WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE – Before ‘Scream’, Wes Craven put his pre-eminent franchise through the postmodern wringer with ‘New Nightmare’, a meta- take on Elm Street. Heather Langenkamp is Heather Langenkamp, an actress still dealing with the afterburn of her big success, who finds her career worries eclipsed by her son’s distress. He’s having sinister dreams, and just because Robert Englund does chat shows these days doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain sinister someone lurking around the corner… I liked ‘New Nightmare’, I thought it was an interesting move for its time. Parts of it didn’t grab me – maybe I was looking for something a bit pithier, or gnarlier or… I don’t know. It was a bit straight. But it was solid, and it was nice seeing all those faces deadpanning themselves. Speaking of gnarly, the prince among early contenders for clever shite po-mo horror still has to be Fulci’s unabashed yuckfest ‘Cat In The Brain’, for my money at least.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER – Back with the standard NOES sequels here, no messing around with meta-textuality or other such arcane devices; perish the thought, this one’s the living definition of heads-down, mindless boogie. There are some college kids, they’re having nightmares about a burned, undead serial killer… etc. Yes, there’s a plethora of eighties tropes, yes there are some zingy special effects (a human-to-cockroach transformation impressed with its randomness), but it didn’t quite launch for me. There was something off about the pace maybe, or it just didn’t hold together in the way I needed it to, or maybe FK in full flush panto villain mode never quite did it for me and never will… either way, a tolerable watch but no more.
PRIVATE PARTS – Runaway Cheryl comes to stay at her Aunt Martha’s place, a guesthouse deep in seventies LA. Questions arise – who’s the defrocked priest with the muscle fixation? Why did that guy just get his head lopped off? What’s photographer George’s big secret? And who’s staring through all the peepholes? ‘Private Parts’ was Paul Bartel’s debut, the first in a pretty illustrious line of flicks (I wish he’d done more). His only real horror film, it’s a post-‘Psycho’ potboiler that succeeds due to its seedy atmosphere. There’s nothing full-tilt about it, the sleaze is more ambient than explicit, but you just get that marvellous sense of feeling for place – post-hippie Los Angeles, but no peace and love, only crumbling streets full of long shadows and creeps. It’s a film I return to quite often. It’d be made differently today, but those shadowy vibes pull me in every time.
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