Topic: The Movie Thread

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The first Taken was fine for the time if you accepted it for the xenophobic, B-movie schlock it was. It really did an amazing job launching Liam Neeson's stint as an action hero, and popularizing the grizzled elderly action hero model overall.

Watched a few films lately.

Escape From New York - First time seeing this! Rather visionary for 1981 purely on a visual level. I can certainly see how its grimy, atmospheric Manhattan Island prison complex must have influenced the look of future dystopic and cyberpunk films. And the influence of Russell's Snake Plissken persona is obvious, although he comes off less as tough here and more as a cartoon. Only a few actors have been able to pull off tough guy roles and make them actually intimidating. Clint Eastwood, for example, sells his tough guy roles completely, and that's probably because the dude looks hard as diamonds naturally. Also, the movie's plot and characters are largely forgettable, and the action is a bit lame (although this was before the Action Movie became a standardized thing, I believe). If nothing else, it was a decent watch, and SO much better than Carpenter's sleep-inducing Assault on Precinct 13, but he made only one masterpiece, and that was Halloween.

Backdraft - Again, the special effects are the highlight here, with truly brilliant and frightening depictions of fire. This saga about firefighters is about 30 minutes longer than it needed to be, and the various storylines don't integrate as well as they could have. Pacino's performance as an investigator trying to get inside the head of the arsonist was pretty decent, though. Definitely worth watching, but not a classic, by any means. Kurt Russell was in this as well in a fairly major role.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - OK, unpopular opinion: I like the second film in this series a lot more than the third one. Nightmare 2 pretty much doesn't connect to the original film at all and feels like a reboot, but it does a decent job of trying to maintain the 'scariness' of the Freddy character, which it accomplishes somewhat by changing his relationship with the main character to one of possession and body horror. I thought people were probably exaggerating when they called this the "gayest horror film ever made," but... ah... they weren't. The only way this film could get any more obviously gay is if the dudes in the cast all got together and, well, you know. The main character gets hit on by his gym coach in a leather bar, for god's sake. One of the deaths involves shower room bondage. The main character goes crawling to his hunky best friend's room to sleep in order to feel safe. Even the body horror element is extremely homoerotic. So I'm not surprised audiences at the time felt uncomfortable with it, but I really think it's one of those old movies due a re-evaluation.

Dream Warriors is an old favorite for fans of the franchise. A lot of people think it's better than the original. But it's... not. I mean, it's certainly a mostly fun watch, and it's interesting how it re-contextualizes the mythology of the Nightmare universe as more of a dark fantasy, but the individual elements of the plot really didn't come together well for me at all. And, personally, I'm not a fan of the 'jokier' Freddy it introduced, although he still has a bit of menace to him. There are too many characters here for the film to make us care about any of them, IMO. A bit part of what brings this entry down for me is this weird fixation on destroying Freddy's remains, and hunting them down. And the rather lame origin story they give him. Freddy shouldn't have an origin story. All we needed to know about his past we learned in the original film, which still preserved plenty of his mystery. But the longer these horror franchises go on, the hungrier they are for original ideas, and they inevitably latch on to the idea of exploring the beginnings of the evil character they're centered around. With that said, while I like Dream Warriors less than a lot of people do, it was still superior as far as horror movie sequels tend to go. All of the first three Nightmare films feel like unique experiences and bring something new to the table.

That trend is broken, unfortunately, with Dream Master, which is a direct sequel to Dream Warriors and the first bad sequel in the series. Granted, it's better than your average Halloween or Friday the 13th sequel, but it's just an inferior retread of Dream Warriors and captures none of that film's unique energy. The performances are listless, the deaths are mostly boring, and the plot is mediocre. There's an element of time manipulation that was clearly intended to be an aspect of it originally, but all that's left of that is a rather confused and annoying looping sequence that keeps the main characters from saving one of Freddy's victim. This time looping, as far as I can tell, is never explained, so it just feels like a cheap narrative device instead.