We celebrate our 500th episode by diving into 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and why it feels like the “MTV Nightmare”—fast, colorful, wildly visual, and packed with some of the series’ most inventive kills.
We talk Renny Harlin, writer’s-strike, collaborative production, how the film cemented Freddy’s mainstream, quippier icon status, and why it became a massive independent hit despite critics like Roger Ebert.
We break down the thin-but-fun vignette structure, the recasting of Kristen (and our near-miss getting Harlin on the show), Alice’s “power” progression, and standout sequences like Joey’s waterbed “wet dream,” Sheila’s classroom death, Rick’s dojo showdown, the surreal movie-theater nightmare, and Debbie’s unforgettable roach-motel kill. We also reflect on franchise highs/lows, Freddy’s future.
Thanks for sticking with us all these years!
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A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Episode 500, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast
Todd: Hello and welcome to the 500th episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw I’m Todd.
Todd: Holy crap, bro. 500. Can you believe it?
Craig: No. It, it, it doesn’t seem possible. There’s, there’s not 500 episodes of anything.
Todd: Really. Honestly, I’ve looked out there. I’ve tried to figure this out, and to the best of my knowledge, to the best of my knowledge, we are the longest-running horror podcast out there.
Todd: I would challenge our listeners to prove me wrong, and I hope you do. You know, prove me wrong. If, if I’m not right, I’m not right. But even those podcasts out there that have m- maybe more than 500 episodes, they just, you know, record a little more frequently than we do. And I have yet to find one that goes back to 2015, I believe.
Todd: Yeah, I believe it was September or August of 2015 when we started this whole mess, and, uh, we have been doing it nonstop almost every week. We’ve missed a few weeks here and there over the five year, you know, 10 years. Cut us some slack. But, uh, o- overall, mathematically, we have made it to 500 in, uh, over 10 years, and I feel like, uh, that’s an accomplishment.
We’ve been podcasting longer than podcasting was cool.
Todd: And that’s probably the only thing I’ve been doing, you know, ahead of the curve.
Everything else is far behind. Yeah.
Craig: That’s funny. Yeah, I don’t know. 500 feels impossible. I bet I couldn’t name 50 movies that we’ve done. I know. I’m not sure I could name 50 movies, period, off the top of my head.
Todd: You’re starting to sound like your mom.
Craig: I know. Well, and people, people ask me about movies we’ve done, and I’m like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Todd: I know. Now it’s getting to the point where we’ll, like, suggest movies to each other and we’ll be like, “Have we done that one? Let’s go back and check.” I have to actually go to the website and do a search to see if we’ve talked about a particular movie. Yeah. That’s how crazy… But also, maybe we’re just getting old and our brains are fried.
Craig: Well, I think it’s both, but it’s, it’s been fun and it’s exciting. I mean, 500 does feel like a pretty big milestone. I have a feeling…
Todd: Have you ever done 500 of anything, Craig?
Craig: No. I don’t think I have. This may be, uh… This, this may be our biggest milestone. I, I don’t know. Uh, I don’t know if I’ve got another 12 years in me.
Or 10 years or however long it’s been.
Todd: I hope you do. I really do. I, you know-
Craig: Well, I hope so in general, but I don’t know about, I don’t know about the… I hope I’ve got at least 10 years in me in, in general. Just podcast, I don’t know. We’ll, we’ll see. We’ll see. You never know.
Todd: Yeah, you’re wearing a little thin on me, you know.
Plus- Yeah … I mean, there, uh, there aren’t that many horror movies, are there? Are there that many horror movies? We do scrape the bottom of the barrel occasionally.
Craig: Well, it feels like we are sometimes, but, but the good news is, you know, I don’t wanna exaggerate, but it feels like horror is really kinda back in a big way.
Like, it’s- Hmm … really popular, and there’s really good stuff- Yeah … coming out. Not… You know, all over the place. We talk about it all the time how just because we’re- We do … so saturated, yeah, with, you know, streaming and everything, there are so many outlets, which is, is good. It gives outlets for creative people who may not have as much money as big studio projects or whatever.
But also we’re seeing, you know, some of those smaller filmmakers becoming recognized and then making their way into the theaters Yeah So I think, I think even though sometimes it feels like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel a little bit, I think there’s a lot of really good stuff coming out.
You’re just gonna have a harder time finding obscure ’70s and ’80s stuff, ’cause they’re not making more of those.
Todd: I don’t know. I, I, I feel like there are not enough weeks in the year for all the obscure things that are in my list. You have no idea. You have no idea what I have waiting to throw at you.
Todd: So I have to hold back, ’cause I don’t wanna, you know, make you mad at me for so lo- You know, we wanna keep this going a little while longer. I don’t wanna piss you off too much. So I try to temper my… You know, I try to throw a newer one in there, something a little more mainstream, something a little less weird.
But I’ve got a long-ass list of weird shit that we may never, ever get to. I think about this a lot, and actually, you know, when you said horror’s coming back into fashion, I think we’ve both talked about this, how horror never really leaves-
Todd: fashion, does it? It’s, it seems to be the one, one of the few evergreen genres out there.
Pro- Romance is probably another one. But, like, especially horror, it comes and goes from the m- what you might quote, unquote call “the mainstream,” but I feel like that’s more a function of the media than anything else. I think s- the audience for horror is pretty solid, and it has remained pretty solid. But it’s only every, I don’t know, 5, 10 years that the mainstream media latches onto a particular movie that does particularly well, and then, you know, there are 20 other movies just like it that come out, ’cause that’s…
Well, that’s not just how horror goes, that’s how movies go in general.
Todd: And so then it feels like they’re, “Oh, there’s a resurgence in horror. There’s a new trend.” And all of us horror fans are just sitting here smugly nodding our heads going, “Yeah, I mean, this is, this is our lives.” “This is our day-to-day.”
And, and it is for so many people. You know, it’s been known for quite some time that if you wanna make money, if you’re gonna bet on a genre, go for horror, and you’re probably gonna make some money even if your movie is, is subpar or, or minimal or whatever. You got a good story to tell, horror fans are very forgiving.
Yeah. And that’s what I like about it. And I’ll tell you right now, on our 500th episode, I’m making a prediction. I don’t think it’s particularly groundbreaking, but something came to me as we’re watching some of these older movies that we just love, sometimes just by the pure scrappiness of them, right?
Todd: Like, we’ve seen so many movies on this podcast where we’re like, “The movie objectively is dumb.”
Todd: Or, “It’s objectively kinda bad, and we shouldn’t objectively enjoy watching it.” Except you can see that some people got together and they made a thing using the resources that they had- Their heart was in it.
A- a- and, and there’s something charming and fun about watching that.
Todd: And I, I feel like the horror audience seems to be more accepting of that than most. We take a lot of pleasure in practical effects.
Todd: Things that aren’t so polished, stories that are nonexistent, but as long as there’s something in there that grabs us, we’re generally entertained and we’re encouraging.
And I feel like in this era that we’re moving into with AI-
Todd: where a lot of what we see is being generated by computers and not humans, that maybe, just maybe, overall we’re gonna trend towards this even more I have a feeling that overall, the film-going public and the book-reading public and whatever-going public is going to suddenly become far less critical and far more forgiving of imperfection because it’s human.
There’s more that we enjoy about a movie than how polished and slick it is. We like a particular actor. We like a particular vibe. We like the story. I mean, the story’s key. We like the visuals and all these things. If one or two of those elements really clicks, it’s enough, and you can get wrapped up in the idea that here is this piece of art that some people got together and put tremendous resources into making, and that’s something to celebrate.
I think that when we see a lot of this machine-made stuff flood the market, no matter how polished it feels, it lacks some of what ultimately I think is a big part of what brings us joy about watching a movie. And I feel like the pendulum’s gonna swing pretty hard in that direction, where people are gonna really seek out some of the stuff that was scrappier, more low budget, more put together, feels more human because it’s going to be rarer in the coming years.
Craig: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong. I think that it, it’s a huge discussion that g- we would have to record a whole different podcast on about, you know, like can machines make art? Isn’t art an inherently human thing? I mean, all, all a machine can do is imitate really, uh- Right,
Todd: what humans have already produced.
Craig: Right. And so I just think, yeah, I mean, it, it will lack the human element. It will… And y- that’s a, a big thing to apply to some of the horror stuff that we’ve talked about that certainly is not high art, but still you see the creative drive behind it. You see the passion behind it, and I’ve yet to see something created ba- by AI that inspired that kind of feeling or reaction in me.
Now, who’s to say? Maybe AI will come up with something brilliant and I’ll have to eat my words. I don’t know. But I, yeah, I think you’re right that we’re gonna con- that we may be more forgiving because ultimately we see the, the passion and the, the effort behind it, and it’s, it’s… It will become more refreshing as we’re inundated with all of this AI-generated stuff.
Todd: I mean, you say more forgiving. I feel like there’s gonna be a craving for it. I really do. I feel like the people are going to want stuff that’s homemade, you know, like handmade I s- I suppose.
Craig: Well, we already do. I, you know, I don’t… I, I think there are very few people out there that are, like, clamoring for the advent of AI-controlled filmmaking or…
You know what I mean? Like-
Todd: For sure. It dazzles us for a little bit, and the novelty of it.
Craig: Right. But I don’t think anybody’s like, “Oh, thank God, AI’s finally gonna replace real filmmaking.” I think w- we are drawn to films or any artwork because it moves us in some way, and I don’t think… I don’t know.
Craig: Getting too philosophical. Well,
Todd: I think it dovetails nicely into the movie that we’re talking about today. We’re not that clever. We didn’t intend to dovetail it like this. But it was put together during a writer’s strike.
Todd: And in that regard, there was no real script behind it, and so it was a real collaborative effort between a fairly new director who was really trying to prove himself-
Todd: a handful of seasoned special effects artists that we’ve talked about ad nauseam, who have done other projects, who came together, and actors, some new, some, uh… It just, it, it feels like a turning point in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise on its face. Like, you don’t need to be told this, you know? You watch it, and you feel like this movie is different.
It definitely comes from that process. There’s definite improvisation going on from a, on a day-to-day basis. Uh, you know, when you read about the behind-the-scenes of Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which is what we’re doing, directed by Renny Harlin, who hung out in the studios of New Line Cinema until they couldn’t send him away.
And basically, Robert Shaye was desperate for a director for the new one, ’cause they had to put a new one out because the third one did so well-
Todd: unexpectedly, and, uh, was finally like, “All right. We’re just gonna give this smelly Finnish guy a break.” He did a decent enough job with his previous film, Prison, which we have also done here on this podcast.
Todd: Funny enough, right? Oh, my God. Okay. You remember, right? Or am I reminding you for the first time?
Craig: You’re reminding me. I don’t remember that.
Todd: I get it confused with Shocker.
Craig: I’ll look it up while you’re talking.
Todd: Prison was the movie about the haunted prison, basically. Uh-
Craig: Oh, okay. All right.
Craig: Yes. That was just like Nightmare on Elm Street. Right. Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. So they figured he already made Nightmare on Elm Street 3, basically- … so sure.
Craig: Yeah. Let him, uh… I mean, it even had the same girl from Nightmare on Elm Street 3 in it, didn’t it? Uh, maybe. Maybe. I don’t… I think so. I don’t remember exactly.
The, the Mohawk girl with… Yeah. I’m pretty sure.
Todd: Oh, yeah, yeah. You’re right. The Mohawk girl was in there. Yep. Mm-hmm.
Craig: I hadn’t put that together. Okay. Well, that makes perfect sense. I’m surprised that they were even hesitant. Like he clearly really, really wants to do a Nightmare on Elm Street movie, ’cause he basically already did.
Todd: Yeah. I think it was after this film- That suddenly he started getting calls left and right. That’s a good sign. This is almost like a Sam Raimi story, th- or a Steven Spielberg story in a way. In fact, I think it was Steven Spielberg who called him for the next movie after this. But, uh-
Todd: you know, he just, he literally hung out in the lobby of New Line trying to get in, saying, “Hey, let me direct this next picture,” until finally Robert Shaye was like, “Okay, we’ll give you a shot.”
And apparently he was grumpy. Robert Shaye was grumpy through the whole production, pretty convinced that this ragtag group of people trying to throw some shit together just wasn’t gonna work. But it turned out to be huge. Uh-huh. It made $50 million in the box office, which for 1988 times made it the highest grossing, most successful independent film to date at that time, and really cemented…
I mean, I think Nightmare on Elm Street 3, which we’ve also done, we’ve done 2, we’ve done 1, we’ve done 3. Nightmare on Elm Street 3 really was the point where they kind of redeemed themselves from part two and started to reach a, a certain level of success, tentative success, where they were like, “Oh, this, this is real.
This could be a longer lasting franchise, uh, with a firmer base on it.” Then this movie came in and, against all odds, really cemented that by its reception. The critics didn’t necessarily like it. A lot of critics did actually. My favorite critic, Roger Ebert, who seems to shit on horror more often than not, didn’t.
Thought it should have an X rating and all this garbage. This, one of the few times when I really disagree with that guy. But more or less, everybody really liked this film, and I can see why. Because tonally, as Robert Englund put it, it’s like the MTV Nightmare on Elm Street.
Todd: It, perfectly attuned for its time, for its generation.
It really hit the right buttons. It’s really madcap. It really flows. It’s super visual. It’s very inventive. It’s got some of the best kills in the whole series, and it really kind of shows what you can do with this character, what you can do with this concept of this dream thing. Uh, it take, you know, 3 I think did a pretty good job of it.
4 I think took it over the top.
Craig: Yeah, I, I- Sorry … that, that’s a mouth, that’s, that’s a mouth, no, that’s a mouthful, but I agree with pretty much everything that you have said. I think it was kind of a lightning in a bottle moment. Like, 3- You know, one had, had been, had done well, but then two was a disappointment.
I think three was so good and especially appealed to young people that I think that it brought the audience back, and the audience that it brought back were just ready for four. And, you know, the combination of, you know, this young director and all of the influences that you already mentioned, uh, MTV and it being so visual and everything, I think it just really worked.
I, I think that you maybe said it best when… I feel like with three it kind of hit its stride, and then with four it really just kind of took off. Like-
Craig: it, it seems like a really good follow-up to three for whatever reason. I haven’t seen this movie in a long time, and I don’t wanna dwell on the fact that unfortunately after this I really feel like they fell off.
Like- Yeah … Dream Child was okay. Yeah. Dr- Dream Child was okay, but then Freddy’s Dead was pretty not good. Right. I’m, I’m trying to be kind. I have so much to say about this movie, but when I was watching it, what I was… I was thinking about the whole series. I was thinking, “You know, even as not good as Freddy’s Dead is, all of these movies are completely watchable.”
Craig: Robert Englund as Freddy is fun regardless. I mean, if the script is bad and it’s, it’s, it’s corny, I mean, you still get him doing his thing and, and you get some inventive, creative kills regardless. So they’re all totally watchable. But I hadn’t seen this one in a long time, and it took me a minute to find it ’cause it’s not streaming on any pay service or any free service.
You have to either rent it or buy it. And I was bummed because I have a whole DVD box set, but I don’t have a DVD player.
So, uh, that, that was a, a no-good. But I ended up renting it, which I think ultimately ended up being a good thing because I think I saw a really good, like, 4K restoration of it. It looked so good. Like, better quality than I’ve ever seen it. And it had been so long since I had seen it that when I was watching it, I just remembered that I love this one.
Craig: You know, we’ve done one, two, and three, and I don’t know, we just hadn’t gotten around to this one. We’ve talked about it before, but we just hadn’t gotten around to it and-
Todd: Well, let’s be honest …
Craig: it, it had been so… Yeah. Well, I didn’t know if you wanted to.
Todd: Let’s go, let’s, let’s just tell everybody. We might as well.
We have been holding off on the fourth one for a very specific reason And the reason is that I almost got Renny Harlin on the podcast with us. Living in China in 2016, Renny Harlin was also living in Beijing at the same time. He was directing Chinese films, big budget action films for Chinese cinema that probably nobody outside of China has really seen.
But, uh, that was his gig, and I was a friend of a friend. I knew, uh, a guy who was a visual effects director who was also in the Chinese film industry, and he was the guy that Renny Harlin hired for all of his movies, and they were p- close personal family friends and hung out together. And it just so happened that this guy’s wife, this guy’s from New Zealand, by the way, and, uh, his wife was pregnant the same time my wife was pregnant, so they were linked that way, and so I got to know him And when I found out his connection with Lenny Har- Renny Harlin, I said, “Oh my God, it would be so awesome to have him on the podcast to talk about Nightmare on Elm Street 4.”
And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll talk to Renny. I’ll talk to Renny and see how he feels.” And, uh, he talked to him and he said, “Yeah, he’s down for it. He’s- it’s a go. In fact, uh, you know, we can all watch the movie together in my screening room. It’ll be great.” And we were super stoked for this. And then life happens, and, uh, I didn’t wanna push it.
You know, I didn’t wanna be that guy, you know? But I’d kinda nudge him every now and then, and then they moved. They left Beijing. And even after he left Beijing I thought we would still get it going, but then COVID hit.
Todd: Renny Harlin left Beijing. He’s doing s- other stuff elsewhere. He’s not in China anymore, and so that opportunity passed us by.
And I don’t know, I just always felt like maybe, just maybe we can get him back together, but I’ve lost touch with, uh, with Will. That’s the guy’s name.
Todd: The New Zealander. And we just kind of decided at this point that, you know, it’s our 500th episode. We have this tradition of doing Wes Craven-directed movies, except for the 150th episode, which where we did a movie that is just one of the most precious and nearest and dearest to our hearts, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Except for that, we kicked all this off with a Wes Craven movie because Wes Craven had recently died, so we did People Under the Stairs. We decided, “Oh, for our 50th, for our 200th, 250th, whatever, we would do a Wes Craven movie,” and we have. But now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel on Wes Craven movies.
Right. And just, like, nothing of what’s left really felt like 500th episode material. And so, uh, we were like, “Well, we gotta do a Freddy movie because that’s Wes Craven origin.” And we both love this movie to death, and we’ve been putting it off for so long. I think we were both pretty unanimous as soon as the idea came up, like, this is the time.
Yeah. This is the time to do-
Craig: Yeah. Yeah, and you brought it up, and I’m so glad you did because honestly it had been so long since I had watched it, and I had just for- You know, I remembered everything about it, and I remembered that it had some of my favorite kills.
Craig: But I, I just forgot- Like,
Todd: all of my favorite kills are in this movie.
Craig: I just forgot that from start to finish, it’s just really good.
Craig: It looks fantastic. You’re, you’re right, it is very colorful, and I think whoever called it the MTV Freddy or the MTV Nightmare or whatever was on point. I mean, it, it, it really is. It, it is very visual. A lot of it kinda looks like a music video.
I mean, you’ve got Freddy in Risky Business sunglasses and- Yeah … not to mention the soundtrack is great. Like Yes. It’s so ’80s. It’s fantastic. Yeah, I love it. I know, but it’s got, like, this banging ’80s soundtrack in the back, like, through the whole thing The acting is as good as you are gonna get.
Craig: But it’s as good as you’re gonna get- Yeah … from one of these ’90s… And it’s fine. Like, it’s totally fine. It’s, it’s not, you know, amazing, but it’s, it’s perfectly fine. And beyond it being perfectly fine, I’m genuinely invested in all of these characters, all of them.
Craig: Even the small ones that have hardly any screen time.
I’ll do a little plug for our book club. On our Patreon, we have a book club where we read horror books, often YA, not always, but most of the time, and we get together on a Zoom call basically every couple of weeks and talk about it. If you’re interested, you should check out the Patreon page. But we recently did a book, and it was long.
It was, like, almost 500 pages long, and we all were bummed out about it because the characters were so poorly written that you just didn’t care. And so by the end, when the mystery started to be resolved, you didn’t even care because you just didn’t care about these characters. I liked all of these characters to the point where I legit found some of their death scenes sad.
Like, I can’t, I can’t think of another movie like this or even another Nightmare movie where I was like, “Oh.” “That’s really sad.” Uh, but, uh It’s, it, it’s, it’s really kind of great start to finish, and I don’t know how in depth we’re gonna get about the plot of this God knows how old movie. Surely, listener, you’ve seen it.
But if like me, it’s been 20 years or more, go back and watch it again. It’s so good. But we’ll talk about it.
Todd: Dare I make us feel weird in that this p- this movie’s almost 40 years old?
Craig: It doesn’t surprise me. We’re so old.
Todd: But I remember when it came out, and I remember that MTV also had Nightmare on… Like, this, it was after this movie that Freddy really entered mainstream.
In my memory, it was Dream Master, but I was watching the Never Sleep Again documentary, which is excellent, by the way.
Craig: It is really good.
Todd: Oh my God, if you wanna know everything about the Nightmare on Elm Street series, you… It’s on all the DVDs, and it covers every single movie. It interviews almost everybody involved in all of the movies, and it’s just great.
And, uh, Robert Englund and everybody says, you know, after this movie is when Freddy really… Like, there were Freddy dolls, Freddy was appearing on TV shows, or Robert Englund was in any case, and Freddy mania kind of hit. Like, your mother would know about Freddy by this point.
Todd: And so this movie is the one that really put it over the top.
And I also feel like this movie is the movie that cemented the jokey Freddy. We always had hints of Freddy’s playfulness in the earlier movies. I would say the first one. The second one is a bit of an outlier, although it’s still got its humor. The third one is where they really started to go with it, but I think the fourth one is when, is what took it over the top.
He became just like a, what’s the word? L- not anti-hero. What’s the word I’m- An
Todd: An icon, but, like, a bad guy that you love, right? Like a love- Oh, sure,
Todd: a villain that you’re almost rooting for because he is so likable. He’s so playful with them in how he messes with these kids And I guess, again, you know, if you had had a coherent script that cared a lot about a, a story from start to finish that started where the last one left off and took you to a future, you know, you probably wouldn’t have had what we get.
Instead, what we get is what’s essentially a paper-thin plot with likable characters, like you said, in a series of vignettes. It’s just a bunch of dreams.
Todd: It’s a series of dreams that Freddy jumps in and kills people in, and I think that’s what’s fun about the movie, and that’s what makes it music video-like.
But that also gives Freddy the license to just kick back and be cool. So you got the one where, like, it’s so obvious that one that you referenced earlier, the beach scene where he puts on the sunglasses. Like, of course. Like, they just wanted to get Freddy in sunglasses. That’s what the purpose of this scene is.
He’s got the ’80s shades on to be cool, you know? They’ve got a, a whole sequence that apparently they had to throw together last minute, ’cause they had no other ideas and they were running out of time, which is a Karate Kid style-
Todd: 80s action fight sequence. Freddy’s not even in it. He’s, like, invisible.
He’s not even in it. They throw that in there. It’s so funny. They’re just a series of vignettes, but in every one he’s got a quip. He’s got one or two quips. Almost every single quotable Freddy line I feel like comes from this, this movie.
Todd: It just shocked me how much I remembered- Of Freddy that actually just comes from part four.
Craig: Yeah, a lot of it. And this, you know, this is… I was gonna say it’s him at his quippiest, but that’s really not true. I think that this, tonally it, it nails it. Later it, it, it goes- It’s too quippy … over the top to a point where it’s stupid. Yeah. You know? Like, I, I think it’s in Freddy’s Dead where at some point he’s literally the Wicked Witch of the West, you know, like on a broomstick with a witch’s hat and like- Yeah
Craig: silly. Here it still felt kinda cool. Like And, and, and the quips were still kind of funny. You know, I hadn’t really thought about it not having much of a plot, but you’re right. You know, I don’t know how much the other ones do beyond him stalking kids. And, you know, like you said, the writer strike and, and Rennie…
So Rennie Harlan actually ultimately thought that the writer strike worked to his advantage because it gave him a lot of freedom to virtually write parts of the script himself and, and rewrite scenes and, and do things that he wanted to do. I, I think, you know, ultimately it worked out. But there is a little bit of a plot.
I mean, it is a direct follow-up of part three-
Craig: which actually made me feel bad for for two of the characters because it, it’s, it’s the Alien 3, you know, dilemma where you were, it, you’ve got these heroes who survived the previous sequel only to kill them off immediately in the next sequel which only takes place like, what?
A few months later? Like Right. That’s ki- that’s kind of a bummer for those guys. But no, it’s the three surviving members of the Dream Warriors, which is Kristen, Joey, and Kincaid. And Joey and Kincaid are played by the same actors, uh, who played them in the previous film. But Kristen has been recast. She was originally played by Patricia Arquette and she’s now played by Tuesday Knight, who I don’t know if Tuesday Knight had done much of anything before this.
Todd: Acting-wise? I don’t think so, no. Not much …
Craig: this is the only thing I know her from and, and she’s, she’s the lead really. It does a switcheroo on you. She’s the final girl from the last movie. She, uh, comes over into this one. And I am a huge fan of Patricia Arquette. Nightmare III was probably the first time I had ever seen her, and I really liked her in that movie.
I thought that she was a great final girl I haven’t seen Never Sleep Again in a long time, but if I remember correctly, pretty much everybody said they weren’t really sure why she didn’t come back.
Craig: I feel like maybe I even read something from her ultimately where she said that she really enjoyed doing the movie, she really liked the series, but she had kind of started to get basically better offers.
Todd: Yeah, she got busy all of a sudden. Yeah …
Craig: offers that were more interesting to her, and so it, it was no hard feelings. She just wanted to do other things, and they recast her with this girl Tuesday Knight.
Craig: Who’s a singer, and she sings… Is it the, I think it’s the opening credits song.
Yeah. And, and she sounds great. It’s a great song. I think that this put her in a bad position, Tuesday Knight.
Craig: Because I think that fans had liked Kristen 1.0 in, in Patricia Arquette, and it also kind of made her, I think, ultimately a little bit of an outsider during the filmmaking. I think especially the actors who play Joey and Kincaid basically said that they didn’t really connect with her or really even try.
Craig: And then I guess I, I saw, and I don’t know if it’s recent, but a more recent interview, just a s- a snippet of it, of Tuesday Knight where she mentioned the documentary Never Sleep Again, and she is pissed off about it. Like- Yeah, she doesn’t like it at all … she is mad about it. No, she hates it.
She, she says that she had just been through cancer treatment or she was going through cancer treatment and she hates the way that she looks, and fans and, and people who saw it speculated about her appearance and thought that she had had plastic surgery or whatever when she was going through something bad.
And unbeknownst to her, because I’m sure they were all interviewed separately, her other castmates didn’t speak very well of her and kind of insinuated that she got preferential treatment potentially ’cause she was the director, which both she and Renny Harlin deny. So I feel bad for her. Yeah. And ultimately I think that she does a fine job.
Craig: I thi- I think she does a fine job. I like her. I like her as Kristen. And w- as I was watching it this time, back in the day I probably, I don’t know, I don’t even know if I remembered who played Kristen in part three at the time, but if I did, I was probably like, “Oh, I like the other one better.”
If it had not been recast, I think that this would’ve been an entirely different movie.
Craig: I think that Patricia Arquette would’ve brought an entirely different energy to it. And because they were kind of making it on the fly, even if, regardless of whether it was romantic or sexual, even if there was just some sort of connection between Renny Harlin and his l- who be- his lead actress, basically, if he was Writing things for her or giving her any kind of special attention, if they had that kind of connection, I just think it would have been different if it had been a different actress.
Maybe it would have been just as good, maybe it would have been better, but I think it would have been different, and I like this movie, so
Craig: I think- So I think it worked out fine …
Todd: I think it could be argued it hardly matters because it’s pretty early on in the movie that it’s apparent to everyone watching that they’re really not setting her up to be the final girl.
There is far more focus on this girl, uh, Alice, and she fits the archetype of the final girl to a T. She’s a little dowdy. She’s kind of virgin-ous. She’s the kind of girl that is supposed to not be beautiful, but you can tell that if you just put her hair up and put her in a sexy outfit, she’s gonna be gorgeous, and this actress 100% is.
She’s kind of a sex bomb, honestly, who was just downplayed for the film, and then by the end of the movie, you know, she’s a badass kicking ass. And so I feel like it’s almost obvious from about 10, 15 minutes in that this isn’t gonna be a movie about her anyway. I wouldn’t say I necessarily expected her to die so early because she’s such a pivotal character and she’s a carryover from the first movie, but when Kincaid and Kevin die so early in the film, then you kinda start to realize, “Oh, maybe she’s the third one,” ’cause Freddy says-
Todd: two to go. When he kills Kincaid, I believe. Then you know that he’s gunning for just the other two initially. Alice and her brother, Rick, start to get a lot of screen time, and then Dan starts to get more screen time at the end, which I think is a thing that, that betrays the fact that this movie was cobbled together.
Todd: Of all the people in this film, I feel the worst for the guy who played Dan. He just got pulled in. He’s really kind of a, a, a minor side guy in the very beginning.
Todd: And even though he’s the guy Alice is going after-
Todd: there’s not a lot of going after happening. He just pops in every now and then, and she’s like- Yeah
“Oh, I like him,” or, “Oh, he’s hot.”
Todd: And then and it’s only, like, at the end when the two of them kinda end up together fighting Freddy, he doesn’t really do a great job of it.
Craig: No, he’s basically just tagging along.
Todd: Yeah. And then, like, at the end, it’s… In the, any other movie, y- there’s a progression of these two characters, like, coming together and finally there’s this romance.
At the end it’s sorta like, “Well, we’re the last two left, and I always liked you, so we’re partners now, aren’t we?” It’s a very lackluster romantic interest for poor Dan.
Craig: I, and I’m, I’m pretty sure he gets killed off right at the beginning of the next movie too, so-
Craig: But there’s a lot of good stuff. I mean, I don’t know how to talk about everything, but it’s new and it’s shiny and… But you also get all the classic stuff. You get the classic nursery rhyme with the girls in white jump roping outside of Freddy’s creepy house, those classic dream scenes. Right at the beginning.
Craig: You get, you get Kristen calling Joey and Kincaid into her dream right away, so- Yes … um, that’s still happening. The other thing that I would say about this movie, and there are other parts later in the movie that cement this for me, I also feel like this movie could stand alone.
Craig: I don’t even think you really need to have a general understanding of who Freddy is-
Craig: to, to see this. And, and there’s even a moment of exposition-
Craig: here, in a little bit, that explains Freddy’s backstory just for those 10 people who wandered in off the street who had- Yeah … never heard of it before. So I-
Todd: Like 30 seconds of exposition. One of the things that I found so charming about this movie was how efficient the script actually ended up being because from the beginning, like you said, we get our traditional intro.
We got the, the little bit of a nightmare sequence with Kristen and, and the girls, and freakiness, and an old house that’s Freddy’s old house and whatever. Joey and Kincaid get summoned in, and they’re like, “What are you doing summoned us into this dream? Freddy’s dead, don’t you know?” Like, they’re so sure of themselves, right?
It’s so typical. She said, “No, he really is gone.” And they’re like, “No, look, the boiler’s cold.” And they put her hand on a boiler and suddenly this dog jumps out, and it’s Kincaid’s dog who was also pulled into the dream apparently, and bites her on the- Apparently … on the arm. And then she wakes up- And her arm has got this really nasty looking dog bite on it.
And Kincaid looks over, he wakes up also, looks over and sees his dog’s got blood on his mouth. And, uh, it’s like, so that immediately establishes this whole thing from the last movie- Yeah … in case you didn’t know- Right … of being pulled into the dreams and shit. I mean, I thought it was hilarious that she had this huge nasty dog bite on her arm.
She just kinda wraps it up with a blanket and drifts back off to bed.
Clip: And then it’s fine, right.
Todd: But still, yeah, you’re right. Immediate set up, so that’s good.
Craig: Well, and then that’s when we meet, her boyfriend is Rick, and his sister is Alice, and they, I think, are supposed to be l- like on the other side of the tracks.
I think they’re supposed to be kind of poor. They live with their dad, who’s a jerk because all Elm Street parents are assholes.
Craig: I don’t remember if I saw or read somewhere that the actor who played Rick contends to this day that he believes that Christian Slater’s whole Heathers vibe was stolen from this movie, and I think he’s right.
Todd: Yeah, he probably is …
Craig: I, it blows me away that this movie came out before that because I would have said, “Oh, this guy’s doing his best Christian Slater in Heathers.” It’s exactly what his character is, and he’s kind of funny and-
Todd: To be fair, he’s also kinda doing a Johnny Depp from the first one, I kinda think.
Craig: A little bit … they’re
Craig: A l- yeah, a l- a little bit And then we meet the new group, okay? So they remind, remind us of the old group, and now we meet the new group. And it’s Rick and Alice, and then there’s Dan, who is a friend of Rick’s, but he’s also the quarterback, and he’s tall and handsome.
And then there’s Deb, who is played by Brooke Theiss, who was the hot sister from Just the Ten of Us. Um, Wendy, she was the hot one. Mm-hmm. And she is the third girl from Just the Ten of Us. Did you watch that show, by the way?
Todd: No, I did not at all, but I know what you’re talking about. It was
Craig: so good. Was it really?
Craig: show. Okay. Yeah. Oh I, oh my God, it was, it was cheesy ’80s sitcom, but yeah, it was fantastic. Like, there were… I don’t know, I think there were, like, seven teenage girls or something like that that were all in this one family. And at one point in time they became, like, a girl group and they would, like, sing, like s- like ’60s hits in a bar.
It was amazing. But yeah, so she’s the third Just the Ten of Us girl. N- Nancy from part one.
Todd: Heather Langenkamp.
Craig: Heather Langenkamp, obviously. And then in the second, one of the girls on the bus is one of the girls, and then she’s the third one. I love her. Again, she has maybe, maybe five minutes of screen time, I would say.
Hmm. But I like… She’s just kind of around every once in a while until her keel s- kill scene.
Todd: Are you talking about Debbie?
Craig: Yeah, Deb. Uh-huh.
Todd: Who has the best kill scene. But yeah, go on.
Craig: Yeah. And we learn right away that she hates bugs. That’s the only thing we know about her except for that. She’s tough, she hates bugs, and she works out a lot.
Todd: my God. No, this is what I love about this whole opening sequence, and this is how you can tell there was no writer involved. Because the, it’s just ham-fisting in information about each of these people to give us their Achilles’ heel or their archetype or their whatever, right? Uh, so, so we’ve got our asshole parent who, you know, is walking in with a bag and a bottle, so we know he’s a dick, as usual.
They’ve got the boyfriend. Okay. We got the sister. She’s comes across as dowdy right away. Then hunky Dan Jordan, who they make a comment about immediately.
Clip: All right. Anybody have trig this semester?
Clip: I had a conflict, homework or Dynasty, and, uh, Dynasty won.
Clip: story. Soaps’ll kill you. Mm, there’s Dan Jordan.
Mm, we are talking one major league hunk
Todd: She- and Debbie’s the big-haired flamboyant girl.
Todd: And then the one you’re talking about, Sheila, the nerd, rides up, right?
Todd: And she’s got big glasses on, and this dialogue made me laugh so hard. You know, d- she pulls up, Sheila pulls up on a bike that’s spewing out a bit of smoke, and, uh, Debbie’s like, “How can you ride on this health hazard?
Don’t you have asthma?” And Sheila says, like, “Oh, you know what? Why don’t you stop working out so much and try reading a book every now and then?” And then pulls out an inhaler and sucks on it. You’re just me, like, “Okay, Sheila’s got asthma. That’s gonna be important. Debbie likes to work out. Got it.” And as soon as we get all this, like, goofy school-ness where we i- get introduced to everybody, they’re in the hallway and there’s some more dialogue, and they walk by the lockers.
Where did the slashes on the lockers come from?
Craig: There are several things in this movie that don’t make any sense, and, and I think that the filmmakers have conceded that there are holes in this plot- … and this is one of them. But this is just one of many, and, and it also seems, like you said, it was kind of cobbled together as they went.
Another thing that starts out seeming to be something but then just completely goes away is the fact that Alice, in the earliest part of the movie, has these weird fantasies-
Craig: that play out like they’re really happening, and then it’s like a fake-out. Like, “Oh, that didn’t really happen. That just happened in her head.”
That happens a couple of times in the beginning. Like, she has a fantasy about Dan, I don’t know, like saying she likes him or something, and then she has another fantasy about screaming at her dad and throwing dishes or something.
Craig: But then that, that never comes up again, which is fine. I don’t care.
The other thing, like, with the, with the glowing slashes, I don’t carry, I don’t care about that either. Where did they come from? I don’t know. It looks cool. Who cares? Like, they don’t even… It’s just for us. Yeah. And it’s just for us. Nobody else sees it. They
Todd: don’t exist in the movie.
Todd: Like, they walk by some lockers, and as they walk by, suddenly the lockers have glowing slashes on them.
There’s no reason. They didn’t suddenly slip into a dream sequence. There’s a… It’s just some- No … kind of creepy image for us to foreshadow Freddy later, you know? That’s all it is.
Craig: What they were talking about is Joey and Kincaid were telling her, like, “Stop talking about it. You’re gonna stir him up.” You know, I don’t know if that’s what happens- Yeah
but he does end up coming back, like, now. Well,
Todd: I give a little more credit to the earlier… Even though you’re right, like, this is a thing that seems to be set up but then does not really pay off. In a way, it’s establishing that Alice has a unusual degree of imagination and/or daydreaming ability and/or ability to control her dreams.
Uh, not really, but l- you know, like, like somehow she’s special, and I feel like this gets called out later, that somehow Alice just has this unique ability to daydream that gives her an edge eventually. I mean, it’s, it’s tenuous, but, uh, I feel like that’s what this is trying to set up. But it doesn’t really solidify
Craig: If that’s the case, I wish that they would’ve fleshed it out more, because I didn’t get that at all.
Hmm. And that actually, if that were the case, if she were able to, like, consciously dream or, or have waking dreams, that would n- that would close one of the holes in the end. Because in the end when she goes to confront Freddy, she never goes to sleep. We never see her go to sleep, and we never see her wake up.
Craig: I was really confused as to how she got to him in the first place, but whatever. We also learn at this point that Rick does karate.
Todd: We get a nice montage. Oh, God, it’s the Karate Kid era.
Craig: This was so funny to me, because this guy that plays Rick is super cute. Like, he’s an adorable guy, but I don’t know if he does karate.
Craig: does. This… And it’s a, it’s a whole montage of him, like, doing karate by himself to, like, this rock song. But the, the words of the rock song, I wish I could remember the tune, I can’t at all, but it’s like, “Settle down.” And that’s what I, I wanted to say to him, like, “Settle down.” Like…
Todd: Nobody’s, nobody’s watching you. You don’t have to show off so much.
Craig: And it, it, it, it looked like, it looked like when you were little, and you would go over to your friend’s house, and their older brother would be like, “Hey, wanna see some karate?” And, and they would tie the Karate Kid, like, headband around their head and, like, “Do some kicks.”
That’s what it looked like. And
Todd: they think they’re badass.
Todd: Yeah, like remember early internet era, that guy, that poor guy who did the S- the Star Wars, uh, lightsaber m- … who, who I think actually got teased incessantly and permanently mentally, like, like traumatized by it. But anyway, yeah, that reminded me of that too.
But also, we were all like this when we were… Like, we all saw The Karate Kid- Oh, yeah … and thought we could do karate. And so this is such- … this is such a, a, a time capsule and such an artifact of its time that I just smiled so wide when this bit came on. But yeah, it heavy-handedly establishing that he’s the karate guy.
Todd: And al- here’s the weird thing Later on, there is a whole sequence, and we already talked about it, where he fights Freddy in this Asian karate thing. Oddly enough, they had not planned that when they shot this.
Todd: It was only when they were like, “Well, how’s he gonna die? Well, we’ve already established that he does karate, so maybe we can do this.”
And, and, uh, and they had to throw that scene together real fast. Like, that’s crazy, right? Uh-huh. That they would establish something without really knowing where it was gonna go. I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe that.
Craig: Yeah. And it, it’s, it’s kinda surprising that it came together as cohesively as it does.
Right. It- but it does… I mean, it moves fast. I mean, this, at this point, this is when Kincaid and Joey get unceremoniously killed off, but still in good ways. Like, Kincaid falls asleep and wakes up in the trunk of a car in a great big junkyard, and he’s immediately like, “This ain’t my dreamland.” And so he, he immediately screams for Kristen.
And then, classic, his dog comes out of nowhere, pees fire, and wakes Freddy up.
Craig: Was it a j- like, was it a, did it, did it originate as a joke? Like, I don’t even understand how this happened.
Todd: It was just R- Freddy Harlan’s random idea, and, and he was honestly just pulling from his own dreams and his own ideas.
Like, this was just his notion. And then later, if you watch the Never Sleep Again thing, Robert Englund’s like, “Well, if you really think about it, it’s like the hounds of hell.” And like what? No. This is like a dog peeing on the, on the dirt in a dream bringing back Freddy. It doesn’t make sense.
Craig: I know it doesn’t, but like-
Todd: How did he get into this dream?
So then a dog in a dream resurrects Freddy from the graveyard that they physically put him in? What, what was the catalyst- Yes … for this? I, it just, none of it makes sense.
Craig: Who, I mean, it, right? Who cares? I mean, it’s that, it’s that conversation that the kid has with his dad in Monster Squad about, you know, bringing the killer back and like, “You know, blow him up and send, put him in a bunch of different boxes and send him all over the world.”
And he’s like, “Yeah, that was part seven.” Yeah, like- Right … in, in, in this day with, with Freddy and, and Jason and Michael Myers to some extent, you just have to come up with some way to bring him back. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, we know. A, a dog, a dog pees fire, and he comes back. And- … y- and you get, you know, these fun practical effects of his bones coming back together and, like, the flesh coming back onto his body.
And, you know, there’s a great thing, you know, where his glove comes up out of the ground, and then you have the classic shot of his long shadow.
Todd: Visually, this is so awesome.
Craig: It looks great. Oh, yeah. And, and then you get the, the theme, the, the Nightmare, the <> w- whatever it is, and he’s back, and he’s back.
And then, uh, it’s a, a close-up on his face, and, “You shouldn’t have buried me. I’m not dead.” And it’s great. And, and this feels like a big scene. Like, it’s- I’m sure a lot of it is matte paintings or, or something. It’s, it… But it looks big
Todd: Yeah. It’s really impressive. It’s kinetic, it moves. It’s just really well shot.
Craig: Yeah. Kincaid, like, drops a big car on him, but that doesn’t work, and all the cars come on, and there’s big explosions, and Kincaid screams, “Kristen, Freddy’s back.” And then he gets killed. And then Joey doesn’t even get that long of a scene.
Todd: No. But I like his.
Craig: Joey’s scene kind of hearkens back to Part I.
It’s another waterbed scene. I’m sure you do.
Todd: Hell yeah. This, I mean, this, I still think about this scene to this day. My God. Joey’s in a waterbed and, and then he glances up at a poster on the wall, and there’s, like, a hot chick in the poster with a tiger, and then suddenly he hears something or feels something.
Who knows? And then he decides to pull the sheets away from his waterbed. He looks in and his waterbed’s got lights in it. That’s the thing I think is funny.
Todd: And this girl, naked girl floats up to the top, and I wanna talk about her. She’s, uh- She’s
Todd: she is, uh, Hope Marie Carlton, born on March 3rd, 1966 in Riverhead, New York.
Began modeling at age 13. Was the Playmate of the Month in Ju- July 1985 issue of Playboy. Went into appear in several Playboy videos and a bunch of Playboy special edition publications. No surprise there.
Craig: No surprise there ’cause she’s beautiful.
Todd: She’s gorgeous and she looks great, and, uh, she was in some low-budget movies that some of our listeners, I mean, you know, some of our listeners are not just into horror, but also fun, weird ’80s movies like Hard Ticket to Hawaii from 1987, which I think is one of the…
Todd: This is one of those, like, old ’80s, like, low-budget action movies that has become popular again because of the internet. Hard Ticket to Hawaii, you gotta see it. It’s, it’s a blast. She’s in The A-Team and L- You know, she’s a bunch of stuff on TV. Married a, a rich millionaire and then had a dispute about money later, which she lost.
She didn’t get access to his millions because of their prenup back in 2009. I read a lot about Hope Marie Carlton.
Todd: can tell … was very interested in her. I love the age of the internet when I can learn all about her now, but… Yeah, she was in Ghoulies Go to College too. Maybe, maybe if we, if we last to another 500 episodes, we’ll have certainly done Ghoulies Go to College.
Oh, boy. Uh, but, but one that she did before this was Slaughterhouse Rock, which is on my list. I really want us to do at some point a theme month, because I think we have just enough movies to fill out four weeks of the last of the, like, heavy metal horror movies from the ’80s, and Slaughterhouse Rock is one of them, and she’s in that.
Todd: like to, to see that.
Craig: Yeah, I’m not I’m, I’m not sure Poem
Craig: I’m, I’m not sure who else was as interested in all of that as you are. But- I,
Todd: I think there were many …
Craig: She was very gorgeous and, you know, and this is a dream, so he’s excited. But she goes away.
She swims down, and Freddy comes up and, and grabs him and g- and kills him and says, “How’s this for a wet dream?”
Todd: I love that. I love
Craig: that line. It was funnier when he said it, yeah.
Craig: But he’s dead, and the next day at school-
Todd: Everybody’s dead. Two kids are already dead. T- Like, this is, this is also like all the other movies where, like, kids are dead and people that are just going around their normal lives like, “Well, hope that doesn’t happen again Yeah.
It’s so funny. This movie, more than any other, and this is why I say the plot is paper thin. W- I mean, if you look at it, the plot of the first one, it really takes its time. Of course, it has to set up the whole premise, so it needs to take its time. But, you know, it’s this whole learning about this creature that’s coming into their dreams, and they’re trying to sort it out, and then they kinda, like, sort out that their parents are somehow involved, and they gotta figure out how to defeat him, and they figure out that, oh, it’s gotta be, like, you know, we have to enter the dream, but we have to have a way to c- bring him out into the real world.
So, like, that’s plot heavy. The second one is really kind of almost a character study. This kid who’s coming into his own and trying to figure out who he’s gonna be. He’s, he’s, he’s possessed by Freddy. There’s a lot of subtext there that we’ve already talked about, and, and it really focuses on this kid and his journey through, you know, you could say adolescence, through learning about his own sexuality or whatever.
The third one is this whole affair, right, of these kids who are brought together in this mental institution, and they all have these special abilities, but they’re all haunted by these same dreams, and they’ve gotta sort out, like, how they’re gonna relate to each other, and then they figure out they all have these special powers and that they’re gonna band together to use to kill Freddy.
You know, that’s– These are, I think, high-concept, very well-plotted movies. This movie is just like, “Okay, we’re gonna kill off the three characters from the first one, and then Freddy’s gonna systematically go after each of these other people.” He, he comes back in this way that’s kinda n- nebulous, and here we are.
You know? I mean, it just, it’s so thin.
Craig: It is, but I do think that it’s clever in the way that it progresses the story because-
Craig: Yeah, it is fun. And I mean, it, it, there is a through line. So once they’re dead, the next day at school, this isn’t important at all, but it drove me crazy. Kristen is a smoker, but Tuesday night clearly is not because-
Todd: She lights one cigarette once.
Craig: It doesn’t get lit, and then she continues to smoke it. She smokes an unlit cigarette through this whole scene. It’s, it dr- It was crazy. I was thinking like, “This is, this is where, like, is not good,” because you see, you see- The flaws … the little things that you… Right, the flaws. She’s– The cigarette is not lit.
She smokes it through the whole scene. But she kind of, she tells Kristen about the Dream Master- So this is the Nightmare on Elm Street for the Dream Master. Mm. The Dream Master has literally nothing to do with this whole movie. Like It’s just a word that comes up- Right … a couple of times. Like, there’s no explanation for what it is.
It’s just Alice mentions it here. She’s like, “Oh, yeah, I feel like when I was a kid I knew a nursery rhyme about a Dream Master.”
Craig: And then she… It comes up again at the end. We don’t know who the d- I don’t know. There’s something else. Somewhere along the lines we hear about some ancient things guarding gates or something.
I don’t know. But at this point she tells Kristen, “If you have bad dreams or whatever, just dream someplace fun and remember you’re in control.” See, I feel like that’s where that whole Alice daydreaming thing could have tied in. Mm. Like, her being, you know, her having these waking dreams where she’s in control.
If they had developed that more, it would’ve been better, but whatever.
Craig: Anyway, then there’s just a few minutes where you get all of the kids together really for no reason except for to go visit Freddy’s house. That’s when Rick- … tells Dan, “Oh, well- The
Todd: whole, the whole story …
Craig: the whole story.” Yeah, the whole story- Just for-
about the parents killing Freddy.
Craig: Again, for those… Yeah, just, just for the people who wandered in.
Clip: She told us a story about Freddy. Fred Krueger, he’s a town legend. He was a child killer freed on a technicality So? So a lot of parents got pissed off. And according to Chris, they hunted him down and roasted him like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Nice neighborhood. Yeah. Anyway, that’s where it gets weird. Um, she says that he comes back in dreams, and if he kills you in your dream, you’re dead for real.
Todd: I also find it, again, I think it’s in almost every movie from here on out, but I still find it comically amusing that there is this incredibly decrepit, abandoned, overgrown house.
Yeah. Like the Munsters’ house.
Craig: On this nice street, right.
Todd: In this beautiful street, right.
Craig: And then Kristen goes home, and her horrible letch mother drugs her.
Craig: As parents on Elm Street are apt to do.
Todd: They’re all assholes.
Craig: But the thing is the, the way that this works is Kristen is the last of the Elm Street kids.
Now, Freddy’s objective up to this point has been to kill the children of the people who murdered him out of vengeance.
Craig: But now he’s accomplished that because Kristen is the last one. So the only way for him to be able to access the other kids is to exploit Kristen’s power and have her draw them in.
So once he gets Kristen in a dream, and, and it’s in the boiler room and it’s all lit and green and shit, and it looks amazing. Once he gets her in there, he starts taunting her like, “You should call in one of your friends.” She’s like, “No, no, I won’t do it.” But she, I guess, inadvertently calls in Alice. And as soon as she calls in Alice, basically she is like, “I’m sorry, I’ll protect you,” or something.
And she just runs at Freddy, who grabs her and just tosses her into the furnace.
Todd: Yeah, that was fast. And
Craig: she… Right. There’s no fight. I have no idea what she was planning to do. Like she d- it doesn’t even look like she’s trying to hit him or like she just literally like runs at him, and he grabs her and throws her in the furnace.
And she’s burning up. And as she’s burning up, she looks at Alice and says, “Alice, you’ll need my powers.”
And shoots her powers into Alice.
Todd: It’s thoughtful of her, isn’t it?
Todd: Right at that moment of death, being consumed by the fire to do that last bit of goodwill.
Craig: It’s stupid of her- Stupid … because her fatal flaw was that Freddy was able to taunt her into drawing somebody else in. So then give that person the ability to draw more people in?
To draw other people in. Like, that doesn’t make any sense.
Todd: Like, let it die with you, Alice. You’re gonna die any- I mean, um, Kristen. You’re gonna die anyway.
Craig: Kristen, let… Right. Right.
Todd: I just like, again, you know that there was no actual writer involved in this when… I’m, I’m backtracking a little bit, but after mom had drugged Kristen-
Todd: she’s like, “In case you haven’t been keeping score, Mom, it’s his banquet and I’m the main course.”
Craig: Yeah, I loved it. And, and, and then she’s like, “No, Mother, you just murdered me. Take that to your damn therapy.” I loved it. It was fantastic.
Craig: Kudos to Tuesday night. Oh, if we also wanna give, like, behind-the-scenes stuff for our 500th anniversary, we could also tell the secret.
We’ve alluded to it many times, but we’ve never said it out loud. We also one time reached out to Tuesday Knight. Do you remember that?
Craig: She turned us down.
Craig: Only because, and I don’t blame her for this, she wanted to be compensated, and this was really early on, like probably in the first couple of years that we had been doing it.
Todd: Maybe now she’s more desperate. Who knows?
Craig: Well- We could ask her again … and, and, you know, we just, we weren’t in a position where we really could compensate her, at least not probably to the extent that she would’ve wanted. She had every right to ask for compensation. Sure. But we’ve alluded to somebody who, who turned down our request to be on the podcast.
It was her. It was Tuesday Knight. I don’t know. Maybe, may- maybe we’ll try again someday.
Craig: Now that we’ve done this movie, I don’t know why we would reach out to her, but anyway. She, she delivers those lines really well.
Todd: As best as she can. I mean, you know,
Craig: just- And I thought it was great …
Todd: in her defense they’re horrible lines, so-
good on her … it was super melodramatic, but I loved it. It was campy, it was fun, as is… And before she dies, she also does dream herself into a, a nice dream, which is the beach dream, which is s- is classic. Like-
Todd: And this is a really well-shot sequence. When she’s drugged out and she’s p- pawing around in her room and falling around, there is some really good camera work from above, like she’s tossing and turning and spinning and it’s following her.
Like, this was clearly a really planned out shot. And again, when you’re, when we’re talking about the MTV aspect of this, this might be one of the best shot of all the Freddy movies when you’re talking about camera work and visuals. It, it just really flows. It, it’s inventive. It moves. I, I loved this bit. I, I mean, just technically speaking, for that camera to be above her, swinging around like it does, following her around the room, and then it kind of spins around as she falls backwards and she starts to fade out and it gets really close into her face, it’s, it’s a great sequence.
And she’s like, “Dream someplace fun. Dream someplace fun. Dream someplace fun.” And like you said, it’s the beach.
Craig: Yeah, that’s a really fun sequence where she, you know, uh, Freddy’s glove is like, uh, the fin of a shark, and it comes up onto the beach and is going through the sand and coming right at her, and then he appears and-
Todd: Doesn’t it flame up, too?
Todd: It’s on fire … this is like, there’s a little bit of everything in this. Like, Freddy as Jaws comes up into the beach. The, the things flame up, and then when it hits the sandcastle, it explodes and Freddy’s there.
Craig: Yeah, and she, she tries to run away, but she falls into quicksand because quicksand was a really scary thing in-
Todd: In the ’80s, we all thought we were gonna- Yeah
fall into quicksand at some point. Be wa- beware.
Craig: She did. Then anyway, then that, she brings Allison and she dies, and then-
Todd: Well, she falls into the house. She’s crawling on the ceiling. I mean, it’s all great dream imagery, you know. Then, then she falls in the boiler room and all that stuff- Yeah … you were talking about.
Yeah. But then- Yeah … I think it’s at this point that my- Favorite line, the one that I just remember from childhood and that I would repeat to my friends all the time, “How sweet, fresh meat.” Ah,
Craig: so many good- Pretty classic. I mean, you’re right. I mean, it, it’s a lot of the stuff from this movie that became kind of iconic Freddy, and that’s one of them.
Him in the sunglasses, another big one. You know, that image is all over everywhere.
Todd: Yeah. Yeah. And we’re 55 minutes in to the movie. So now our three big characters from the first movie are now dead. The, Alice has gotten some power, and Alice wakes up and she’s in a room. Now, she has… I liked this bit. I thought it was very inspired.
She has this mirror that’s covered with photographs of her friends and people she loves, and early on, I don’t remember if it was her brother, I think it was maybe her brother, who comments, “You know, well, you can’t even see yourself in here.” And she’s like, “Eh, I, I don’t really care about seeing myself. I don’t wanna see myself.”
But there’s a photograph there now on the mirror. It’s like a postcard from Freddy holding Kristen saying, “Greetings from hell.” And she picks it off the mirror, and of course, when she takes it off the mirror, it exposes a little bit of the mirror. And as each person dies from here on out, she ends up pulling their photograph off of the mirror so that more of the mirror is exposed and she sees her face.
And I think this is a really cute, inspired, artistic moment where as Alice, like, gets her confidence, as she regains her power, she is able to see herself more clearly and confidently in the mirror because she’s exposing the mirror. I, I like that. I, I thought that was, like, in a movie that’s cobbled together, that’s a really powerful visual thing that, that’s coherent through, you know, these next few kills.
Craig: Yeah, and it, you know, it’s, it’s a little heady for a movie like this- Right … but I do think that it’s clever. It, you know, it’s also, you know, she can’t really see herself, but then every time, and her friends continue to drop off from this point on, we’ll talk more about it in a second, but every time one of them drops off, she, like, takes on some element of them, which, you know, for the movie is fun.
Todd: It’s like she collects their artifacts at first and then puts on their elements, yeah.
Craig: Yeah, but, like, she literally … When somebody dies, she literally, like, feels them, like part of them, like, come into her. Oh,
Craig: And so, like, after Kristen dies, there’s one scene in the movie where from out of frame, she raises her hand and takes a drag off a cigarette that we’ve never seen before, and then she goes, “Wait a second.
Craig: my God. “Well, where did she get that cigarette?”
Todd: I laughed out loud at that.
Craig: Oh my God, that was so funny.
Todd: It’s super pointed, but also you’re right. It’s like somebody was like, “Oh shit, give her a cigarette.” Like,
Craig: she takes… It’s half smoked and she takes a puff off and is like, “Wait a minute, I don’t smoke.” Like, sh- oh, boy. No, you did.
Todd: You didn’t smoke that cigarette.
Craig: sh- oh my God. Oh, it’s so funny. But I do think it is a clever idea that she kind of, she draws strength from the people that she knows. Now, in the, in the movie it’s, like, supernatural almost. But I think it’s kind of a, a cool, oh God, metaphor might be kind of a stretch about how, you know, she kind of- takes or, or learns something from each of her friends, and by, by drawing on the strengths of her friends, she gains her own self-confidence so that by the end she can peel all of that away and actually look at herself in the mirror.
Craig: And then Alice literally goes through the looking glass. I mean, come on.
Todd: Yeah. I mean, Fred even says toward the very end of the movie, he says something like, “Welcome to Wonderland” Something about Wonder some shit.
Todd: It’s, I mean, it’s a little, it’s a little corny, but I like that. And it’s, it’s, it’s a bit of a callback to the movie before it, you know, where all of their powers are combined in a way.
This is just combining their powers in a different way.
Craig: Yeah. And I read that initially, initially Alice was supposed to also have the powers of the Dream Warriors, but they thought that that would be too confusing, and I agree.
Craig: I’m glad that she, I’m glad that she didn’t inherit all of those powers from Kristen.
Logically, it could have made sense.
Craig: Yeah. I, I think, like I said, I think that you could almost watch this movie having not seen the other ones and still be able to follow it. I think that would’ve muddied the waters too much.
Todd: I mean, in a film that felt the need to like, you know, give a 30-second exposition about who Freddy is and what he does, that, yeah, that would’ve been, that would’ve been a bit much.
Craig: Th- this is where we start to see her friends kind of get picked off, because she inadvertently draws them into her dreams, and I think the first one is Sheila. Now, right before their class, Sheila says, “Look, I made this bug zapper for Deb,” ’cause she hates bugs or whatever, and she’s made, like this device or whatever.
Todd: By the way, is this the first time we learn that Deb is afraid of bugs?
Craig: No, she said something about it earlier. I c- She- I totally missed it … in fact, she squashed a c- she squashed a cockroach in her intro scene. Okay, okay. Um, stepped on it and said, “I hate bugs.”
Todd: Oh, that’s right, that’s right.
Craig: But then this is Sheila’s death.
For whatever reason, I, I, I really do think that Deb’s death is maybe the greatest in, in all, and I’ll let you talk about that one ’cause I know it’s your favorite. But Sheila’s death always stuck with me, and this is the one I was alluding to before when I said it was sad. Hm. Because poor Sheila is so cute and literally did nothing wrong, like doesn’t even know what’s happening.
Yeah. Like Sheila and Deb, this is just occurring to me now. They’re not involved. No, they’re not involved at all. They would have no idea what was happening. It’s true. It’s, it is true. Especially Sheila Deb, at least later, kind of knows that Alice is acting weird, and I think maybe somebody mentions to her that she said something about Fred Krueger.
I don’t know. But Sheila doesn’t know shit, so Sheila is just stressed out, you know, taking this test or whatever, and then all of a sudden Freddy is the teacher and comes up to her, and it’s all very scary, and she’s locked in her desk and-
Todd: Well, there’s like a mechanical almost Freddy arm coming. And even Rennie Haran was like, “I honestly, I don’t re- I don’t even remember what I was thinking.
I thought this might be cool. I think I was thinking of The Terminator or something at the time.” Like, it’s a little weird. This sort of mechanical, it looks almost like a Freddy arm, but then it’s not. Just kind of comes out and grabs at her, but then she throws it down and so it goes away. She
Craig: pushes it back into her desk, yeah.
Todd: But Freddy’s up at the front of the room. He’s the teacher now. There’s this iconic scene of him carving an apple, which, God, he’s got blades for fingers. It’s just, you can’t resist this. Uh, I love that bit, and I feel like this is a scene that gets replayed a lot. But, uh, anyway, he’s carving an apple with his fingers, and he stands up, and he walks towards her, and he pulls her up, and he goes, “You wanna suck face?”
And she goes, “No.” And, and he puts his mouth on hers and completely sucks her body out, and it’s only when she’s collapsing kind of in the real world with the asthma that I re- I realize the connection. But I have to tell you, this one kind of bothered me a bit, and it was Sheila’s performance-
Todd: that made it feel a little too real, you know?
Craig: Well, and he… Freddy’s really gross in this scene, too. I don’t remember. I don’t know, I think it just seemed like typical Freddy to me at the time. Watching it now, it’s a little bit more disturbing because he caresses her face gently at first, and then he does that obscene thing with his tongue. Like, he flicks his tongue at her.
Craig: And when he says, “You wanna suck face,” her response is so immediate.
Craig: And then his, he forces her face onto his so aggressively And sh- like I said, she’s so cute and sweet and non-threatening
Todd: Her response is so innocent and genuine that it bothered the out of me. I gotta- Yeah … I gotta say, this scene really upset me.
Craig: It, yeah, it bothers me too. And, but, but she, you know, Alice, like, feels her go into her Alice or whatever.
Craig: And then there’s more kind of teen stuff where Rick, you know, says they’re dropping, like, flies and- Uh-huh … Dan and Alice talk in the diner a little bit, and she says that she can’t sleep or somebody will die.
And then Bob Shay of New Line cameos as a teacher who talks about dreams, and this is where he very briefly in the background, like this is just background noise basically-
Todd: You could miss it easily. Yeah.
Craig: Yeah. He talks about how, like, there’s two different gates, a good one and a bad one, and each gate has a guard, and the dream master, like-
Todd: Controls the entrance somehow.
Craig: I don’t know. It doesn’t
Todd: it doesn’t come into play.
Craig: No. And this is all, you know, we’re hearing all this in the background as it’s zooming in on Alice falling asleep, and she does fall asleep, and so does her brother Rick. And that’s where we have his dream and death. And at first, he’s, like, on the toilet, ’cause he fell asleep on the toilet.
Craig: And a bunch of cheerleaders run into his stall. But then Alice is in there with him because she is, she, she can go into people’s dreams or whatever, but he sees her, and I just thought this would be so weird for him to be having this dream where all of these cheerleaders are, like, surrounding and fawning all over him, and then his sister is there.
Like- … “You, what are you doing in this dream? Go away.” But then he immediately gets pulled into, like, a dojo.
Craig: And like you said, like, they didn’t know how they were gonna kill him off. I read, I think, that in fact they even considered just not killing him off, like just letting him live, but they had already filmed his funeral-
and there was some pivotal stuff that happened at his funeral, so they had to kill him off some way, so they came up with this way. And I remember as a kid thinking that this was cool, like Freddy’s, like, invisible and he has to fight invisible Freddy. Now, obviously as an adult, I realize that this… They probably couldn’t get Bob England-
Craig: Right. So they had to figure out some way to do it without him, and ultimately-
Todd: It’s actually kinda lame. Yeah.
Craig: It is ultimately kind of lame, but for whatever reason it worked for me then. I was sad to see him die too. He was a good guy. Rick was a standup guy.
Todd: I was shocked. I saw the little bit on Never Sleep Again where they were talking about this movie, and they were talking about some of the inspiration for it.
And apparently, and again, just like a year or two before this movie, A Chinese Ghost Story, which was a movie we tried to do on this podcast. Craig and I had it lined up. I sent the file to him and whatever, and there was an issue with the subtitles. They weren’t lined up. We couldn’t really watch it I couldn’t get anything together in time, and we put it on the back burner.
It was, it was right after I’d moved to China. I was super excited to do this very notorious old-school classic, and we never got to it. But when you see clips from this movie, The Chinese Ghost Story, you can see where not just this scene, but a lot of the scenes in this movie were inspired directly by that film.
The, the dreamlikeness of it. And honestly, this movie’s got a lot more inspiration from the Hong Kong Asian martial arts/supernatural horror films that were big in the late ’70s and ’80s than you would imagine. The, a lot of it really comes from that. This scene maybe being the epitome of that, just sort of a, in a, in a clunky low-budget way.
But it made me think, Craig, that we need to revisit that movie. We need to go back and, and do that finally.
Craig: I’m sure it’d be easier to find now, yeah.
Todd: Yeah. Yeah, I could totally do it, yeah.
Craig: Rick ends up getting killed, and then Alice wakes up in her classroom screaming, and all of the windows in the classroom explode-
apparently in the real world.
Craig: But there’s never any reference to this ever again.
Craig: And it l- it looks great. It looks like a music video, so ultimately I don’t care. But there’s no explanation- None of it makes sense … for w- th- there’s no explanation for why that would’ve happened.
I mean, you know, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to pick apart every bit, but there’s a lot of stuff where it’s like this, is this, if this is happening in the real world, it doesn’t make sense, and if this is a dream… You know, there’s a lot of holes, I guess you could say, in the consistency of is this dream world, is this reality?
Why would this be affecting reality if it happened in the dream? Yada, yada, yada, that kinda thing in this movie. But ultimately, if you’re just watching it for fun, you can kinda glaze all over and probably not pay too much attention, and you won’t be too bothered by it. I,
Craig: uh- You might wanna… I, I would, I glaze over it all.
Todd: You don’t like that, that,
Craig: uh- Might lead to, to cleanliness issues … you don’t think that image… I don’t, I don’t know. Um-
Todd: What do you think of when you think of glazing, Craig? What’s going on?
Craig: So then, okay, so-
Todd: There’s a weird filler scene, right? This whole, with Rick climbing out of the coffin, ’cause there’s this funeral scene with Rick.
Todd: It- there’s no point to this funeral scene. She just kind of daydreams Rick climbing out of the coffin. He cackles a bit, says a few things that d- that make no difference, climbs back into his coffin, and then someone comes up to Alice and is like, “Alice, are you okay?” She’s like, “Not really.”
Todd: They walk away. Yeah, I just feel like this was, this had no need to be in there.
Craig: No, I mean, it was a nice little scene between brother and sister. I mean, again, it was sad that he died.
Todd: Was it, though? They, they weren’t even, like, commiserating or anything. He just… He was almost taunting her, I felt. You know?
Craig: No, he… Well, I d- Eh. Maybe he was, I guess. I don’t know. It was like-
Todd: Eh, blah, blah, blah, blah … he was…
Craig: Yeah. “I’m not really dead. I didn’t really die. Just kidding, I am.” I, I- Yeah … it was weird. You’re right, it didn’t really amount to anything. But she can do nunchucks now-
Todd: And she, she mentions to Debbie, in case we forgot, she’s talking to Debbie and she’s talking to, um-
Todd: Dan. “We need to band together. We’ve gotta, like, fight this together. We gotta be together.” And Debbie’s like, “Yeah, look, I don’t spend hours working out just to let one night stalker beat me.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s right, Debbie works out.” Yeah. We haven’t seen Debbie work out yet, but we’ve heard reference to it an hour ago, so I better be reminded of it now.
Craig: Well, and she starts working out now.
Craig: Again, to a great song in the background.
Craig: Something Put Your Hands On Me or something. It’s great.
Craig: And so she starts working out, and then Alice, I think is trying to go to the diner, but gets sidetracked and goes into a theater, and she’s watching it.
Todd: This is another thing that makes no sense.
Craig: No, it looks great, but it doesn’t have any… It doesn’t make any sense. Like, is she asleep before she goes into the theater? Does she… I, I, I don’t-
Todd: Why even in her dream was she motivated to go into the theater? I don’t know. Except that maybe we just do weird shit in our dreams that we can’t control.
Craig: I guess it would make more sense that she fell asleep in there, but it doesn’t make any sense why she went in there. But anyway, she, she falls asleep in there, and on the screen is a black and white version of her diner that she works at, and she gets sucked into it, and all of her dead friends are in the audience clapping for her, and she runs into herself.
Todd: It looks fan- and apparently was very difficult to do. I mean, they put a lot of effort into this one. It was filmed in the Rialto, and that whole bit of her literally flying into the screen and showing up in the screen… I mean, when you look at it now, it’s like, eh, I don’t know, you’ve seen that in, like, 10 movies.
But at the time, that was kind of a first. And so, uh, y- you know, technically it was- It looks really
Todd: it was challenging. It does look good. And, uh-
Craig: And it leads to a good scene where she goes in, and, you know, she, she had said earlier that her greatest fear was ending up old working at that diner that she works at or whatever.
So we see her old, still working there.
Todd: By the way, did you notice the name of the diner?
Todd: It’s the Crave Inn.
That’s- Super cute … cute.
Craig: And then Freddy shows up and serves her a pizza- Oh … that has people’s faces as the sausage on the pizza.
Todd: Another iconic scene.
Craig: And they’re all, like, screaming and saying, “Help me, Alice.” No, Alice,
Clip: don’t let him do it. No. Well, you little meatball. I love soul food
Todd: Oh, this is so iconic.
Craig: Uses one of his finger knives to, like, pop the face and pop it in his mouth, and squish it all up in his mouth. It looks disgusting. It’s great.
Todd: Oh, that’s fantastic.
Craig: But then the diner door opens, and it opens into Deb’s bedroom. So Freddy’s gonna go after Deb. I guess, I guess he got Alice to draw her in somehow.
Todd: Yeah. Who knows at this point?
Craig: But so she, quote-unquote, “wakes up,” or doesn’t, I don’t know, and runs to diner, to the diner, and that’s when we get Deb’s dream, which is-
Todd: Oh, I love it. This is my favorite of all the movies. This is my favorite sequence. I think it’s so clever and so smart and so good and so disgusting.
It’s just every bit of it is fantastic. There’s two parts to it First there’s Deb and her whole sequence, and God, she- of course she’s working out, she’s bench pressing here, and then Freddy appears above her and says some quippy line, and then pushes down the weights against her, which makes her arms bend so far that her elbows pop out.
But it’s not her bones inside of her, it’s like cockroach… Well, we learn it’s like bits of cockroach that then start bursting out of her arms, and it is visually so painful and so disgusting and so great.
Todd: I mean, I don’t know how you can forget this. Everybody m- who saw this movie must remember it to their dying day.
It’s such a great, it’s such a great sequence.
Todd: And you know, like I said earlier, there were a lot of special effects artists who were very active and very busy at this time who all came in to do bits and pieces on this movie. And the screaming Mad George, who we’ve talked about a lot, he was like- Mm
Society and the, one of the later, uh, Silent Night, Deadly Night movies, and, uh, he, he does a lot of these kind of really visceral, slimy, gross kind of body effects. He was instrumental in this, in this sequence as well, responsible for it. And what essentially we see is that she’s got cockroach arms and she’s flailing around, and then suddenly she’s inside of this roach motel, and eventually Freddy has the roach motel in his hand.
You know, it’s like he’s giant or she’s tiny now. But there’s another cockroach in there as well, and she’s like, she ends up falling forward into a glue trap. I mean, it is… Every bit of this, it builds. It’s like one thing building on another building on another, where she just transforms into a cockroach that falls into a glue trap inside of a roach motel, and then eventually gets squished by Freddy.
Craig: Yeah. And I- Oh … I just recently learned that Brooke Thiess did all of that. Like, anytime there was somebody in those, like, cockroach prosthetics, it was her. And she said that, that, that the roach motel floor, it was, it was meant to appear super sticky, and it was, but it was also really, really slippery, so it was hard for her to even, like, push herself for some of those sequences.
But it looks- Damn … I mean, it looks, it looks gross and it looks so good. And then he squishes it, and all this gunk squirts out of
Todd: the roach motel. Like these tiny little cockroaches in this rec- roach motel are squirting out like a giant thing of gunk. It’s kinda silly, but it’s just- Yeah … it’s funny But the thing that surrounds it is fantastic.
Clip: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Todd: Her friends are trying to come at her, and so they, like, run up to the diner, and Alice runs over and’s like, “We gotta go to r- go to her house,” and he drops, “And I’m gonna drive.”
And she hops in the si- in the car and, and Dan hops in the other side, and they drive. And then they get to the house, and she jumps out of the car, or the truck, and she runs towards the house. And then suddenly, the next scene, we see her running around the corner, but she’s coming back around the corner to the diner into a version of the very same scene we just saw, and she repeats.
Everything repeats. I kid you not, when I first saw this movie, I thought something was wrong.
Craig: Me too. I was just gonna say the same thing. Honestly, I don’t remember the context. Like, I don’t remember where I saw it or who I was with, but I remember seeing this and thinking, “What is going on? I, I’ve already seen this.”
Todd: is so genius. It is such a fake-out. I put this up there with playing Metal Gear Solid. Craig, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Uh-uh. But there will be listeners who know exactly what I’m talking about. And when you’re fighting Psycho Mantis, there is a, a sequence in that game w- that is so fourth wall breaking that it blows your mind.
And this is just like it. I was like, “What, what is happening?” And it loops it again and’ll… And then the third time… And again, it cuts between this and Deb’s death. So we’re seeing these cut between each other. And every time it comes back to them trying to save her, you realize they’re in this time loop.
And at one point they realize they’re in a time loop. And the guy’s like, “Wait a minute. This sounds very familiar. Like, you’ve said this before. Um-”
Craig: And she’s like, “Wait, we must both be asleep.” What? Like, I could buy that she’s asleep, but what, did he fall asleep standing there at his truck? ‘Cause that’s where we last left him.
Todd: It doesn’t make sense at all.
Craig: But whatever. Who cares? So then they finally figure it out, but it’s too late. Deb is already dead and, and Alice knows that because she gets a feeling anytime somebody dies.
Craig: So they’re driving down the road, and Freddy appears right in front of them. So Alice decides that she’s going to hit him with Dan’s truck, and that made me really mad.
Like, if somebody else is driving my car, I don’t think that they should be able to decide if they’re gonna wreck it or not, but…
Todd: Nah. Well, even if it’s Killin’ Freddy? Come on.
Craig: And, and it’s a really cool truck, too, and it totally smashes. And Dan gets hurt and taken to the hospital. And she tells the paramedic not to put him under, but then she leaves him at the hospital, and she knows that he’s gonna be- Yes
Todd: Look, she abandons her boyfriend at the hospital. I just need to point this out.
Craig: I don’t think that she has any choice. I think she tries to stay with him, but they make her leave, and I think that that’s why she runs home-
Craig: and pops a handful of pills, presumably sleeping pills And suits up, and there’s a whole, like, 30, 45-second montage of her, like, putting on the karate headband and, like, put- like, wrapping it around her fist and, like- It’s
Craig: arming herself with Sheila’s bug zapper and putting on maybe Deb’s jacket or br- I don’t remember. But she takes something from all of her friends and puts them on, and she peels all the pictures off of the mirror, and then she looks at herself and she’s a badass, and- Yeah … she goes, she goes through the mirror Into the hospital room and I just, I have in my notes, “Is she dreaming?
What is happening?” Yeah. We didn’t see her fall asleep. Is she dreaming? Is Dan dreaming? I think the answer is yes.
Craig: Freddy is the surgeon, but they run out and they end up in a carnival tunnel- … that F- Freddy is controlling.
Craig: They get thrown out of the carnival tunnel, through a stained glass wind- window, into a cathedral, and this cathedral is where this is, this is the final act.
Like, the showdown is gonna happen in this cathedral. It’s just a set piece. Like- Yeah … this is not a place we’ve ever been. Nope. This is not, this has never been referenced.
Todd: Nothing they’ve dreamed.
Craig: No, it’s just a cool place for the last thing to happen.
Todd: It’s so silly, yeah. It- I literally wrote in my notes, “Why are they in a church now?”
Craig: ‘Cause it looks cool. It’s surrounded by stained glass windows so it can be lit well. They- they’ve got wind blowing through there. Anyway, before anything can really happen, Dan wakes up, like he starts to crash and so the surgeons wake him up, and he’s okay, but he’s gone. And we hear the, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you” rhyme, and Freddy says, “Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”
And I guess because she knows karate, she’s also a gymnast now, and- Yeah … she can, like, do, like, yeah, like, I don’t know, back flips down the aisle of the church. And I have in my notes they fight and dance around the church for a while. Not literally dance, but, like, that’s kinda what it feels like. They just kinda move around the church for a while.
Craig: And then he says, “I’ve been guarding my gate for a long time.” What? What are you talking about? Like, this is-
Craig: this is clearly a callback to that weird story that we got f- from the teacher. From Bob Shay. But we don’t know anything about it.
Craig: And, and so now, so is the man who was Fred Krueger, is he now…
I, I don’t, I don’t under- I don’t understand. The
Todd: gate to what, you know? I mean,
Craig: like, what- The gate to what? … you go through this gate- Like,
Todd: one? … are you supposed to go through it? I don’t know. Like-
Craig: I d- I don’t know …
Todd: who’s threatening to go through the gate that he’s guarding and, yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.
But also it’s a line you could miss, and y- you know, you never know.
Craig: Yeah. Yeah, it goes, it goes by really fast. But then she uses Sheila’s bug zapper like a proton pack, like a Ghostbuster proton pack, and burns a big hole through his chest, and you see, you know, like, all of the souls that are in him in there or whatever.
But he’s like, “I don’t know, you can’t kill me,” or something. I don’t know. And she is laying there on the ground next to shattered pieces of a stained glass window, and she says, “Wait a second. I remember the nursery
Todd: don’t even remember- Apparently that’s important … how it goes.
Craig: Evil shall see itself and it shall die. Now, we have never heard this before.
Craig: But apparently she knows from this nursery rhyme that she only now remembers that when she picks up the piece of broken stained glass, Freddy sees his reflection in it- That explodes … and it causes him to be destroyed from the inside out.
Yeah. And again, it’s, it’s the whole question, you know, how do you bring Freddy back? Fine. Great. You get him back. Well, now how do you kill him? ‘Cause, you know, you’ve killed him a bunch of times before and, and I read that Renny Harlin was like, “Well, you think of all the ways that you can kill somebody, and all of those things are external.
You can shoot him or burn him or blow him up or whatever. All those things are external. How can we kill him from the inside out?” And so this is how they do it. He sees himself in the mirror, which apparently causes something to happen which allows all of the souls that he, of the people that he’s killed that are in him can now reach out from inside him-
Craig: and rip him apart.
Todd: It feels like they’ve been on the edge of doing this this whole time anyway, ’cause, you know, every time… And we saw the souls in the first, in the movie just before this too, right? The, we all go
Craig: to sleep. And Linnea Quigley was in there somewhere. Yeah. Do you think that was her boobs?
Todd: That was her boobs. It was 100% her boobs. I’ve seen, you know what, if you go, and I think actually it’s also on the Never Sleep Again bit too. They talked about and they showed behind-the-scenes video of this giant, uh, Freddy Krueger torso that they constructed and then all, had all these people painted up and behind there just pressing their faces and bodies through it.
And, uh, you can hear Renny on the outside going, “Linnea, press your chest. Get your chest out there.” And he says, like, “Yeah, I kn- I know what the 14-year-old kids want.”
Craig: Yeah, she doesn’t care.
Todd: She does. You know, she’s down for it always. Yeah. That’s Linnea Quigley- Still
Todd: straight. Yeah, she does.
Todd: this was pre-plastic surgery. Do
Craig: you wanna know, do you wanna…
Craig: Here’s another, here’s another fun secret for the, for the 500th episode I still have Linnea Quigley’s phone number in my phone.
Clip: you could call her at any time.
Craig: I just like knowing it’s there. Uh-huh. Like, I just feel really cool, like I have Linnea Quigley’s phone number in my…
I don’t even know if it’s really her phone number. Her assistant may have given us, like, a temporary line or something, but- Could be. Could be
Craig: it’s still in my phone as Linnea Q.
Todd: Oh, man. That was such a nice conversation with her we had.
Craig: Oh, it was great. W-
Todd: I- Like a dream come true, that one.
Craig: There have been times when I’ve been, I’ve been in my contacts and I’ve thought, “I could just call her- Right now
Todd: May I have 10 minutes of your time, Ms….
Craig: Yeah. Oh, boy. Anyway, she was really super, super nice. Okay, so sh- yeah, so the s- the souls reach out, and this all looks good. You know, like you said, really cool special effects.
Todd: Hey, by the way, Linnea didn’t ask us for money. I just need to point that out.
No. She was so… She was beyond gracious.
Craig: you- Absolutely beyond
Todd: gracious … you know, we, we, we let her go at exactly the 20-minute mark that, you know, we promised we would have, and she sounded almost, almost surprised. Like, “Oh, oh, we’re gonna end talking here?” I felt like we could’ve gotten more time out of her if we had just kept going.
Craig: She was great. She was so, so great.
Craig: I mean, so anyway, yeah, they, they tear him apart, I guess, and I don’t remember if he blows up or what, and all of the, you know, white souls fly away out the window, and Alice walks out of the big doors of the church into a bright light, and that’s it.
Craig: And then we see Dan and Alice in some, like, garden with a fountain.
Mm-hmm. And she’s in all white, and she’s sitting next to this fountain, and she looks into the reflection and thinks for a moment that she sees Freddy, but then the water ripples and she looks and he’s not there, and that’s the end. And that then leads right into 5. I assume you’ve seen them all, right?
Todd: Yeah, yeah. In fact, uh- A couple years ago, Liz and I sat down and I m- and we watched every single one in sequence over the course of a few, a few days. And I’ve seen them all, but then I got the opportunity to see them all in sequence to really, really compare them, and yeah, I mean, I concur. Five is
Todd: Five is okay. It’s not terrible. I don’t even, I don’t even have the hate for six that a lot of people do.
Todd: I, maybe I’m a little biased because I like seeing Alice Cooper in there, but, uh- Yeah,
Craig: and I like that sequence, yeah.
Craig: Yeah, I, I just, I, I think the ending was kinda stupid. I mean, giving Freddy a…
I mean, t- maybe we’ll talk about this movie- Dynamite? I wanna s- … at 1:50, I don’t know. But, like, giving him a daughter and then, uh, uh, those dream spirits or those ancient dream demons. Yeah. Plus it was 3D. I w- I did see it, I did see it in 3D in the theater, which made it a little bit better.
Todd: That would’ve been fun.
Craig: I was- I do remember at the time being disappointed that it was, it was only the last, like, 10-minute sequence that was in 3D, which was kind of a bummer. But anyway, it was okay. Six, like you said, six was, I, I, it’s fine. I’ll still watch it if it’s on, but it’s really corny. And then I really felt like they course-corrected with New Nightmare.
Todd: And Freddy versus Jason, we love the hell outta that movie. That was a great one.
Craig: I like that movie a lot. I, it’s certainly flawed, but I, I still think it’s a lot of fun.
Todd: I feel like it had, it’s better than it had any right to be. I mean, the idea of getting Freddy and Jason together sounds cool on paper, but then when you really start to suss out what that means, you know, it shouldn’t actually be that great.
And I remember that movie being actually pretty great.
Craig: Yeah. Well, and listen to our episode on it if you wanna hear all the backstory about the production problems. I mean, they were trying to get that movie into production for years. Um, and there were so many different scripts and directors and, and whatnot.
But yeah, I ultimately ended up liking it. The, the remake with Jackie Earle Haley, I did not like at all. It felt really reductive. Freddy’s makeup was done largely with CGI. I’m sure Jackie Earl Ha- Earle Haley is a fine actor, but I, I just didn’t care for it And so that’s it. That’s been, what, like 16 or 17 years, I think, since that remake came out.
Craig: And there’s really not been anything Nightmare official since then. Now I consider Ga- oh, gosh, what was it? I can’t- Dylan’s New Nightmare, that fan film that we watched and did a minisode on for, for the Pat- for the Patreon page.
Craig: I liked that. Like, in my mind, I almost consider that canon.
I really enjoyed that. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. I think it’s available on YouTube. It’s a fan film, but it’s really good. But people, you know, Robert Englund has kind of waffled back and forth. I mean, he has definitively said that he would not get back into the Freddy makeup again.
Um, but then he’s done it a couple of times since he said that for cameos and things. And I, I think that he’s interested in seeing something happen with it, whether he’s a part of it or not. But I guess since Wes Craven died, that’s really muddied the waters with the rights. I think one of the big studios, I wanna say Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the first movie, but just the first movie.
And so I think that they are working on doing a remake or a reboot- Reboot or something … of the first movie. Hmm. Yeah, but then the movie for the rest of them, plus I think all of the international rights are owned by a different studio. I think Paramount. Don’t… I mean, you’d have to double-check. I, I don’t know if I’m right on…
It’s two big studios, and those two big studios, one of them, I think it’s Paramount, wants to buy Warner Brothers, or the other way around, and they’re kind of in negotiations for that, but I don’t think that that will happen until next year at the earliest. And d- just as a side note, I don’t think that that should happen.
I don’t think- Right … that it’s good for all of these studios to be- No … one big conglomerate. I don’t think that that’s good at all. It’s
Craig: But if it happened, that would clear some of the rights issues up. But I heard the, the studio that owns the rights to the first movie are, are actively working towards movie for domestic release, but then the studio that owns the international rights are also considering making a film that would only be released internationally.
Craig: So I, I mean, I know that the international market is huge, but Nightmare on Elm Street seems like such an American thing.
Craig: I also don’t know how international rights work. Like, I don’t know if an internat- I, I would assume that if a film was released internationally that eventually we would be able to access it.
Todd: Yeah. In this day and age, of course. Yeah. Come on.
Todd: It’ll be all over the internet in some way, shape, or form, and somebody’ll bring it over. I mean, there’ll be money to be made, if anything, but then there’s always piracy in the internet, so, uh-
Todd: we’ll, we’ll definitely see it
Craig: We’ll see something.
The, Freddy Krueger is too big to go away forever, and I, you know, I- Robert Englund at this point is, is old. I, I remember watching this part four and seeing him as the teacher, and I think, uh, he’s, uh, behind the teacher’s desk and I think he’s got his feet up on the teacher and he’s, or on the desk, and he stands up and I thought, “Wow, Robert Englund looks, like, in peak shape here.”
Like- Yeah … he is lean and in shape and just, uh, you know, anybody at his age today would have difficulty, I think, with the physicality of it. But, you know, I’m, I’m a huge fan of his, and if he wanted to be involved, if he wanted to do it again, I would be first in line. But I, I have a feeling that won’t happen.
But, but I hope something good happens ’cause I do love the character and, and the concept and I’d love to see more of it.
Todd: It’s hard, right? It’s kinda like Indiana Jones. I mean, it’s really, really hard to picture anybody but Harrison Ford in that role.
Todd: In the same way, it’s really hard to picture anybody else in the Freddy costume, and they tried it once and it was a sh- it was a shit show, so it almost proved the point.
I mean, look, you’ve got James Bond, and you’ve had multiple characters playing James Bond and it works. So I’m not saying it can’t work and it won’t work, but I don’t know why it feels different from James Bond in that way. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if we saw another person in Freddy and he was really good, uh, it would be great and then we could continue this franchise.
But it’s certainly not as easy as, say, Jason, you know, where you got a mask on- It’s a guy in a mask … or Michael Myers. Yeah, I mean, like, uh, those are easy to reboot and to continue to do sequels ’cause they’re masks there, and the differences are far more subtle And maybe not really noticeable by the general public or can be repeatable, but that there’s a face.
There’s a face and a very, very distinct character behind Freddy. He talks, he quips. Yeah, that’s a very different animal to try to tackle, and it would be a hard sell for old fans. But maybe, who knows? Maybe new fans would find-
Todd: a new thing. I don’t know …
Craig: yeah, that’s true. You never know. In, in fan forums, there’s…
Kevin Bacon’s name has come up a lot, and Kevin Bacon knows this and has said that he would be interested. But I think that’s kind of a-
Todd: He’s about as old as Robert Englund, isn’t he? I mean, am
Craig: I wrong? No, surely not. I mean, he’s not a spring chicken, but he’s not… I don’t think he’s as old as Robert. I don’t think.
Todd: Well, m- maybe they got five years apart or, or six.
Craig: Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s in really good shape, though.
Todd: Yeah. Okay, that’s the difference.
Craig: Well, Robert Englund may be, too. I don’t know. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I, I, I, again, I’m, I’m super glad that we got around to watching this movie. I’ve said it already, but I’ll say it again.
If you’re like me and, and you remember this movie fondly or otherwise, but you haven’t seen it in a long time, I really encourage you to go back and watch it. Gosh, I had so much fun watching it. It was, it was nostalgic and I was just… I was surprised by how I had forgotten how much I liked it.
Craig: Even then, uh, back then, I, I…
It was one of my favorites, and I had just kind of forgotten. Parts I and Parts III and New Nightmare get talked about so much. I feel like this one doesn’t get talked about as much for whatever reason, but it deserves to be. Yeah. I think it’s great. I think it’s an excellent entry in the franchise.
Todd: I feel like it may not be objectively the best-
Todd: all around But it, m- it might be the most fun. It’s
Craig: really entertaining. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Todd: Y- yeah. It’s just, it- you can’t miss it. And if you haven’t seen it in a long time, you’ll realize that a lot of your favorite memories of Freddy m- probably come from this movie, honestly.
Todd: It’s that visual, it’s that iconic, and, and I’m glad we did it for our 500th episode, Craig.
Todd: Jesus. Here we go. 500. I can’t believe we have sat down 500 times and talked about horror movies. It’s crazy. I know. But it’s been so much fun.
Craig: At this point, I have probably talked to you about as much as I’ve talked to anybody else- … in my life.
Todd: Right? Maybe more than my mom at this point, you know?
How often do I call her? I, I’m sorry to say, I don’t call my mom once a week.
Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. Wow. I don’t know. It’s been a long time. Fi- it’s just hard to believe that there are 500 plus hours of us yammering out there- Oh … on the internet. It’s wild. But to those of you who have been listening to us yammer for a while, and to those few of you who’ve been with us almost from the beginning or from the beginning, you have our gratitude.
It’s, it’s been a lot of fun, but we surely wouldn’t do it if we felt like we were just talking into a vacuum, if we didn’t, you know, get feedback from you all and have fun conversations with you, uh, online. That’s, that’s really what makes it worth it, and that’s the reason that I don’t see any reason to stop anytime soon.
Todd: Yeah. We’ve built a nice little community and, uh-
Craig: And made some friends. There are some, you know, uh, folks that I really consider friends at this
Todd: point. A- absolutely. Thank you, guys. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sticking with us all this time. And if you’re a new listener as well, like, thank you for joining us, and we’re really proud to be able to present you with a nice back catalog, all completely available to you, of 499 other episodes for you to catch up on, and we hope you’ll continue with us into the future.
Craig and I, when we started this, it was just for fun, just to see if we could do it, and it turned out to be something that we really enjoyed, and we made a pact. We said that as long as this continues to be fun, we will keep doing it, and when it stops being fun, we’ll stop. So far, as you can see, we’ve, uh, continued to enjoy it, and, uh, I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.
So, thank you so much for, uh, joining us on this journey, and we look forward to seeing you into the future. And with that all said, thank you again so much for listening, and until next time with another horror movie coming your way, I’m Todd.
Todd: With Two Guys and a Chainsaw.
