David Vining's Blog, page 121

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

This movie is pretty much a complete mess, and I’m into it. Wes Craven decided to come back to the franchise that really made his career for the third time (the combination of the poor reception of several of his previous films along with the actual financial success of The People Under the Stairs along with New Line Cinema wanting to squeeze just one more drop from the fruit that was the franchise seemed to have done it), and he wanted to go in a different direction. Pulling the story back ...

The People Under the Stairs

Looking at the IMDb rating of The People Under the Stairs, it seems like this is close to a fan favorite. It’s one of his highest rated films (only at a 6.4, mind you), but I was simply bored silly by this attempt at the variation of a haunted house film. There’s also supposed to be a heavy subtext to the film, but the characterization of the two main villains is so broadly comic (while not actually being funny) that I’m not even sure what the target is supposed to be. Combine that with the ...

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Finally, one Nightmare on Elm Street film decides to dig even a little bit into Freddy Krueger into a character. However, they made the mistake of being obsessed with his past rather than his present or future. Long-term producer of the franchise and new director Rachel Talalay along with screenwriter Michael De Luca approached this intended final chapter in the franchise by digging into the unknown lore behind Freddy, trying to offer up simplistic psychological reasons for Freddy to be a ch...

Night Visions

It does not surprise me that this thinly veiled pilot for a potential television show didn’t lead to anything. It’s essentially “cop who doesn’t follow the rules” clichés mixed with “generic psychic” to pretty much outright embarrassing results. What makes it even worse, in my mind, is that Wes Craven not only directed this, he co-wrote it (with Thomas Baum), and even executive produced it. This was his baby, and it’s awful. Maybe not as awful as Shocker, which is not saying much, but still,...

Shocker

Wes Craven was at the point in his career when he should have been incapable of making movies this bad. Working regularly in and out of the studio system since the early 70s, almost twenty years, he has the technical skill and access to a craftsman talent pool large enough where the complex production process should be streamlined enough to where he can approach the actual production with a confidence that allows him to write with fewer compromises. Instead, the competent production highligh...

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child

Really, this is the fifth entry in a franchise centered around a dead guy who invades people’s dream to kill them. Do we need to spend more than half of it with our main character trying to convince people around her to believe in the guy? Still, despite all of my frustrations with the bulk of the film, the ending is a large example of how I simply can’t hate any of these films. Sure, the storytelling is frustrating, but the visuals are so dynamic and imaginative, especially as the climax co...

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Wes Craven was done again with the series, and New Line producer Bob Shaye kept things going by hiring the young, Finnish filmmaker Renny Harlin to find a way to continue the series. It’s an odd situation. The script by Ken and Jim Wheats, with additional work by Brian Helgeland, it takes a handful of the characters left over from the last film, closes out their story, and then tries to extend that to a new cast of characters. It also seems to want to do something with the idea of a Dream Ma...

The Serpent and the Rainbow

Wes Craven went full Dario Argento’s Suspiria, fully embracing the logic of dreams in this adaptation of a non-fiction work by Wade Davis, taking the greatest strengths of his previous work and stretching it out to feature length. That feeling is the movie’s greatest strength, really giving its final thirty minutes a nightmare feeling that steadily increases over time, though Agento did it better.

Dr. Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) is a medical researcher who goes into the deep, dark places o...

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors

Wes Craven was convinced to come back to the franchise he accidentally birthed after the second film, which he was completely uninvolved in, made enough money to entice New Line into making a third. He returned to develop the story and write some early drafts of the script with Bruce Wagner which was then readapted by director Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont. That influence is felt in the return to the world of dreams after the possession story in the second film. The end resulting script i...

Deadly Friend

The contentions around this film’s post-production are a bit notorious. After a negative test screening full of Wes Craven’s fans, the studio looked at the film that Craven had created, a light-hearted tale of a young man, a young girl, and a robot, and decided that it wasn’t bloody enough for his fans. So, they forced him to go and shoot several new, very bloody scenes to insert into the film to give it the R-rating Craven’s fans expected. The original vision was lost, and only a compromise...