The Freddy Cougar Moviethon

Hello! This is the Doomed Show #11 - The Ward & My Soul to Take

My soul takes cake. What? Seriously? You'll find out! Brad and I talk about a Carpenter movie and then a Craven movie and then we rest. And then we talk some more. You can listen or download at Podomatic. Or you can just download the episode from Mediafire. And we might be on iTunes or whatever. I DON'T KNOW!

Edit: Oh wait, you can subscribe to us on iTunes. There's a button on the right of the Podomatic page. Subscribe and your iTunes will automatically download our show when we have a new episode. Did you already know that? You did! Well, now I feel stupid! But at least I am learning how iTunes works! Yay!

The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 Made Me Puke!

It shouldn't surprise the average horror fan that a film as pitiful and lame as The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 could inspire me to a very long night of reverse peristalsis. Other than that friggin' awesome cover art, THHEP2 totally sucks. But in Wes Craven's defense, his ill-conceived coke binge in the desert (that's just my speculation on how this POS came to be), isn't the only thing behind one of the most nauseating nights of my life.

It was a Saturday evening in my tenth year of life and my TV promised me some scary delights with The Hills Have Eyes Part 2. My parents ordered pizza from my favorite place in town. This was Peachtree City, Georgia, by the way, and the quality of pizza available was probably not what one would call "gourmet". This particular pizza place (whose name I cannot recall; though I doubt it was one of the majors) had pretty strange pizza. The cheese always looked like it had melted and set several days before its arrival at our front door. The sauce was strangely tangy and very, very salty. While I beheld the (un)magic of THHEP2, I gorged myself on this stuff (pepperoni to be precise).

Then I noticed that something was wrong. That dizzy feeling which I had mistaken as hunger wasn't going away. It was getting worse. I stopped in mid chewing to run to the bathroom and puke my guts out. I stayed in the bathroom for a while. Once I was sure I was empty, I brushed my teeth and staggered out to the living room. My mom threw a blanket around me and I laid out on the couch. Lucky for me, THHEP2 was still on! Thank you, commercial breaks.

So I'm lying there, in a flu-inspired fever and still rather nauseous, and trying to make some sense out of this fucking lame ass movie. The film is still a blur to me. I remember some traps, some hill people, motorbikes, and a dog. One could argue that I should probably watch this film again without the extenuating circumstances of pizza vomit and raging fever but really, who gives a shit? Deep down in my heart, I know that The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 blows. So what?

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

While I prefer Muvico Starlight 20, I am not going to drive all the way across town just to visit my favorite theaters. I figured that since there was a big ass oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that I should at least have the decency to save a little gas and hit up AMC Veterans which is only 5 miles from the new Doomed Moviethon HQ. I'm glad I remembered to set my alarm this morning for 9am because I would have slept and slept and missed the 10:30am showing. I'm usually an early riser on the weekends but you never know.

So I cruise out to Veterans, pay for my ticket (only $5 for the first show of the day), pick up a couple of hotdogs, and a Coke. I could have sworn this theater was a Pepsi establishment. Mountain Dew is so much better for you than Coke. Ask anyone. I go to theater number 13 (!) and get a decent seat in the center of the place. After chowing on my dogs, my spirits sink when a family of 6 walks in. Mom, dad, and 4 kids ranging in ages from 7 to 12 arrive and make a big fucking noise. I'm a pretty cynical guy so I just assume that this is going to be one movie that will be totally ruined by a bunch of loud fuckwads. The movie starts and these kids are just constantly murmuring and whispering to each other.

I try to focus on the opening credits because I figure that eventually, these kids will be scared silly and that'll be the end of all the noise. Then a miracle happens. The first death scene occurs. (Trust me, you don't have to wait very long.) Someone's throat gets opened up and the family of 6 gets up and starts heading for the door. Everyone in the theater is laughing as these idiots who haven't been able to shut the fuck up since they set foot in the place are sent packing. After they left, things settled into a nice silence and the rest of us could enjoy the show.

If a horror fan is choosy, that horror fan can really score with remakes. For example, The Crazies - I'm sorry but that was just awesome. I'm fairly open minded with remakes. If a film is something that I can't imagine being improved with a remake, I check out the trailers/poster art and make my mind up as to whether or not I'll go see it. If it's a movie that I think could use a little touch-up or re-imagining, then I avoid as much press as I can and just go see the film as cold as possible. The new A Nightmare on Elm Street was definitely part of the first category. I was very, very skeptical. The original film is very important to me so I was a smirking jerk when I heard it was getting the millennial treatment.

I was pleasantly surprised by Nightmare. I only counted one ridiculously cheesy moment* (not counting the micro-naps) and a handful of overly sped up/CGI'ed effects. Logic and character development suffered a bit mostly because everything felt a little rushed. The running time could have gone about 5 or 10 minutes longer to slow things down a little. And coming from me, that's a compliment. There were also a few corny moments in the dialogue (enough with the micro-naps!) and some weak acting. I know this sounds like a lot but honestly, everything else was grand. When the new Nightmare does things right, it does them very right.

Jackie Earle Hailey (Watchmen, Shutter Island) is excellent as Freddy Krueger. He adds this twitchy and unpredictable quality to an already scary monster. The makeup is astounding and holds up very well, even in well-lit sequences. I love Rooney Mara as Nancy, our heroine. She is stunning to behold and a great actress. Former music video director, Samuel Bayer, takes the viewer to some creepy, disturbing, claustrophobic, and grimy places with this film. A Nightmare on Elm Street does not skimp on the blood and the surreal especially when dreams and reality start to collide. This won't ever replace the original film in the hearts of its fans but this is a worthy addition to the universe of Wes Craven's classic dream maniac.

*SPOILERS*

Okay, now to get down to specifics. The cheesiest moment in the film is when Nancy is asleep in her bed and Freddy is pushing through the wall behind her as though it is made of rubber. This worked very well in the original film because it was a practical effect done right. This CGI shit looks so cheesy that all I could think of was The Frighteners. But you know what? It's not 1996! I think that sometimes revisiting iconic moments from the original can be where the remake shoots itself in the foot. The people who are new to the story are just going to see a stupid scene and wonder what the hell that was all about while people familiar with Freddy and his antics will just be annoyed. Nobody wins.

I like how the film focuses on Kris (Katie Cassidy) for a while and we start to settle in with this chick as our heroine. Then the rug is pulled out from under us when Freddy takes her out. I knew this was coming but it was still great. I loved the scene in the drugstore where Freddy is walking down the aisle terrorizing Nancy. Instead of a jump scare, we have horror casually but steadily coming right out of the world of dreams. And finally, at the end of the film, when Nancy pulls Freddy into the waking world and the showdown commences, I was on the edge of my seat. It all came together and it was very bad ass. Plus, we all learned once again just how deadly paper cutters can be.

Wednesday Ramble: Freddie Cougar

One magical Saturday night in 1985, my sister was given the arduous task of babysitting me. I was 9 years old and I was actually excited about it. As far as siblings go, we got along pretty well and with my parents out at a party or whatever, we could kick back and have fun. Unfortunately, my sister’s creepy boyfriend and his buddy were allowed to come over which made me a little jealous. Now that she was a cool teenager, I saw her less and less.

In a recent email to my sister, I inquired about this particular evening and this awful duder she was dating and she says she doesn’t remember either. He wasn’t the nerdy comic book geek she dated for a while (a guy I worshipped but who turned out to be a stalkerish creep) and it wasn’t the awesome king of sarcasm that she eventually married. No, this was some rebound jerk that she probably went out with for a month or something. Hopefully, it was less than that. With his perfect hair, sharp features and ridiculous ego, he just seemed like a total sleazebag to me.



Anyway, this jerky guy and his dumbass friend were there spoiling everything but they did bring along some very important entertainment. The VHS was something called A Nightmare on Elm Street. My sister immediately said I couldn’t watch it because I was too young. This blew my mind. How could a movie be that scary, offensive, etc.? This was the same girl who woke me up in the middle of the night so we could sit up and watch the thoroughly twisted and bizarre Fantastic Planet.

Her creepy boyfriend and his bud had their hearts set on watching Nightmare on Elm Street so they started arguing on my behalf saying that I was totally old enough. Then the urban legends about the film were brought up. According to my sister, a teenage friend of hers had to sleep in her mom’s bed for 3 months after watching Wes Craven’s film. Somebody chimed in that Nightmare was so scary that it driven a bunch of kids insane because they were afraid to go to sleep after seeing it.

So before they would agree to start the tape, I had to promise my sister that I wouldn’t freak out and if I did, I wasn’t allowed to tell mom and dad. She would disavow any knowledge of letting me watch such a scary film. I was also instructed to bail out if I got too scared. I agreed to everything and begrudgingly accepted the challenge to watch this film. At this point, my imagination was running wild. What the hell kind of a horror movie is so scary to force teenagers to lose their minds?

When my parents came home later that night, I spilled the beans about being allowed to watch a horror film of such an intensely graphic and scary magnitude and they couldn’t have cared less. R-rated movies were not forbidden to me and hadn’t been for a long time. My folks were selective about my viewing but some real doozies slipped through once in a while. The funniest thing was trying to communicate to the people who had brought me into this world just how brave their son was and how I was exhilarated but not traumatized by the experience.

The actual experience of watching A Nightmare on Elm Street through my nine year old eyes (especially after all the hype perpetrated by my sis and her friends) was thrilling but definitely not the sanity erasing experience I was prepared for. The profoundly terrifying concept of a man who could kill you in your dreams just kind of went over my head. When I was 12 years old, I revisited the film and it scared me silly. The image of Tina’s walking corpse in a body bag leaving a trail of blood everywhere she went really got to me the second time around. For some reason, as I got older the film got scarier to me.

A Nightmare on Elm Street did eventually give me a nightmare. When I was around 14 years old, Freddy Kreuger invaded my mind. In this nightmare, I was at a long table in a mansion having dinner with a posh family. All of a sudden the forks lifted themselves off the table and chased everyone out of the room. “It’s Freddy!” someone screamed as they disappeared out the door. I was left alone with the butter knives which came to life and started following me around the room. I woke up to the sound of my own laughter. I haven’t dreamed of Freddy Krueger since.