Nightmare Week: “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge” (1985)

Lest anyone think I was too hard on Master of Terror Wes Craven in my previous post, I will now give credit where credit is due: at least he had the integrity not to stick around and milk the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise for all it was worth. At least, not yet. We’ll forget for the moment that he did return to the series several times, that he later went on to make three Scream movies, and that he’s spent the past few years producing hacky remakes of all his early movies, including Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and yes, A Nightmare on Elm Street (due early next year). Let’s cut the guy some slack! He had integrity for a moment, anyway, and that’s more than most of us can claim.

Nightmare Week: “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984)

This may be considered heresy amongst horror movie fanatics – I don’t travel in those circles myself, though I can see them from here – but I’ve long thought that, of the major American horror filmmakers to emerge in the 1970s, Wes Craven was easily the most overrated. I’m talking about the American Nightmare crowd, the Mount Rushmore of which is generally considered to be Craven, George Romero, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper. (No, David Cronenberg doesn’t count, silly – he’s Canadian.) The other guys have certainly had uneven careers, but they’re each responsible for at least a couple certified classics of the genre – Romero’s original Living Dead movies, Carpenter’s Halloween and The Thing, Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist (and yes, I know the Spielberg conspiracy theories on that one, but give the guy a break, he made the freakin’ Texas Chain Saw Massacre!). Sure, Craven’s got the coolest horror movie director name, I would never dispute that. But to my eyes, the early films that forged his reputation – specifically Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes – are half-baked concoctions sprinkled with a dash of grad school pretension, too silly to truly be scary despite some extremely unpleasant moments.

Screengrab In Exile Presents: Nightmare Week!

As we’ve already reminded you, it’s Halloween Eve, and goodness knows it’s been far too long since I’ve subjected myself to a marathon viewing of marginal cinema for your mild amusement. (Yes, it’s already been nearly four months since Shark Week.) As those of you who have been following our adventures since the original Screengrab days may recall, last year I endured 24 hours worth of Stephen King movies as a Halloween treat, and while there are doubtless enough King adaptations out there to fill another 24 (actually, 25 with Daylight Savings Time coming to an end – don’t forget to “fall back” after you finish trick or treating and toilet papering your boss’s front yard), I decided to go a different route. And so, beginning tonight, I will be tricking myself by watching every entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and treating you to the fruits of my labor. The best kills! The crappiest one-liners! The most dated moments and least explicable plot twists! Sounds like a SCREAM COME TRUE, doesn’t it, kiddies?

- Screamin’ Scott Von Doviak

Review: The House of the Devil

Every now and then a movie comes along that makes you yearn for a drive-in theater revival, and The House of the Devil is one of them. Ti West’s exercise in slow-burn horror wouldn’t look out of place on a double bill with the likes of The Omen or Burnt Offerings, and that’s entirely intentional. Not so much an homage to the horror flicks of the ’70s and ’80s (with all the wink-wink kitschiness that implies) as a meticulous recreation of same, House is more concerned with stretching nail-biting suspense to the breaking point than finding new ways of making heads explode. (Although, rest assured, at least one head does explode real good.)

Read the review here

Screengrab In Exile’s Last Minute Halloween Costumes

by Andrew Osblood

So if, like me, you waited until the local Goodwill was already cleaned out before starting your Halloween shopping this year, Screengrab In Exile is here to help with our favorite zero effort Last Minute Halloween Costumes!

BAGHEAD

Inspired by:  The Duplass Brothers’ 2008 mumblecore horror classic.

Requires:  One paper bag, eyeholes (and a shirt…please)

New DVD Releases: Monty Python Almost The Truth +3

by Scott Von Doviak

Monty Python: Almost the Truth — Monty Python has often been called the Beatles of comedy, so it’s only appropriate that the venerable British troupe finally has its own version of Anthology to serve as a fitting tombstone… er, tribute. The six-part documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth aired last week on IFC, but fret not if you missed it: the whole thing is now available in a three-disc edition that will fit snugly on the shelf next to your complete boxed set of Flying Circus episodes.

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Nick Schager Reviews Precious

An exploitative social drama dressed up in Oscar-baiting inner-city threads, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire mucks around in low-income-housing misery, abuse and degradation in search not of enlightenment but merely liberal-guilt shock. In 1987, obese Precious (Gabby Sidibe) is 16 and still in junior high school, pregnant with her second baby by her incestuous father, and forced to return home each day to a mother (Mo’Nique) who does nothing but collect welfare, watch game shows in her dank apartment, and viciously beat and berate her daughter. Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer) drenches his prolonged, venom-dripping scenes of maternal malevolence – like mom callously tossing Precious’ Down’s Syndrome baby onto a chair and then trying to kill her daughter by throwing a TV on her head – and other assorted spectacles of Precious’ debasement in mucky blacks and blooming whites. All the while, the director, though eliciting heartfelt performances from his leads, lays on crass and/or excessive gestures (Precious’ daddy-rape features cutaway shots of sizzling eggs; Precious retreats into escapist fantasies of the glamorous celeb life with a light-skinned boyfriend) that speak less to the character’s grief and coping mechanisms than to the filmmaker’s own show-offy tendencies.

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Hayden Childs’ Music Library: From Bats to Grizzly Bear

More catch-up! These are all 2009 releases.

The Bats – The Guilty Office (2009). OK, this was a 2008 release in New Zealand, but in the States, it was 2009. The Bats, led by Robert Scott, who plays bass in The Clean and is the primary songwriter [with the usual guitar and vocals] here, have a sweet slightly-psychedelicized folk-rock sound that manages to capture that ineffable kiwi-rock feel while reaching out to indie-folk touchstones like REM and the Byrds. This album isn’t much of a deviation from the past, but considering that The Bats have been a going concern since 1982 and that this is only their 8th studio album, it’s quite amazing how wonderful it is. Whatever it is that New Zealand puts in the water down there to keep their musicians creative far past the point where most have burnt out, I hope these guys keep drinking it.

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Vadim Rizov Review Labor Day

I’d call Glenn Silber‘s Labor Day a well-intentioned but dull, video-ugly documentary if it weren’t partly financed by its subject, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); that just makes it a crappy infomercial. Theoretically, Labor Day is meant to inspire the ranks by showing how the two-million-plus organization was the tipping point in electing Barack Obama, but in practice, it’s missing an argument.

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Hayden Childs’ Music Library: Jandek! Jandek! Jandek!

This post almost killed me! When I first wrote about Jandek for Lost In The Grooves back in 2003 (ok, published 2004), he was quite a bit more obscure than he is now. I mean, people had been writing about him for some 20-something years at that point, but no one really knew who he was or why he was making this weird, discordant, almost transcendentally insular music. In the intervening time, though, there’s been a Jandek documentary (Jandek On Corwood: check it the hell out) and the man has defied everyone’s expectations by becoming a touring musician.

But despite his current status as an international man of mystery, I should talk about why I have 40 Jandek albums. I’m not sure if I have 40 of anyone else’s albums, including Richard Thompson or Miles Davis, and I have a ridiculous number of Richard Thompson and Miles Davis albums. But for one thing, Jandek’s albums are incredibly cheap. And he puts out a lot of them. There’s another 20-something that’s he’s released that I don’t have, and that’s not including DVDs. But primarily I’m interested in the Jandek enigma.

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