vodka started to slowly dissolve from my brain and I remembered that the glove was also a physical object in the first movie, where Freddy did have a glove at all times. It might be a small mistake here and there, but piled up, they do tend to piss off viewers.

But did this movie do anything right? In my opinion it did, I really liked the Freddy in this movie, it seemed like he had more of a personality, and even though he wasn’t in the spotlight much, he does get his times worth in the third act, which gives us a nice rest from our other obnoxious main character

But now we come to the big question, the one that had everyone’s jimmies rusted when they saw this flick:

Are the Homo-erotic undertones of Nightmare on Elm street 2 there by accident or was this really meant to tackle the subject of homosexual feeling during the coming of age of adolescence?

Well, there’s no question that some of those undertones were blatant, if I can say so. Sure I joked about it earlier with my summary of the plot. But to be fair, this movie deals a lot with sexuality, a lot more than in the first movie, ironic seeing as that no one actually had sexual intercourse in this movie, while in the first movie, the act was very much there early on in the movie to set the stamps on the characters of “the whore” and “the jock”, an almost ritualistic scene in every slasher movie, and above all, Wes Craven movie, who would never pass on the chance to have a cliché to then shine an ironic light on it.

But the fact that this movie deals more openly on the theme of adolescence and sexuality is all well and good, but why are the homo-erotic undertones so blatant? But a better question is, are they really there?

I believe that the homophobia of the modern age might have clouded our mind a bit on that subject, we have been crying wolf for so long that we tend to see them everywhere. I’ll admit that there are some scenes that are very much ‘gay’, there is no disputing about that. Like when half awake, Jesse stumbles into a leather bar and runs into his Gym teacher, who obviously has a ‘Dom’ complex, who makes Jesse exercise in the middle of the night only to lure him to the showers, where he gets his own misfortunate encounter with Freddy. There is no question that this scene was very much ‘gay’, yes. But maybe, and I’m just speculating here, this scene was meant more as a way for Jesse to overcome his father issues and fear of school. The strong, masculine, dominating Gym teacher could almost be a textbook description of how most teenagers saw their own father figures. And the fact that Freddy , through Jesse, actually serves what he deems a ‘just reward’ only proves Jesse’s own obsession with his revolting nature against his own father who is actually a very strict masculine figure.

There are many more questionable scenes, such as Jesse’s disgust toward the act of coitus with Lisa, but what most seem to miss is why he is revolted. In the scene Jesse and Lisa are getting it on in a private room at a party, when suddenly Jesse’s tongue turns into a misshaped mess of flesh as he was about to use it on her bosoms, which forces our wimpy protagonist to run away in fear to seek comfort at his bro’s house. This was seen by many as very proving of the undertones of the movie. But lost in translation is actually a much deeper scene than that. The fact that Jesse is disgusted in himself, and not Lisa, seems to actually show us that Jesse suffers from a ‘Hedgehog dilemma complex’ rather than homosexual urges. He is not disgusted by the female body, but is actually afraid of hurting Lisa was he ever to get this close to her.

So is this movie as Avant-guard in homosexual movement for the slasher genre as everyone is saying?

No, I’m not saying that the gay undertones aren't there, because they are. But I think it comes more from the lack of direction from the director’s part rather than actual intent.

So with all this said and done, is this movie any good? Well, it makes for an interesting tale about coming to terms with adolescence by having a demon literally taking over your body, but it makes for an horrible sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street. But I still don’t think it’s deserving of all the hate it’s getting.

Personal rating: 5/10

Critical rating: 4/10

Things I’ve learned from ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Freddy’s Revenge’

- The ‘Revenge’ part is pretty played down, although the kill count is pretty damn high.

- Jesse’s performance in his bedroom of ‘Touch me’ was still better than Miley Cyrus at the VMA’s.

- Exploding birds invading other movies than ‘Birdemic’

- When a dude breaks into your room in the middle of the night, jumps on you while you’re in bed and put his hand over your mouth while saying that there is something trying to get inside his body so he want to sleep next to you, your reaction shouldn't be calmly giving him relationship advise, no matter the bro-mance

Freddy’s Kill count:

14

Best Kill in this movie:

Exploding birds

Best Kill so far:

Blood geyser 

A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984 review

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Edward scissor hands on acid

A yes, Wes Craven and his strange fixation to deconstruct the ‘Slasher’ genre. His most notorious achievement in that field that would later become his opus moderandi  would be no other than 1996’s “Scream”, but did you know that nightmare on Elm street was originally meant to be an anti-slasher? Believe it or not, one of the most famous face in slasher history was meant to end the entire genre, but it all backfired and Freddy Krueger’s nightmare became what pretty much saved the knife wielding drunken teenagers slumber party killing world.

It also comes to mind that I should do a review on Friday the 13’th, seeing as it was two days ago, but I couldn't be bothered. You want a short review of that movie? Here it is, it’s hella boring and disappointing for the reason Scream spoils in the first five minutes of its movie, and don’t give me that crap “But you saw him at the end of the movie on that boat” well tippy doe and call me Dorothy, cuz I’m tipping down the yellow brick road and beating the wicked witch of the east to death with her broom. When we want to see a zombie behemoth man-child murdering a bunch of helpless teenagers, the movie shouldn’t blueball us like that only to show us that it was a guy at the other end of the glory hole. At least the sequels had all kind of awesome adventures, like going to the hood or into the bloody spacefuture.

What was I speaking of before I got lost in camp crystal lake? Ah yes, A nightmare on Elm street, the original nightmare. I got the whole collection a few days ago and thought, well, why not review the entire saga? So expect the whole month of December to be Freddy related, with a very special something unrelated on Christmas.

Nancy and her friends all seen to be plagued by the same nightmare, a man in a green and red coat and a brown hat with knives at his fingertips trying to turn them into shish kebab. But as they try to have a sleepover in hope that the nightmare will stop, things go awfully wrong as the nightmare becomes reality. Their parents and the whole town seems to know more that they are letting on, and as the kids begin to drop like flies, it’s up to Nancy to find a way to fight this monster, because you know, it’s not like it’s the cops job or anything, who are as useful in this movie as water at a Russian party.

This movie is amazing, for one, Robert Englund kills it as Freddy Krueger. It’s definitely one of his trademark roles and one fans loved for years. The rest of the actors do a solid job for the most part and it’s always hilarious to see a pre-famous Johnny Depp.

The imagery and the effects are some of the best for the time, the fact that a great chunk of the movie happens in dreams gives the art department a whole lot to play with, and play they did. The sets, especially the well-known ‘boiler room’, which is a the realm that Freddy creates as his own personal hunting ground, looks amazing, although there is still work for improvements here and there. And the effects are some of the craziest and mind-blowing that wasn’t meant to be perceived by the human mind at that time. Some of them even creep me out, after 31 years most of it still holds up perfectly.

If a had one gripe with the movie, it would probably be Freddy himself, or better said, what his reputation made him out to be.

Freddy, Chucky and Ash are probably my favorite horror icons, simply because they are quick to the gun and have a whole lot of humor in what they do. I’m not really a fan of the quite, slow walking murder machines, like Jason or Myers. I prefer my crazy psychopath’s with some bite. And even though I hate to admit it, the Freddy of the original nightmare on Elm street didn’t have much personality. But then again, they didn’t really know what they were going to do with him and probably never expected to be such a success. So in the end it’s not really a flaw but rather a character that hasn’t yet been developed.

And although the movie can be a bit slow at times, it always surprises you with a dream sequence you didn’t even know you were in.

Overall great movie, amazing effects, solid acting, especially on Englund’s side. Definitely worth a watch, or multiple even. See you in part 2, Freddy’s revenge.

Personal rating: 8.5/10

Critical rating: 9/10

Things I’ve learned from ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’:

- All it takes to turn a upper privilege white girl into John Rambo is a lunatic who disrupts her beauty sleep.

- Johnny Depp’s body contains enough blood to fill the red sea, no wonder the rum was always gone.

- Also, his jar of dirt didn’t save him this time either.

- The fact that Freddy Krueger is a well-known child murderer and possibly molester, doesn’t stop the internet of writing romantic fanfic about him. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna scrub the filth of my eyes with sandpaper.

 

Freddy’s kill-count:

4 kills

Best kill so far:

Blood geyser 

Sint 2010 Review

Sint

Bloodshed and Pepernoten

Aww yeah, time to get some culture up in this b8tch.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in the northern European country of Holland, where the weather’s sh8t and the potheads are many. As much as I sometimes dislike the country and its lack of mountains, genuine eatable food, horrible driving habit and overall simply retarded government, if there’s one thing I’m grateful for, it’s the extra holydays (and the beer is also worth mentioning).

Seriously, there are so many holydays in this country, it’s impossible to count, the Dutch don’t drop their pants without taking the day off to celebrate. You’ve got the day big  J was born, the day he died, the day he rose up again, the day he went up to heaven, the day he got his first beer. Hell, they even have a holyday named “Koninginnedag”  (admit it kinda sounds like a Norwegian deathmetal band), but I dare you to find anyone who actually knows what the hell they are celebrating.

But one of these Holyday’s is on the fifth of December called “Sinterklaas”, where an anorexic Santa gets of his cruise ship with his countless racial offensive ‘helpers’ and goes around scaring the hell out of your kids and throwing candy to your face that taste like a camel’s a88 covered in spices.

But technically, it’s exactly the same as Christmas(an holyday the Dutch also celebrates 20 days later), except Santa put down his slim Jim and the elves are literal 18e century slaves who brings presents to all little good boys and girls, which instead of putting them under a tree, they proceed to cram into their wooden shoes because the concept of actually being able to walk was optional in Holland.

So of course, in 2010, someone thought it was a great idea to copy “Santa Slay” and give our friendly bearded friend a makeover, said genius was Dick Maas, who also made a movie about a killer elevator that was awesome and that I definitely recommend ( ‘De Lift’)  , but who now makes movies about killer festivities, how low one can fall…

So in the spirit of December, and one day after Sinterklaas, let’s take a look at the Dutch horror fest: Sint,

It’s 5 December once again it the great capital of the Rastafarian worldwide, Amsterdam, and everyone is busy preparing for yet another holyday. Well, except for detective Hoekstra, although he is also preparing but in his own way, which involves a surprising amount of firepower, because he know that if there is a full moon on the fifth of November, the friendly saint Nicholas, who was a ruthless child kidnapping pirate back in the days, will set port with his nightmarish ship and his army of the death to murder, pillage and burn the city to the ground.

And as the full moon is just about to rise on this faithful night, we follow a desperate attempt to stop this massacre by Hoekstra and other soon to be dead underperformed teenagers.

Lost ya didn’t I? it’s probably around this point that you’ve come to wonder “pirates, ghostship, undead army, is this the Dutch Pirates of the Caribbean??”

And unfortunately I’ll have to answer no, although I’m sure Depp would make this movie quite interesting, the whole pirates thing is pretty easily overshadowed when you see an undead St Nicholas riding on rooftops with his horse to escape the cops.

And before you ask, is this movie mean to be silly, yes. Oh yes it is, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have some great scares here and there.

The acting’s bearable, for the most part at least, the main teenager is a tad bit annoying at times and everybody seems to be reading lines instead of trying to give life to a character, but eh, I had my expectation lowered when I heard about this movie anyway.

The atmosphere in the later acts of this movie are great but I still feel like the ending just kinda happened, very little build up, no real feel of urgency, just disappointing and rushed.

But really it’s not about the characters or the story, it’s about seeing St Nick coming to town killing and maiming and being an all-around badass, and then leaving , kind of a simple summary for the whole movie I guess, and while it lasted, I kind of liked it.

But the biggest problem I fear for ‘Sint’ is the language and cultural barrier, which for non-Netherlanders can be kinda hard to pull trough. As far as I know there isn’t a dub, so if any non-Dutch want to give it a try, brace yourselves, it can be rough.

So at the end of the day, is it worth watching? Well, it’s as good as one would expect. But I’m not so sure that’s a compliment…

Personal rating: 6/10

Critical rating: 4.5/10

Things I’ve learned from “Sint”

- Did they just blow up all those kids at the end?? HOW IS THIS A GOOD THING??

- Zombie ninja pirates are awesome at stealing yo kidz

- Cops are d8cks