Uh-oh! Somebody’s in a shower! Somebody’s gonna get killed!

Ooops, nope.

Oh, they’re “expanding the lore”… this is about Freddie’s origin?

He’s apparently the child of a hundred insane guys and one nun. Well, that’s appropriate.

This movie looks pretty good?

I’m kinda bored already, and the Nightmare movies aren’t usually this boring. I wonder what happened here… Oh:

Director Stephen Hopkins has expressed disappointment with the final product, stating that “It was a rushed schedule without a reasonable budget and after I finished it, New Line and the MPAA came in and cut the guts out of it completely. What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”

And it’s the second-lowest grossing movie in the series, so people didn’t really like it either.

The movie looks pretty good for a movie with this kind of budget, but it’s just really boring, and doesn’t seem to make much sense. Even for an Elm Street movie.

ABORT ABORT

(See, she’s pregnant.)

Seems accurate.

I mean, making a movie is difficult and stuff. The first movies worked because they were indeed nightmarish. But this movie seems like it’s made by somebody who’s never even had a nightmare. Instead it just a bunch of… random tableaux that just feel silly.

He’s being sucked into a comic book, see? A common nightmare.

Nice matte painting.

Such Escher.

This movie is in-credibly boring. And it so weird, because it has a lot of fun horror concepts going, but it’s still just really tedious.

So I was going to give this ⚀, but I guess some of the special effects are kinda amusing, so:

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Stephen Hopkins. 1989. ⚁

As has been happening with this Elm Street box set, the documentaries are more entertaining than the movies themselves. They’re so… so… OK, the producer says she was burned out after doing a lot of Freddie movies, so she skipped doing this movie (and she also had to do Cry-Baby), and also because, as she said, this movie had the worst concept in the series.

You usually don’t get that level of honesty in these documentaries!

And then you get interviews with the writers and you realise why this movie is as bad as it is, and it’s because they’re totally moronic. Talking about “the collective unconsciousness” and “the imagination of God” as explanations for nightmares, and… they just let them spout this idiocy. It’s very entertaining, especially when intercut with the producer who explains how none of this works and nobody wants to see this (and that’s why the movie bombed).

(Well. It made money, but not as much as the others.)

This looks uncannily like a late 70s British movie… but it’s from 1999?

Wow, that’s some way to start a movie…

Well, I guess it’s set in the 70s, so there’s a reason it looks like a late 70s movie.

It’s grim up north.

The actors are absolutely amazing — even the actors manage to be period perfect — but this is a harrowing film to watch. Something horrible is gonna happen in every scene, it seems like.

I think the moral of this movie might be that kids should never be unsupervised, and that it’s probably better if they just stay in and play video games instead of mingling with each other.

Oh god, something even more horrible is going to happen!

I had to take a short break here to get dinner started, but mostly because I really don’t wanna see what happens next…

Yeah.

Well that was unexpected.

Look, this is obvious a great movie, but watching this is worse than watching Saw IV: It’s just painful. It’s brutal.

But great!

Which is almost the same reaction I had to We Need to Talk About Kevin (also by Ramsay). This is a better movie, and even more heartbreaking.

Ratcatcher. Lynne Ramsay. 1999. ⚄

Yes, I’m learning French at the moment…

So the story here seems to be quite simple (and presented by having people chatting at each other endlessly (which I like)): There’s a very “modern” mayor in this small village, and he wants to build a huge library in the village (because he’s got a vision of people leaving cities and working in the countryside when that becomes practical). But there’s a tree they may have to cut down…

That’s the tree.

Is that the same guy as in the previous movie?

I was fascinated by this movie at the start — but I’m getting pretty annoyed by all these scenes of people sitting like this and discussing er philosophy and stuff. It worked better when they were walking around outside in the pretty countryside.

And now we’re going even further into faux reportage land — we’re following this journalist who talks to the villagers about the proposed library and life in the countryside in general… It’s… just not that interesting?

OK, this guy was interesting — talking about how farming had changed and how cows that are allowed to run free in the fields are more healthy.

I’m guessing these are real interviews, sort of? I mean, she’s an actor playing a journalist, but I’m guessing that the people she’s interviewing are real people talking unscripted. (Well, most of them.)

OK, this guy is definitely an actor.

Her balloon!? I mean, I don’t know French, but ballon means ball, doesn’t it?

Yes, indeed! Man, I’ve been doing Duolingo for three months and I’m already more fluent than whoever did this translation! *gasp*

This scene is pure genius. And so funny.

I use similar glasses for drinking wine — those are Duralex Picardie, but I use the Duralex Provence ones.

This is the final movie in the Rohmer box set (which was sponsored by Agnès B).

It’s a very pretty box set, and the transfers of the movies are very well done. Or perhaps I should say “main features” — there’s so many extras on each disk — several hours of shorts, documentaries and things Rohmer did for TV, I think.

I say “I think” because I haven’t seen any of it, because… THEY ONLY PUT ENGLISH SUBTITLES ON THE MAIN oops caps lock features. Which just seems kinda perverse. I mean, it’s nice that they did do that, but it means that there’s a lot of stuff here that won’t be accessible to non-French speakers.

But! Like I said, I’m apprendring French, so perhaps I can revisit the box set in a couple of years and watch the extras…

Anyway! This movie… it’s a bit frustrating? There are scenes here that I think are absolutely wonderful, funny and amazing, and there were parts of this movie I almost gnawed my foot off out of sheer boredom. So:

L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque. Éric Rohmer. 1993. ⚃