This short is presented as an extended reportage of a somewhat paranoid woman… it’s interesting.
She gives a bunch of factoids about local history and stuff, while the interviewer keeps saying that that’s not what she wants to talk about.
But then there’s a huge plot twist!
It’s a solid short — it’s intriguing, and then we get a surprise. Class!
Stalin My Neighbour. Carol Morley. 2001. ⚄
There’s frequently shorts included on the disks I buy, but I usually don’t watch them while watching the main feature. Not quite sure why… it’s like “oh, I’m done with that! next!” when I’m watching a movie.
But I’ve marked all these films as “mostly-seen” instead of “seen”, meaning that there’s stuff I might want to watch later. So… why not start watching these things now? Right? Perhaps a couple of days of shorts. Or not, depending on whether I get bored or have other things to do.
So here’s the first one: A short included on the Alcohol Years DVD.
This movie is a bunch of short vignettes illustrating headlines from British tabloids? I guess that’s a concept.
Like this one is based on “Her husband was granted divorce yesterday after complaining that his wife was moving furniture around in their house for 30 years.” So it’s these slightly absurd things, many of which live on in memes.
And many of them seem like urban legends.
But it’s amusing, I guess… And it tries to add some gravitas.
Everyday Something. Carol Morley. 2002. ⚃
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.)
