31 Flavors of Horror #30: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

I kinda take a different approach with this entry in the 31 Flavors of Horror series. A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of those remakes that's been analyzed and parsed to death, and it's not really a flick for me. I'm from the generation who got the Robert Englund series. The new one is for a younger crowd, and it compliments the dark heart of the first one, and is miles away from the morbid humor of the rest of the series.. I meant originally to give it the full rehash, but instead  just wound up with five takeaways.

31 Flavors of Horror #30:
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

1) Kellan Lutz is really pretty and scruffy, so it's kind of a shame that we know from the outset he's toast. He's the equivalent of the Drew Barrymore kill in the first Scream movie. As his character Dean, was the new squeeze for Kris (Katie Cassidy) - who herself is a stand-in for the Tina character, you have to figure her ex-boyfriend Jesse (Thomas Dekker) is happy his competition's so quickly eliminated. Cassidy seems younger than Amanda Wyss from the first flick, but plays that scared, flustered look just as well. She's also played as much more of a traditional "Final Girl" in the flm's front half than the Nancy character is.

Cassidy also has a great set of lungs on her (both as a screamer and, well...). Oddly, you don't get the impression she and Jesse get it on, unlike the clearly freshly-shtupped Tina in the first film (tacky, but true). The fact that Tina is portrayed as a 15 year old (!) who's having what looks to be decent sex always bothered me. I always thought Tina must've had some horrible home life, since Wyss had a hardness about her, which I guess says more about me being "judgy" than anything in either film.

(Four more points, and my general gripe of displeasure of Jackie Earle Hailey being so damn good, are all ahead!)

One A Week Reviews #27: Kaboom

Is it showing my age to admit I've been a fan of Gregg Araki since I first saw The Living End in college? It was the mid-ninties and my early twenties. That film broke big on the Indie scene for him but the film I connected with more was The Doom Generation. Never before had I seen nihilism or young adult hormones portrayed quite so candy-colored before...

The new film, Kaboom, is a bit of return-to-form for him after the wonderful, meandering stoner comedy Smiley Face. (Shockingly and appallingly, I have yet to see Mysterious Skin, but I'm moving it up the Netflix queue to resolve that). This is more of a looser Nowhere, an assemblage of sexually-charged near-misses and scenes threatening a tragic third act, here given some breathing room and a dash of David Lynch-style ominousness. The cynical and hyper-sexualized teens that have populated most of his films are here. His dialogue is in that same smart-aleck style but here is slightly lighter and looser as well. Sadly, the sprawl and dream-logic seems to get tangled up in the mystery story structure of Kaboom. To paraphrase Joe Bob Briggs, there's too much plot getting in the way of the sex.

Smith, the lead, is an aimless bisexual college student hot for his roommate and involved with one of his two gal Fridays. He also may be the "chosen son" and trigger of some pending possible apocalypse. Or it could just be the arduous ennui of turning 19. Between random sex-romps and the mystery of a possibly-imaginary trio of animal headed murderers, things stay off-kilter for the duration. What Araki captures best is that teens-and-twenties sense having an aimless, endless future in a world threatening to go over the edge coupled with a messy, sprawling libido.