Thursday, February 18, 2010

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

I wouldn’t even mention the fact that, once again, there are several different nightmares, except for one tiny detail:

This movie doesn’t take place on Elm Street, either.

Of course, once you think about it, the only movie that has a complete tie TO Elm Street is the second movie. Freddy possesses a person who lives on Elm Street, who subsequently goes out and does his killing for him.

But in the first movie, Tina is the first to die. I’m not sure where Tina lived, but it sure didn’t look like Elm Street. And I know for a fact that her boyfriend was in a jail cell when Freddy killed him, and that cell wasn’t on Elm Street.

All in all, this series has some title problems.

There’s a larger question here, however: How is it, exactly, that Freddy managed to return in the nightmares of various and sundry people?

In the first movie, he had been dead for quite a while. None of the kids, all of them in high school, could remember him. So he’d been dead at least a decade. What finally allowed him to come back? And by what means did he return?

And why did he choose to terrorize kids, when adults were responsible for his death? I mean, I realize he was a child killer, so, what? He just decided to go with what he knew?

All things being equal, if the second Freddy movie was really all about revenge, Freddy should have sent his avatar out to kill the people who killed Freddy in the first place. That’s at least logical, right? Right?

Sure.

Moving on.

In order to demonstrate that, like, the last movie was kind of dumb, but this movie is going to be, like, classy, the flick starts with a quote by Edgar Allan Poe: “Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I loathe them.”

As the credits roll along, we get to watch a girl making a house out of paper mache. It’s after one in the morning, so she turns up the music, and slams some Diet Coke.

Her mom comes into her room. Mom has been out on the town. She refers to the teenaged blonde girl as Kristen, so we’ve got a name to hang our hat on. And just like Tina, mom has a “guest,” and doesn’t want to keep him waiting.

So she gets Kristen into bed, and shuts out the lights, even as Kristen protests that she’s having awful dreams again.

Kristen stares at the paper mache house she was making. It looks sorta-kinda like Nancy’s house, only it’s all boarded up. Of course, it might just look all boarded up because there are Popsicle sticks over the windows.

Kristen falls asleep. Then she wakes up. Somewhere, small children are doing the Freddy Chant.

Kristen stands up in her bed, and, hey… she’s not in her room any more. She’s in the middle of Elm Street, and there’s Nancy’s house, which is, indeed, all boarded up. And the front door is still red, which it was in part 2, but not in part 1.

Also, they perform the Freddy chant wrong: It’s supposed to be, “Grab YOUR crucifix,” and they say, “Grab A crucifix,” instead.

It’s like no one cares at all about getting these things right, I swear.

Kristen gets out of bed, and starts walking to the house. A bunch of kids are jumping rope while they do the Freddy Chant on the front lawn.

There’s a little girl in a yellow dress, riding a tricycle in front of the house. She asks Kristen’s name, but won’t tell Kristen her name.

Then the front door opens, and Yellow Dress rides into the house. Kristen chases after her.

Kristen heads down to the basement, because she hears Yellow Dress’s tricycle bell. How did she get down there? I mean, I know it’s a dream, but still. Those stairs would make for a bumpy ride.

Yellow Dress appears, and says, “This is where he takes us.” The furnace suddenly fills with fire, and Kristen can see the bones and skulls inside it. The little girl continues, “Freddy’s home.”

Kristen picks her up and runs. Down various hallways which wouldn’t actually be in anyone’s basement.

Since it’s a nightmare, Kristen gets stuck in some tar on the floor, so Freddy can run up behind her and just miss swiping her with his claws. As she escapes in the nick of time.

She runs down a hallway, enters a large room, and bumps into a corpse hanging from the ceiling. The she looks around the room, and sees that there are a LOT of dead people, all of them about her age, hanging from the ceiling.

Yellow Dress says, “Put me down. You’re hurting me.” Kristen looks down, and sees that the little girl is now a scorched skeleton.

She screams and wakes up.

She goes to the bathroom, and turns the tap… which turns into fingers, and grabs her hand.

Freddy’s face appears in the bathroom mirror, and does some evil laughing.

The other tap turns into fingers as well. The Freddy claws sprout from them, and they slash at Kristen. She screams.

Her mom runs into the bathroom, and Kristen, who is now fully awake, has one slashed wrist and is holding a razor blade.

There’s blood on the mirror. Kristen passes out, and her mom runs to her.

Next Shot: Psychiatric Hospital.

So now we’re meeting new people.

We’ve got Max, a black orderly type, who is doling out medication. He thinks all the recent suicides are because of the kids’ parents dropping acid in the 60s.

We’ve got Doctor Gordon, who has a clipboard and a smile for everyone.

And we’ve got Taryn, who has long black hair, and who isn’t sleeping. The doctor expresses concern, but not surprise.

We’ve got Jennifer, who has burns on her arms that she made with cigarettes. She wants to know when she’ll be getting her cigarette privileges back. I’m guessing not soon. As is the doctor.

A dude named Phillip goes running by.

And then Gordon looks in on a black kid, who I guess had some outbursts.

Another doctor, this time an older woman, comes up behind Gordon and they talk about the kid, and then a new doctor, just out of grad school, who’s been doing ground-breaking research on pattern nightmares.

I know you’re wondering if it’s Nancy. The answer is: Duh.

The other doc, by the way? Simms. Just FYI.

The two docs get a page. A suicide attempt has just been brought in, and she got all violent when they tried to give her a sedative.

It’s Kristen.

She kicks Gordon, and slashes Max with a scalpel. Gordon says they won’t hurt her, and she starts doing the Freddy chant, beginning with, “Five, Six, Grab Your Crucifix.” Yep, she got it right.

She proceeds to get Seven, Eight wrong (she goes with, BETTER stay up late, instead of GONNA).

And then, in the hallway, the “New Doctor” says, “Never sleep again.” And who is it? Yeah, it’s Nancy. I told you that.

Props to the continuity people, she’s still got that white streak in her hair. Nancy asks Kristen where Kristen learned the rhyme, and Kristen hands the scalpel to Nancy and hugs her.

I guess jump rope chants are the thing that unites us all.

Later, Nancy talks to Gordon, who refers to all the kids as survivors with severe sleep disorders. In his words, “Insomnia, narcolepsy, bed-wetting.” The nightmares are the common thread. They’ll do anything not to sleep.

He also mentions some kind of boogeyman.

You know, here’s the thing: If a bunch of kids all come to your hospital, all with sleeping problems, all of whom mention some freaky dude named Freddy who comes to then in dreams, wouldn’t you take it a LOT more seriously?

Gordon’s all, “Well, none of them want to sleep, and they all have bad dreams about THE SAME GUY. Dum-te-dum.”

Great work, doc.

Gordon tells Nancy she did a nice job with the new patient, and Nancy gets ready to leave. She drops her purse, revealing a bottle of pills. I’m sure that’ll be important.

Gordon hands her the pills, and tells Nancy to go see Max to get the full tour.

Gordon finally asks about the Freddy Chant, and Nancy says it’s something the kids say to keep the boogeyman away.

Nancy walks away, and Gordon turns and sees a nun, dressed all in white. He keeps on looking at her, until she suddenly vanishes as people walk in front of her.

The next day, Max gives Nancy a tour of the facilities. He tells her which office she can use while her real office is still getting set up.

Nancy gets to meet Phillip, the sleepwalker. He makes puppets.

Then she meets Kincaid. He’s the dude who was locked up for being all violent.

Max warns Nancy that he kids seem nice, but that they’re dangerous to themselves and each other.

They walk by a boy who doesn’t talk. His name is Joey. Joey helps a nurse pick up some towels she dropped.

Nancy goes to Kristen’s house to interview Kristen’s mom about Kristen’s “suicide attempt.” Mom isn’t helpful, and has to get downtown. Nancy goes up to Kristen’s room to get Kristen’s things, and sees the paper mache version of her house.

That night, Gordon works on his computer. He looks up the drug Nancy is taking, because he is nosy. The drug causes dreamless sleep.

In her bed at the hospital, Kristen draws Nancy’s house and tries not to fall asleep. She fails.

She looks up, in her dream, and her door opens. Yellow Dress’s tricycle wheels in, leaving bloody tracks. Then it starts to melt.

Kristen steps back through the door, and closes it… and she’s back in Nancy’s house. There’s a roast pig on the table. It’s rotting. It growls at her, and she walks away.

I’ll give her credit: She at least tried to walk out the front door before going deeper into the house.

Kristen goes into a large room with a big rug on the floor. Something under the rug moves, which freaks Kristen out. Then it starts smashing the walls from inside the walls, which also freaks her out.

A giant black worm with Freddy’s head pops out of the floor, and starts eating Kristen, feet-first. Kristen screams.

In what I guess is her apartment, Nancy dozes, until she hears Kristen call out to her. Using the power of her brain. Or something. I have no idea. Nancy looks up and sees the paper mache Nancy house. She stands up, clutches her head, and falls back into her chair.

And then through her chair.

From there, she smashes through a mirror and into the room where Kristen is being eaten by the Freddy worm.

Nancy grabs a shard of glass, and stabs the worm in the eye. The worm drops Kristen, and looks at Nancy. And says, “You!”

Nancy tells Kristen to run. Good plan.

They exit the room, and slam the door, and Nancy tells Kristen to, “Get us out of here.” Kristen’s eyes get all squinchy, and they vanish. Nancy wakes up in her room again, still sitting in the same chair.

She sees she has a cut on her hand, from the mirror glass.

The next day, Nancy brings Kristen’s Nancy House to her and tells her that she used to live in that house.

Nancy continues, “Have you ever done that before? Pulled someone into your dream?”

Kristen said she did, when she was like four or five she’d bring her dad into her nightmares, to make things better. She stopped doing it after her parents got divorced.

Nancy tells Kristen the man in her dreams was real.

And now? Group therapy time! We meet Will, who’s in a wheelchair.

Then, we’ve got Jennifer, the cigarette burner. She wants to be an actress.

And they reintroduce us to all the other characters we already met. Props to the movie for reminding us they have names, seeing as how most of ‘em are horror movie cannon fodder.

Finally, Phillip steps up to the plate and says that their dreams are being considered a group mass hysteria, even though none of them ever met before they came to the hospital.

Doc Simms thinks the dreams are brought on by guilt, and other psychobabble.

Now, granted, the many writers who worked on this movie had to come up with some kind of reason that they refused to believe what the kids were saying, but that’s mighty thin. Mighty thin. It’s like the people who made this movie went, “Who cares what the reasoning is? No one.”

Well, guess what. I care. I do. This is my caring face.

Just before bed Will, Joey, and Taryn all play something that’s probably supposed to be Dungeons and Dragons, but probably isn’t, because who has the money? Taryn thinks it’s sort of lame.

Then Max shows up and makes everyone go to bed.

Max turns out the light, Joey and Will debate who is going to take the “first shift.” Joey has to stay up, while Will sleeps. One whimper, and Joey has to wake him up.

Nancy and Gordon have dinner. Nancy says that her mom died in her sleep, and she and her dad don’t talk very much now.

She goes on to tell Gordon that his patients are in real physical danger, and he should give them all Hypnocil. Gordon says nay. Nay! Because dreams are nothing to fool around with.

At the hospital, Phillip and Kincaid sleep. One of Phillip marionettes starts to twitch, and its blank face twists until it looks like Freddy. Continuity credit 2.0: Freddy isn’t wearing his glove, his fingers just sprout claws.

Just like part 2! At the end! With the claws! I can tell you’re excited by this.

Freddy Puppet uses his claws to cut his strings, and drops to the floor.

Phillip wakes up, and sees his puppet get real big, and turn into the actual Freddy. Who is wearing his glove.

Lame.

Freddy extends a single claw, and slashes at Phillip four times. One for each limb. His arms and legs now each have a hole in ‘em, and a tendon, or some other such muscle, extends out of each hole.

Kincaid wakes up (I think he actually does so, it’s not just another dream-in-a-dream) and sees Phillip, who is known for sleepwalking, sleepwalking. But, you know, it looks to us like he’s being dragged along on marionette strings. Only we can’t see the strings.

Kincaid tells Phillip to wake up, only Phillip doesn’t, and so Kincaid, who is not a helper, tells Phillip to have a nice stroll.

So Phillip keeps on walking. Past the nurse, and through the front door. Which is locked. So he literally walks through it, as though it weren’t there.

Sitting awake in his room, Joey sees Phillip standing at the top of a high tower. So he wakes up Will, and takes him to the window. Will yells out, “Don’t do it!” and other such things.

Joey goes to the front desk, lets the nurse know he’s agitated, and then steals her food tray so he can slam it against bedroom doors as he runs back to his room.

In Joey and Will’s room, other kids gather, and scream up at Phillip not to jump.

Phillip tries to fight off Freddy, Freddy cuts his “strings,” and Phillip falls to his death.

The next day, it’s group therapy time. Naturally, the doctors think it’s a sleepwalking accident. Or he killed himself.

The kids don’t think so. For obvious reasons.

Either way, they decide to sedate everyone at night, and lock their rooms up while they’re at it.

Kincaid freaks – he doesn’t want to be doped.

Nancy says they can’t dope the kids, they’ll be defenseless against their dreams. And, surprise, surprise, Gordon decides to give all the kids Hypnocil. His cohort is against it, and basically says if it doesn’t work she’s going to hang Gordon out to dry.

Kincaid spends the night in solitary, singing about how he’s not going to dream any more.

Jennifer sits up, watching TV. Max tries to get her to turn it off, but Jennifer begs him not to – she says she can’t handle the nightmare after what happened to Phillip.

Taryn comes out of the shower and bumps into an orderly who is really, really happy he pulled night duty because he totally wants to open up the pharmacy for Taryn. It’s weird and creepy, since the movie doesn’t establish any sort of previous relationship for the two of them. He’s basically just some guy who knows she’s an ex-junkie.

Bleah.

Taryn says to stay away, or she’ll go to Max.

Jennifer pulls a half-finished cigarette out of the ashtray, even though it didn’t belong to her. She lights it up, takes a drag, and then burns herself with it in an effort to keep awake.

She changes channels, her head nods.

And then the dude interviewing Zsa Zsa Gabor turns into Freddy, and the TV fuzzes out.

Jennifer gets up. And here comes the Freddy chant. And also, screaming. Jennifer goes over and hits the fuzzed out TV, which sprouts Freddy arms and grabs her. Freddy’s head pops out of the TV, and says this is going to be Jennifer’s “big break” into TV.

Then she smashes Jennifer’s head into the television.

Max comes in, and finds Jennifer hanging there, quite deceased.

The next day, Gordon is at a funeral. Which means they set up the funeral pretty quick, I guess. I suppose when your kids keep killing themselves, you want to get them in the ground before anyone has much time to think about it.

The nun Gordon saw before comes up behind him and tells him it’s okay to grieve, and asks what faith he follows.

He says science.

He says he’s seen her before. Her name is Sister Mary Helena. She says only one thing can save the children. “The unquiet spirit must be laid to rest. It is an abomination to God and to man.”

Gordon is freaked. Nancy calls to him from a few feet away, and Gordon excuses himself.

Nancy didn’t appear to see the Sister. They leave the cemetery.

They have dinner at Nancy’s place, and Gordon talks about how the kids are slipping through his fingers.

Nancy says maybe Gordon is ready for the truth. Gordon decides to trust Nancy.

The next day, they have a small group. Nancy tells the kids all about Freddy. She explains that Freddy killed all her friends. And she says that all the kids in that room? They’re the last of the Elm Street Children, who helped to burn Freddy alive.

I’m sorry, I just choked a little bit trying to swallow that.

Here are the problems with that statement:

First, Nancy should really, really, really be dead. At the end of part 1, she was in a car that was clearly Freddy, surrounded by her dead friends.

Second: Her mom “died in her sleep,” which makes almost no sense, since she wasn’t having any Freddy dreams.

Even this movie, mere seconds ago, implies that the children of the Freddy-killing parents are the targets of Freddy’s wrath.

Uh, I guess. Except in Part 2, Freddy just went right ahead and attacked a kid whose family never lived in town until, you know, just now.

So we’ve got some major confusion as far as Freddy’s agenda goes. And since Nancy lost her fight with Freddy, Freddy should have been free to torment these other kids for four years.

Except, of course, he just stuck to the new kid, whose parents had nothing to do with Freddy’s death.

The kids, meanwhile, appear to have never heard of Freddy, or guessed the identity of Freddy, over the last four years, despite the fact that Freddy, in the FLESH no less, went on a major rampage in their town.

And now I’m just rambling, I fear. Moving on.

Nancy thinks Kristen is the key to defeating Freddy, even though Nancy appears to have no game plan whatsoever. After all, Nancy was the girl who failed to defeat him last time.

(Also, didn’t they say she went crazy? In part 2? Anyone want to pretend that 2 never happened? I mean, except for the part where Nancy’s mom died, because they carried that over…)

Whatever. Gordon blocks out all the light in the room, and decides to try mass hypnosis.

He puts everyone under, including Nancy. They all wake up a second later, and Kristen apologizes that it didn’t work.

Gordon tells Nancy she’ll have to face facts. They need to try something else.

Joey sees the cute nurse, and she leads him away, via flirtation. She takes him into a room, and tells him that he’s cute.

In case the audience hadn’t figured out this whole thing is a dream sequence, we go back to the Group Room, where everyone is talking about trying again. Gordon is reluctant, until the balls of his little desk toy start flying around the room.

Also Will, who is in a wheelchair, stands up. And in case we don’t get it, he tells us that in his dreams he can walk. And he’s a wizard master. He turns the ball into a butterfly.

Kristen does gymnastics.

Kincaid bends the metal legs on a chair.

Taryn is dressed all in leather, and has knives.

In his little room with the nurse, Joey unzips the nurse’s dress, at her request. There’s kissing.

Suddenly, their tongues are stuck together.

Joey panics, but not enough to talk. The “nurse” spits out four tongues, which tie Joey’s arms and legs to the bed.

And the nurse, of course, turns into Freddy.

The mattress under Joey falls away, leaving Joey dangling over a fiery pit filled with bones.

In the Group Room, the lights blow out. They know Joey is in trouble, but now they can’t get out of the room.

The room starts to shift, and change, and start on fire. The walls start to close in.

Then the door opens. It’s Simms.

Simms just sees a bunch of people asleep, with Joey lying on the floor. She wakes everyone up and says “Code Blue.”

A moment later, in movie-time, Joey is lying in a hospital bed with a tube down his throat. He’s in a coma.

Gordon’s boss fires Gordon and Nancy.

Gordon begs Simms to listen to the kids, and tells Nancy that this is out of their hands now.

Gordon packs up his stuff and puts it in his car. He looks up at the tower Phillip jumped from, and sees the Sister again. He breaks into the tower and climbs to the top.

In the top of the tower, there’s a storage/junk room. He finds the Sister up there. She says, “This is where it began.” Apparently, the worst of the criminally insane were shut up in there, back when it was still open.

And at one point, due to an unfortunate accident, so was Amanda Krueger.

When the authorities found her, and took her out, she was pregnant. Freddy was “The bastard son of 100 maniacs.”

It seems that in order to defeat Freddy, Gordon has to find his remains and bury him in hallowed ground.

So, you know. So much for the philosophical, “Just tell him he’s a dream and he’ll have no power,” idea. Oh. And defeating him using the power of love. That didn’t work either.

And while I’m at it, on a biological level, Freddy couldn’t be the son of more than one maniac. I realize that doesn’t sound nearly as freaky, but it’s still true.

Nancy sits with Joey, and tells Freddy to let him go. Scratches appear on Joey’s chest, telling Nancy to, “Come and get him.”

Nancy and Gordon drive away, and try to figure out what to do. Nancy knows that Freddy’s body was burned, and his remains were hidden. Only one man knows where Freddy’s body is, now.

Voting? Anyone? Guesswork? I’ma go with Nancy’s dad. Except, of course, all of those other kids in the hospital are Elm Street kids, which implies their parents helped to put Freddy on ice.

Unless the kids really all lived on the same street, in which case they SHOULD have known each other before they came to the hospital, which would contradict something that was said earlier in the movie.

Otherwise, they should be able to ask Kristen’s mom where Freddy is.

At the hospital, Kristen freaks over the fact that Nancy has been let go. She’s dragged to the “quiet room” for sedation. This is gonna be bad for her.

Nancy takes Gordon to see her dad. In a bar. No idea how she knew where he was.

Nancy tells her dad that Freddy is back. Dad isn’t convinced. Nancy gets up and prepares to walk away.

Gordon gets a page. It’s the kids, paging him to tell them Kristen is about to get shanked by Freddy.

Gordon tells Nancy to go to the hospital. Then he goes to get all rowdy with Nancy’s dad, over the location of Freddy’s bones. He says they’re going on a little scavenger hunt.

In solitary, Kristen walks around, trying to stay awake.

Dad takes Gordon to a church. Gordon fills a bottle with holy water. He also takes a crucifix. A priest stops him, so he gives the priest his driver’s license, and says he’ll be back.

Nancy goes to the hospital, and Max keeps her from seeing Kristen. Nancy asks if she can say goodbye to everyone else. He gives her five minutes.

Nancy goes to the TV room to find the remaining kids. They’re going to have a “last group.”

Dad takes Gordon to an auto salvage yard. He says he’s not sure he can find the remains any more.

Meanwhile, Nancy asks the three remaining kids, Will, Taryn, and Kincaid, if they really want to try to help Kristen in the dream world, because it’ll be totally, like, dangerous as stuff.

They all say they’re in, so Nancy hypnotizes them again. Of course, I question how it is that Nancy can also hypnotize herself at the same time…

For that matter, how did Gordon do that earlier?

They all pass out just as Kristen passes out. Now they’re all in solitary together. Group hug!

They make plans to find Joey, but then claws start ripping through the padding in the walls.

Nancy tells them not to get separated. But it doesn’t work.

Padding flies through the air, and Kristen wakes up in her room. It’s the start of the movie all over again, with mom coming in and telling Kristen to go to bed. Kristen says she doesn’t want to be alone, mom steps into the hallway, and Freddy grabs mom and cuts off mom’s head. Which keeps on nagging Kristen about her problems.

Freddy goes after Kristen, and Kristen gets all gymnastics-y. Which allows her to escape into Nancy’s house.

Elsewhere in the house, Taryn hears Kristen’s call and goes looking for her. Instead, she ends up in an alley. She pulls out her knives, and starts walking. There’s a homeless dude there.

Naturally, he’s Freddy. Knife fight!

Freddy asks why they should fight. He holds up his hands, which are now hypodermic needles. He says, “Let’s get high.”

Taryn’s old track marks start opening and closing like hungry mouths, and Freddy jams his finger-needles into Taryn’s arms.

Will, also separate from the group, wanders down a dark hallway, looking for everyone. He’s attacked by an evil wheelchair. It hurts his leg.

Will says, “I am the Wizard Master,” and he shoots green fire-type-stuff out of his hands. He destroys the chair. Then he tries in on Freddy. Who grabs him, and stabs him with his knife-hand.

In Nancy’s house, Nancy and Kristen finally find each other. Then the wall starts to break. It’s Kincaid. He breaks the rest of the way through the wall.

They talk about the fact that they haven’t found Joey yet, and Kincaid decides he’s going to talk smack at Freddy.

Suddenly, a door appears in the middle of the room. It opens up. It’s a stairway down to the boiler room of evil.

In the auto savage yard (I know, you forgot. It’s okay.) Dad takes Gordon to a pile of cars and says that Freddy’s remains are in a Caddy. Which is under a bunch of other cars. Gordon uses a shovel to pry up the hood.

And there they are. The remains.

Dad goes to the car and gets ready to drive away, only Gordon has the keys. Gordon tells Dad that Dad is about to attend a funeral. One that’s long overdue.

Nancy and the kids finally reach the boiler room, only it looks a lot more like Nancy’s basement. With the furnace. And the fire. Though all the trash piled up everywhere is new.

Joey is there, tied over a pit. Nancy says to let him go.

Freddy decides to oblige her, and the tongues holding Joey up loosen, one by one.

Nancy grabs his arm, just as he starts to fall. Kristen does some gymkata on Freddy. Kincaid just goes for plain old force, and ends up in a Freddy-holding-him-up-by-his-neck position.

Nancy says Freddy has never been this strong, and Freddy peels back his sweater so you can see his chest, which aside from a lot of burn scars, also has screaming faces poking out of it. Freddy says, “The souls of the children give me strength.”

Ah, there we go. A reason for Freddy to keep on attacking kids.

Suddenly, Freddy vanishes.

In the auto yard, Gordon and Dad dig a grave. Dad hears something. All around them, cars are trying to start. Lights turn on, windshield wipers wipe, and so on.

Dad says to bury the bones. Gordon reaches for them, and they reform into a skeleton, which attacks Gordon. I think it has claws, but it’s tough to tell. Though I’m perplexed. If it’s Freddy’s glove, where did they get it? It was in Nancy’s basement, but then Freddy’s avatar had it, so…

Better not to think about it.

For that matter, this would be completely unprecedented. Neither of the two men are dreaming, so Freddy’s bones shouldn’t be able to attack. It just makes no sense at all. At. All.

Anyway, the skeleton puts a beat down on Gordon, and then attacks dad. It tosses Dad onto a bit of jagged metal, which passes through dad, so that’s probably it for him. Unless it’s not. I’m sure we’re going for dramatic effect here.

Gordon tries to fight off the skeleton with a shovel. It takes the shovel from him and knocks him into the freshly dug grave. It starts to bury him, then roars (how? It has no vocal cords, right?) and crumbles back to bones.

Still in the dream, Kristen, Nancy, Joey, and Kincaid walk through an ugly red hallway with a lot of mirrors in it.

Freddy appears in all the mirrors, and all the different Freddys grab the various kids and pull them into different mirrors.

Joey yells, “Nooo!”

The mirrors shatter. The other people fall to the floor.

Nancy says, “He’s gone. It’s over.”

Nancy is a moron. Really. That’s the only way I can think to explain why she thinks that worked.

Dad appears, in a bunch of sparkly light. I’d say it’s a little over-the-top, but that would be an insult to the phrase, “Over the top.” But it gets worse. He calls Nancy princess, and says that he’s “crossed over.”

He wants to tell Nancy he’s sorry for all the things he’s done, and that he’ll always love Nancy. Nancy says she’ll always love him, too.

She hugs him.

In turn, he turns into Freddy and stabs her. She drops to the floor.

Then he slams a door shut behind Kristen, and prepares to stab her a lot.

Nancy pops up behind Freddy, grabs his hand, and stabs him with it. One of those poor soul-faces probably just took a blade to the eye. Ouchy.

Out in the auto yard, Gordon wakes up and gets out of the grave. He shoves the bones into the grave, along with some holy water and the crucifix, which I seem to recall he said he was going to return.

And he says, “Please, God, for the children. For Nancy. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Lay this spirit to rest.”

Freddy vanishes in a spinning flare of light.

Kristen says she’s going to dream Nancy into a beautiful dream, forever and ever.

And then, it’s another day, and all the survivors are graveside. Nancy is dead.

Gordon looks around as the priest does his thing, and sees the Sister. He goes to find her, and, big shock, the nun was Amanda Krueger.

That night, Gordon goes to sleep. He has Nancy’s dream statue, and the now-completed paper mache Elm Street house next to his bed. A light clicks on in the house.

Just a reminder, folks: The crucifix didn’t work. Told ya.

3 comments:

  1. Hey, that orderly was Larry Fishburne! And the script was by Frank Darabont! The ELM STREET movies are like the Indiana Jones movies - Odd ones are good, even ones are torture.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm starting to agree, Bill. I just finished four (posting coming tomorrow) and it just... kind of lay there, adding to the mythology in the most random of ways.

    I have no idea how fans reconcile the various disparate, random elements. In particular, the way Freddy dies at the end of each movie.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As a huge fan of the series...most fans, until recently, totally skip over 2. Especially since Freddy didn't appear in it much. Part 3 was more of a continuation of part 1. And that last dream was the reason why Nancy was taking Hypnocil in part 3. The medicine was blocking Freddy from her dreams, so he decided to find the next group of children from the originals who killed him.

    ReplyDelete