David Vining's Blog, page 122
June 28, 2022
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
I can’t be too hard on this first sequel in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Wes Craven might have had nothing to do with the film, thinking the potential for a sequel to his original was simply not there while New Line Cinema handed the reigns to David Chaskin and Jack Sholder, Freddy’s Revenge tries to take the continued adventures of Freddy Krueger in a new direction without repeating the first film, almost like it’s trying to make a psychological thriller out of it. It doesn’t succeed...
June 27, 2022
Elvis (2022)
Did you ever wonder what Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story would have been like if Baz Luhrmann had directed it? Well, wonder no more because Luhrmann made Elvis. I imagine there’s a very narrow section of the moviegoing public that is going to really love it. It’s going to be the small cross section of people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of Elvis Presley, those who don’t instantly recognize Walk Hard in every biopic ever now, and those who love Baz Luhrmann movies. I don’t have the first...
The Hills Have Eyes: Part II
Well, it was in focus, at least. Made before A Nightmare on Elm Street, left uncompleted with only three-quarters of the film actually shot, and then hastily assembled with a heavy amount of footage from the first film right afterwards to try and capitalize on Wes Craven’s suddenly saleable name, The Hills Have Eyes: Part II reminded me a lot of Halloween II. Both are rushed sequels from the original creators (Carpenter just wrote the Halloween sequel without directing it) that have no real ...
June 24, 2022
Chiller
Wes Craven was suddenly hot stuff, so Chiller sometimes gets billed as Wes Craven’s Chiller. Well, he didn’t write it, it was written by J.D. Feigelson (who also produced the television movie), and it’s more of a return to form for Craven after A Nightmare on Elm Street, by which I mean that it’s Craven returning to his less than stellar roots of horror filmmaking. There are ideas there (they seem one step removed from Craven’s well-trod ground), but the film ultimately just settled into dul...
June 23, 2022
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Wes Craven found an idea that played entirely to his strengths, and it’s probably his best film. It’s also hindered a bit by the fact that he couldn’t quite get rid of his weaknesses around character and structure. Craven was a frustrating filmmaker, is what I’m saying. He had great ideas, and he could do certain things really well. However, he was missing an insight into how basic storytelling worked. I think he should have picked up a writing partner at some point.
Tina (Amanda Wyss) ha...
June 22, 2022
Invitation to Hell
If I were the kind of person to give up on a film, I would have given up pretty early in Invitation to Hell, Wes Craven’s television movie that was designed to Susan Lucci a change of perception in the public consciousness and, perhaps, a path towards a Best Actress award at the Emmys. If I had, I would have missed the bonkers and kind of great final twenty minutes that largely saved the experience for me. Up to that point, the film was a plodding, predictable, dull, and overdrawn effort at ...
June 21, 2022
Swamp Thing
Apparently Wes Craven took this comic book adaptation to prove a couple of things to studios: that he could work with action and that he could work with movie stars. Is it a surprise that he didn’t get Batman immediately after this, a few years before Tim Burton got his shot, after everyone saw Swamp Thing? I don’t think he actually proved that he was any good at action, perhaps serviceable at best. The performance he got from Adrienne Barbeau is serviceable as well. The largest problem is t...
June 20, 2022
Deadly Blessing
After the boring slog that was Summer of Fear, Wes Craven comes back with a much more put together film that, while it doesn’t work completely, offers more atmosphere and a cohesive sense of horror and tension that works in the film’s favor. It also ends up spinning its wheels after a certain point before revealing itself to be “Red Herring: The Movie”, which is kind of frustrating. The effort to be unpredictable to an audience always just kind of bugs me because it almost always gets in the...
June 17, 2022
Stranger in Our House (or, Summer of Fear)
Wes Craven moved from New York to Los Angeles and got offered this made for television movie project starring Linda Blair based on some minor novel by Lois Duncan. Working with a real crew and real equipment, Craven made the first film in his limited body of work that feels distinctly cinematic. It’s also horribly boring and awful. I’m not the biggest fan of his first two films, but at least that grungy aesthetic was in service to some effort to entertain. This feels like the most by-the-num...
June 16, 2022
Blonde – Trailer
From Andrew Dominik, who made one of the best westerns of the last few decades in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as well as the wonderful and massively underseen crime drama Killing Them Softly, comes a new movie.
Don’t care what it is. I’m there.
