Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)

Episode 37, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd:  Hello, and welcome to another edition of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: I’m Craig.

Todd: Today’s, episode is, Wes Craven’s new nightmare. We kicked off this podcast watching The Nightmare on Elm Street. We thought we’d revisit Wes Craven and, check out what was the last film in The Nightmare on Elm Street series if you don’t count Freddy versus Jason. Which I don’t.  Do you? Do you consider that?

Craig:  Yeah. I mean, I do. You haven’t even seen it.

Todd:  I haven’t, so maybe I shouldn’t speak until I’ve seen it. It’s really not bad. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just wondering is it part of the canon? You know what I mean?

Craig:  I would say so. I mean, it’s still got Robert England. You know, you still got the real Freddy. I think if it were, not Robert Englund, I wouldn’t count it. But he does a good job. It’s not a great movie, but it’s fun. It’s it’s it’s a fun ride.

Todd:  Well, it’s one people been waiting for for a while since it had to happen at some point, like Alien versus Predator.

Craig:  Oh, right. Yeah. They had been wanting to make it since, like, part 3 of, Nightmare on Elm Street came out, but there was all kinds of problems with the studio and whatnot. And, actually, Paramount owned the rights to, the Friday the 13th properties.

Todd:  Mhmm.

Craig:  And New Line couldn’t get their hands on them, so they couldn’t do the crossover. Well, I guess, eventually, when, the, Friday 13th series stopped performing well. Paramount gave it up. And, it was also the same time that, Wes Craven kind of reconciled with New Line. I guess he kind of had some issues with them for a while.

Todd:  There was some falling out. Wasn’t it money? Was it money?

Craig:  I don’t remember what it was. I think that they wanted him to write and direct, Nightmare on Elm Street 3. And he agreed, but they couldn’t come to an agreement on the script.

Todd:  That’s right. The script that they submitted was darker and was just not quite what they wanted. And so they Robert Shade called in someone to do rewrites on that. Right?

Craig:  Right.

Todd:  Right. Was it was Frank Darabond involved? I don’t remember. Anyway yeah. And so they did rewrites on, and I guess they weren’t happy. I guess Robert Englund wasn’t happy. I mean, sorry. Wes Craven wasn’t happy, and there was a bit of a

Clip:  who knows?

Craig:  Kind of a falling out, which, you know, it’s it’s it’s unfortunate because I really I like Wes Craven’s take. You know, his original take was dark and and scary, and the sequels got into campy Yeah. Stuff, which was fine. I mean, it was still fun, but it wasn’t the same. And so the you know, at 1994, I guess, or right around that time, something happened, and and there was kind of a reconciliation between Bob Shea, the head guy at New Line, and, Wes Craven. And even though they had been planning on doing a Freddy versus Jason, Wes Craven had this other idea, and it it became, Wes Craven had this other idea, and it it became, New Nightmare. The the working title was Nightmare on Elm Street 7 Ascension. Woah.  But, yeah.

Todd:  This one’s kind of nice because in a way, the title sets it apart from the rest of it by not giving it a number and also by saying new Nightmare. Right. Wes Cravens, you know, giving it back to the creator a little bit, but also showing you this is gonna be a bit different from the other Freddy movies we’ve seen.

Craig:  Yeah. Quite a bit different. And I love it. I’m so glad it happened. You know? I I think it’s just kinda one of those clandestine things that just right place, right time. And I’m really glad. You know, I like the whole series. I can sit and watch any of those movies.  The first one’s great. The second one sucks pretty bad. The third one, I actually love. Dream Warriors is awesome. Dream Warriors is awesome. The 4th one’s not bad. 5th one, so so. The 6th one was awful, and that was the one that they were gonna end it on.

Todd:  Was that the child or was that the Freddy’s dead?

Craig:  Freddy’s dead. Now you

Todd:  know what I liked about Freddy’s dead though? And correct me if I’m wrong. Isn’t that the one Alice Cooper plays his father? Yeah. It is. And it kinda we really takes it back to his roots and which is always a little bit of a mistake in a lot of these films. There’s always the temptation. You get along far enough that you need to go back and revisit the villain’s roots, and somehow that takes a little bit of the teeth out of it. Right.

Craig:  Well, and they they kinda messed with the the time frame. Like, they introduced that that Freddy Krueger had had a daughter, and so now the daughter had to, like, defeat

Todd:  him or whatever.

Clip:  Oh, yeah.

Craig:  Kinda goofy and silly. And then, plus, they went 3 d at the end, and the effects were kinda cornball. Yeah. I mean, it it’s it’s still it’s it’s really cheesy. You know? In that last in part 6, you’ve got, Freddie dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West flying around on a broomstick. Mhmm. You’ve got Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold playing this That’s right. Kinda weird couple.  And I I just didn’t love it. And it was kinda sad because, you know, you always these franchises, they say, oh, it’s the last one, and you always kinda think, yeah. Right? We’ll see. But, they really were kinda playing it up that this is it. This is the they they called it the final nightmare or whatever.

Todd:  And and we all kind of expected I mean, by that point, you’re right. The movie was bad enough, and we’d had so much of Freddy, and he devolved really into this sort of campy, ridiculous person that we all expected that to actually be the last night. So when this came out, it’s like, oh, this is interesting. And then when the take on it became really a commentary on how the series had gone completely off the rails, Wow. It was it was really the first meta as as far as I remember. Me too. Yeah. 1 of the first meta horror at least one of the first meta horror films to really hit main stream and be a big hit.  Yeah. And people really kinda see it

Craig:  as being a precursor to Scream, which Wes Craven did, I don’t know, just a couple years later.

Clip:  Yeah.

Craig:  Yeah. And in both of those movies, it’s one of the issues that it’s tackling is what effect do these movies have on the real world. And that’s you know, it kinda tackles that here in a fantastic way, but really interesting. And and I remember, you know, this was 94 that this came out, so I would have been, like, a sophomore in high school. And it was before I I think we had the Internet, but it was, like, in the really early stages. And, like, I didn’t have it at home or whatever. And so I didn’t know that this was happening until, I think, I saw a preview for it. And I just remember just being giddy with excitement, because I loved these movies.  My dad would take me to see these movies in the theater when they would come out, and they came out really fast. You know? I think the original was in 84, and so New Nightmare kinda marked the 10th anniversary. Wow. Yeah. And in that time, in 10 years, they had 7 movies. I mean, that’s that’s kinda crazy.

Todd:  Yeah. That’s almost one movie a year, really. And or at least you’re always looking you you there’s always a new one in production, because it’s the series that made New Line.

Craig:  Right. Exactly. The House of Freddie Built. Yeah.

Todd:  It was a brand new, brand new, almost failing, actually. It doesn’t take long for a movie studio to start getting in the in the red, and, the original Nightmare on Elm Street really blew them out of the water. And I think this was always their crutch, at least for those 10 years. Well, we gotta keep a Freddy movie going, you know, in the same sense maybe that that the movie takes this theme. You know, you have to imagine that the feeling at New Line was, we will only survive if we keep telling these stories.

Clip:  Yeah. Right. Absolutely.

Craig:  And and, you know, I they were it made sense. You know? It talks about it in New Nightmare that, Freddie was it was huge. You know? He was everywhere. Heather Langenkamp in the film at some point says, you know, Freddie’s like Santa Claus, like King Kong. You know, all the kids know him. And, you know, those movies were huge money makers, but as they continued to decline in quality, I think they started to make less and less money, and they kinda just gave up on it. And then this came back around. And I think by that point, some people had lost a little bit of faith, and it didn’t do as well in the theaters as they expected.  But since then, you know, it’s really developed this big cult following, and a lot of people, myself included, cite this as maybe my favorite entry in the whole series. It’s close tie with number 1.

Todd:  This 1 and 1. I mean and you know what’s a little different about this one is I was thinking, I was watching it this time around. And really the original’s not that dated, but it kind of is. This one holds up today. This could have almost been made yesterday.

Craig:  Yeah. I think so too. And there are some effects and things, particularly in the final act, that are a little hokey. You can tell that they were restricted by their budget a little bit. Mhmm. But I forgive that because the idea is so clever and because it takes it in such a different direction. And it really tries, especially in that 3rd act, to really do something that it’s never done before and really make, you know, this kind of huge finale, as opposed to, you know, a scary guy chasing a girl around in the house. You know, it’s a lot bigger as far as production is concerned.  And I think it was a success. Yeah. You know, after the movie was over, I said to Todd, you know, it’s not a perfect movie, but I love it anyway. Oh, yeah. It’s got its flaws. There’s some kind of hokey moments, but overall it plays really well, and I really, really enjoy it.

Todd:  I have to say, and I haven’t seen this probably nearly as many times as you have, but I’ve seen it a fair number of times. In fact, I think I reviewed it a either last year or the year before on my October horror movie a month thing. And every time I see this, I appreciate it even more. And I think I just come to it at a different age and a different mindset that I see things hidden in the script. I see things in the story. I see themes that are underlying through. There are a lot of themes running through this that just reminds me, damn. Wes Craven is a fantastic writer.

Craig:  He really is and a great director. And, you know, I was watching this time around. This was made so close, you know, just a few years before Scream. And it’s so clear. It’s so evident that it’s the same director. I mean, the same kind of shots, same kind of character development. And and this one, I think what makes it so appealing is that is that, that the character they’re characters that you really care about. They feel like real people.  I mean, they’re they’re setting it in the quote real world. And so, you know, we we kind of look at these people in a different way than we would look Todd stock characters that we had seen in some of the previous ones.

Todd:  Yes.

Craig:  And, I think that, you know, that worked, and it worked well for me. And, you know, my sister’s been here and visited with us before. She’s not a big fan of horror movies. She loves this movie. Really? Yeah. This was one that I could get her to watch any time. I I think maybe there’s even some appeal there for people who aren’t necessarily hardcore horror fans.

Todd:  I think you’re right. And another thing Todd that this movie does to Craig over just a little bit maybe I should catch myself before I go go go too far down this rabbit hole now that I think back through the movie. But it’s not quite as gory. No. It’s not quite as gross out as the other ones are. One thing that struck me about this film as I was watching it for the first time ever is that more so than in the other movies, he seems to really rely on real life horrors in this one quite a bit. It’s not really toward the end that we get into the supernatural, Freddy Glove, people getting slashed and things, but we’re actually tackling some really spooky stuff that we have to deal with every single day. There’s the loss of your father.

Clip:  Mhmm.

Todd:  Or

Craig:  your spouse. Right?

Todd:  Or your spouse. There’s car accidents.

Craig:  There’s Earthquakes.

Todd:  Earthquakes is is a big one. Right? Going to the hospital and the scariness of a hospital, the scariness of a morgue and and having to to face that. Doctors. So much of this is grounded in what we already are kind of scared of and is really creepy. And so when it delves into the supernatural and it does so in these settings, it almost doubles the ante, I think. It kinda ups it a little bit.

Craig:  Yeah. And it’s you said, you know, less gory. I think that this probably has one of the lowest body counts of any of the Nightmare movies. And really, much like in the first movie, Freddy doesn’t really have a whole lot of screen time

Todd:  No.

Craig:  Especially not until the end. I mean, he pops up a couple of times for a really short period of time in the first two thirds of the movie. But it’s really not until the final act that he’s really a a I mean, he’s a key player throughout, because it’s the dread of of him and what he is or what he represents that is building this suspense. But, he doesn’t really show up in his full glory until almost, you know, the very last act.

Todd:  Yeah. It’s the threat of Freddy throughout the whole thing. Like, you’re right. It’s it it it is a complete bookend to the first movie Mhmm. With the first movie in that Freddie is such an iconic character. He’s such a big deal. Yet unlike in the Jason, you know, movies, the Friday 13th movies, he didn’t start out as this I’m in your face all the time. I am the main threat kind of character.  He was always lurking in the shadows and in the dreams. It was only as the as the films kind of progressed. And I think that was really what Wes Craven had issue with with his creation was it did turn into camp after a while, and it did turn, oh, here’s Freddie in every scene, and he’s almost a bit player along with the rest of them, in funny quotes and goofing off and playing around. For me, it didn’t make it didn’t make him any less likable. You know? I enjoyed the character. I still do. And I like that aspect of him, which you don’t get with, for example, you know, Jason who’s dead serious Right. Or or Michael Myers who’s even dead or serious.

Craig:  Right. And and they’re more just, you know, kind of a masked killer, which is is what Freddie was originally intended to be. I mean, initially, they were just gonna cast a stunt guy to play him. And I don’t even remember how it worked out, but, Robert England, you know, ended up in the role. And he really made it his own. And and Robert England’s a a great actor. He really is. You The kind of stuff that he does now is is kind of more low budget indie.  You don’t really see him in the mainstream so much anymore. But, you know, he really brought this character to life. And even that’s even when he was playing it shticky and even when he was playing it campy, it was still fun for me. But it was nice for me to see him be able to come back and do the scary again.

Todd:  Yeah.

Craig:  And it it worked. I mean, he’s scary in this movie.

Todd:  My question, did Robert Englund play Freddie in this movie? Yeah. Okay. He did. Yeah. Because he doesn’t look like himself. He’s clearly been bulked up a little bit, his face and everything. It’s they intentionally well, obviously, the makeup is intentionally different. Yep.  Because we’re trying to create a more real world Freddy. We’re trying to distinguish from the Freddy of the fiction into, well, here is the manifestation of the Freddy of the stories coming out. Right. It’s a little different. But also, yeah, his face is fuller and bigger. Robert Englund’s got kind of this narrow skinny face. And of course, he’s got the yellow eyes. Right.  And he’s dead serious. Mhmm. And he’s not really quipping, but also in the credits at the end, when it, you know, it lists everything. Heather Lang in Clickcamp, herself.

Craig:  Changes were intentional. He wanted it to be slightly different, and he wanted it to be darker and scarier, kind of more of what he had envisioned initially. Even, the new glove, which was a big deal for all his fanboys when this came out, that was really kind of more of what he had had in mind in the beginning.

Todd:  Because it wasn’t a glove in the beginning, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it a guy with either long fingernails or a guy with knives for hand for fingers or something?

Craig:  I think it was it was just like a leather glove with, like, knives, like, knife blades on hand in in in part 1 and in the subsequent movies.

Todd:  Well, but but, I mean, originally, before the movies, wasn’t it what when he originally wrote the script, wasn’t the glove an idea that came up before the first movie was shot? Between the script and the movie?

Craig:  Yeah. I don’t remember. I don’t know.

Todd:  I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong, and and maybe I’m gonna have to go back and delete this. It’s not a podcast to cover for myself.

Craig:  You could very

Todd:  well be right. I thought that the glove was a, like, a special effects person’s idea. Let’s put him in a in a in a glove instead of giving him, like, knife knife fingers or whatever.

Craig:  Yeah. It could be. I’m not sure.

Todd:  Because this glove, was it even a glove?

Craig:  Not really. I mean, this one is more and that’s where the movie opens up. You don’t know. I mean, there’s no opening credits, so you don’t really know what’s going on. It kinda looks like the beginning of Nightmare 1, except for that it’s in, like, this this much darker, more gothic looking kind of boiler room. And it’s the same thing. It’s it’s Freddy making the glove. But this time, it’s more like an animatronic kind of thing with looks like it’s got bone and tendons and and partly mechanical.  And then the the guy, the special effects guy who’s doing the the acting, takes a big butcher butcher knife or whatever and chops his hand off and puts the animatronic one on. So it’s it’s almost like it’s an update of that original scene. And and, yeah, the the different look throughout. His makeup is different. They did bulk him up. And and Robert Englund’s not a very big guy. I mean, he’s he’s not incredibly tall, and he’s he’s really thin.

Todd:  He’s kind of a skinny lanky dude,

Craig:  really. Yeah. And, you know, they you can tell that they through costuming and through the way that they shot, like, they shot him from down low a lot, so it would appear that he was much bulkier and more looming than he’s ever appeared before. A little bit difference in the costumes. The Yeah. The the sweater is a little bit dingier.

Todd:  And it’s almost muted because he has a big coat on

Craig:  for me. Yeah. And like a green fedora.

Todd:  It’s like a it’s like a prim and proper fedora. Right. It’s not like the dirty banged up hat that he had to wear.

Craig:  Right. He’s got black leather pants, which is very nineties. But, Yeah. But, yeah, a new look. And, you know, that was what was so exciting when, the the preview came out. There’s a point, in the movie where Freddy pops out. It’s one of the few jump scares in the movie. He pops out, and said says miss me? And, I I remember seeing that part in the preview, and I was like, yes.  Yes. I missed you so bad. Thank you, Freddie. And look at you. You look like a badass, and

Clip:  I’m so glad you’re back.

Craig:  Oh, Todd. It was so exciting. I was so excited about this movie, and I wasn’t disappointed when I saw it. No.

Todd:  Well, did you see it in the theater?

Craig:  I think so. Oh, yeah. I I know I saw part 6, so I can’t imagine that I didn’t see this. I was so excited

Todd:  about it. I don’t know if I saw in the theater or not. Well, so you mentioned the beginning. They get this bio organic hand, and it is instantly clear that we’re not we’re watching the beginning of a movie being made. Right. And so suddenly it’s the director, more blood, more blood. So the guy’s back there pumping with the blood. Then we are introduced to the special effects person who is, Chase.  Uh-huh. Right? Yeah. And he is back there with the guys and they’re kinda working on the special effects and they’re working on that glove. Right?

Craig:  Mhmm.

Todd:  And he makes this comment. He says something about how it’s oh, yeah. Well, pretty impressive glove. And I think his wife, Heather Heather Leningham playing herself is visiting the set.

Clip:  I don’t like that thing.

Craig:  That thing puts bread on our table.

Clip:  Is it alive, daddy? Heather.

Craig:  You’re in the next shot. Villain. State of the art animatronics enhanced with bio organic grafting, full tendons, nerve bundles from a live Doberman.

Todd:  That’s one of the sillier moments in this movie. I’m thinking special effects people don’t need to get that technical. Yeah. Right. All they really need is like string and stuff to pull, you know, something mechanical, maybe you know, or things like they’re like on the verge of these, they’re like working with new scientific breaks. Right. There’s some bio organics just to make this glove move on screen. This is kinda silly.  But it brings to mind that idea that a, this is a new glove, and, b, he, you know, he was gonna fuse it onto his hand, and, c, I really think that Wes Craven originally had him, written Freddie written as a guy with knives or fingers or long fingernails or something, and the glove was added later. So I feel like this was like a throwback. Gotcha. Like him coming back to it and kinda pulling that out and toying with it a little bit.

Craig:  And it’s it’s cool. You know? It’s it’s it’s not a huge change, but it’s it’s neat. It’s a fun change. And just the whole, you know, as soon as, Wes Craven himself yells cut, and you see him on the screen, and you see Heather Langenkamp there, and you can see that, you know, these original people are back together making a new movie. Feels good. It does feel Todd, and it blurs the lines between movie and reality. Mhmm. And and so much of what is in here is basically real.  I mean, Heather Langenkamp is playing herself, an actress who’s famous for this series of movies, but whose career is not maybe skyrocketing the way that she might like. She’s married to a special effects guy, who Heather Langenkamp is, married to a special effects guy. In in fact, they asked her husband to to play himself in the movie, but he turned it down. Really?

Clip:  Mhmm. Oh,

Todd:  I didn’t know that.

Craig:  Yeah. And then, you know, throughout the whole rest, we’re introduced to Bob Shea, the executive producer, and just everybody who is involved playing their selves, and it just feels I don’t know. It feels so cool. We hadn’t ever really seen anything like that before.

Todd:  We really hadn’t. There wasn’t much of it anyway, and certainly not in the horror realm. Right. And it’s interesting too because the Nightmare on Elm Street series, it plays between dreams and reality. Right. This the movie is almost a stand in for dreams. Right? It it plays between the the movie world and the real world, and and bounces between. So it’s it’s like this this inception layer.  Right? You have in the film, you have the movie you know you’re watching, you have the movie that they are making, and then you have the dreams that they’re having about the movie that they’re making. Right. And so now when you’re watching the film, you’re bouncing between all three of these, and it’s, it’s a little disorienting.

Craig:  Well, and the other cool thing that it does is it kinda wipes the slate clean, because it’s taking it out of the realm of the movie. So we don’t know if those movie rules still apply.

Clip:  Mhmm.

Craig:  And in some ways, they don’t. Like, you know, for example, in this in this movie, in New Nightmare, it appears that Freddy can kind of manifest even if people aren’t asleep

Todd:  Yes.

Craig:  At at some points and in some ways. And it also seems like beyond just, you know, the physical character of Freddy, there’s even more outside influence, like supernatural. Like, there’s all these, earthquakes that have been going on. Yeah. Everybody involved in the production and Heather doesn’t even know that she’s involved in the production yet. She doesn’t even know anything about it at the beginning of the movie. She just thinks she’s dreaming these things. Yeah.  But everybody involved is experiencing these weird things. They’re, having weird dreams. They’re getting weird phone calls. And it bends the rules, and so that makes it exciting because you don’t really know what to expect.

Todd:  Yeah. Yeah. Because even that sequence that we see at the beginning where it’s the movie within the movie, she’s talking with him about the glove and then the glove comes to life and starts tearing people apart.

Craig:  Mhmm.

Todd:  And you’re sort of accustomed to, okay, this is the actual movie. This is the actual story. Wow. We really jumped in with that fast. And then it turns out to be her dream. Right. But she wakes up out of it and not into just a safe, quiet bedroom, but in the middle of an earthquake. And that was a very interesting thread through this.  And my understanding is that that was also, sort of a bit of serendipity. Right? That the earthquakes weren’t originally part of the script or at least heavily a part of it.

Craig:  Were they? I the the earthquakes were in the script, and they they had filmed the earthquake scenes. And they were afraid that they had gone a little bit too over the top with the severity of the earthquakes. And then just a couple of weeks before production wrapped, those huge earthquakes hit Los Angeles. So they sent out, film crews to just film the aftermath of the actual real earthquake, and that’s what they ended up using. And once they saw the mass destruction that that caused, they thought, well, our scenes aren’t too over the top at all. It’s it’s very much real. And again, you know, kind of one of those weird coincidences

Todd:  in a movie shoot. More of the meta Yeah. You know, then you’re bringing some reality into this fiction. Yeah.

Craig:  It’s it’s it’s really weird. I’m sure it would have been weird for people you know, this came out in 1994 soon after those earthquakes happened. It had Todd, you know, what a coincidence. Yeah. Very strange. But, yeah. You know, so she wakes up, and it doesn’t deviate from the rules entirely. It’s not like it totally flips the script.  I feel like it it happens later in the you know, her husband, the chase, the effects guy, gets cut on the fingers by the glove in the, in the dream. And when they wake up, of course, their first concern is their kid. They run down to their kid. The earthquake quits. They’re making sure everybody’s okay. And the kid notices that his fingers are cut. And, of course, just like in all these movies, they find some way to rationalize it. You know, it must have been something The bro that fell or something.  Yeah. Heather says, but, you know, I dreamed it. And he says, well, you must have just been half awake. That’s how dreams work. You still weren’t fully awake, and you saw me get cut, and it kind of incorporated into the dream. But you can tell from the very beginning that she’s totally on edge. Her nerves are just shot. And it’s it’s at that point, you know, he tells her that he’s going off to do some Soap commercial.  Yeah. Or something.

Todd:  Which is another cute thing. Again, I think pretty pretty brilliant writing in that in her dream, you know, he’s doing all this fancy special effects stuff like a special like like the Hollywood special effects artist you imagine is doing all the time. Right. Yet in the reality of the of their world, nah, he’s going to do a soap commercial. Right? He’s got to go down there to make realistic soap bubbles. Yeah. And that’s like, yeah. That’s probably how a special effects artist spends most of their time.  Right. Across the way, sure. Bubbles and coke Craig like that.

Craig:  And so then I guess we get the the the premise of the story is that she’s been getting these weird phone calls. She’s got a stalker. Again, this isn’t this is pulled right from real life. Heather Langenkamp had a stalker in real life. Somebody is obsessed with her from these movies. And Wes Craven asked her, her, can I write that in? And she said, yeah. I can. She’s getting these weird phone calls.  It sounds like Freddie. She’s on edge. Her son, who is played by, Meiko Hughes, who we just saw a few weeks ago in Pet Sematary, he’s kind of acting strange, and she doesn’t know why. There’s, you know, more aftershocks the morning after. She gets one of those phone calls.

Todd:  It’s like a pound pound pound pound pound of weird, crazy things happening to her. Right. Almost to the point where you also are getting a little tired of it. Right? The cracks on the wall and the aftershocks look like fingers, and then Dylan’s acting weird and he’s watching the movie, and she goes downstairs, and then she shakes him, oh, and he starts screaming. And then the phone rings, and she answers the phone, and it’s the creepy caller. And she hangs up again, then it rings again. And you’re thinking, oh, she’s gonna pick it up and it’s like the delivery man. No.  It’s the creepy caller again, and she hangs up, and then Dylan says something creepy, and then the the doorbell rings. It’s like, when is this gonna end?

Craig:  I know. Yeah. It’s really tense. At the door, it’s just the babysitter, and she’s this pretty blonde girl. I recognize this actress from some things, but I don’t think she’s a big name. But, she comes in, and she’s trying to calm Heather down. Heather is going to, tape, like a talk show. They’re gonna be interviewing her, I guess, because it’s gonna be the 10th anniversary of Nightmare 1.  And she kinda doesn’t wanna go because she’s Nightmare 1. And she kinda doesn’t wanna go because she’s not feeling great, but she decides to go. And it’s there’s a funny part where, the limo driver who’s kind of this, I don’t know, creepy, skeezy guy, he’s looking at her in the rearview mirror, and he’s like, you

Clip:  played that girl in that movie with the guy with the yeah. Sure. It’s you. That’s what I love about this job. I get to meet the stars.  I’m hardly a star.  What? Are you kidding? I love your stuff.

Craig:  No. It’s it’s I I love all that meta stuff. You know, we hadn’t seen I think Heather Langenkamp has worked, you know, here and there.

Todd:  Things. Were we on stage or something?

Craig:  I don’t know. I mean, I she comes from a family of creative people. And and, you know, she’s she’s still working. And she’s right now, they’re filming a Hellraiser sequel, and she’s in it.

Todd:  Oh, really?

Craig:  But, you know, her her you know, like with any of these horror movies, the final girls or whatever, they’re usually not big name folks. They don’t usually go on to do a whole lot more, and she hadn’t. And so, again, there is some more meta stuff there where you’re seeing into the life of not necessarily washed up. You know, they have a nice house, and they get by fine. But, she’s not some big celebrity. Yeah. She’s just a working actress.

Todd:  Yet she’s willing to acknowledge it, and she’s willing to go along with it. And she’s willing to go on this talk show and talk about Freddie. You know? It’s not like she’s, don’t talk to me about Freddie Right. Anymore. I don’t wanna I don’t wanna deal with it, which, again, seems a little more true to life

Clip:  Right.

Todd:  Probably how that really is.

Craig:  And she goes, and she shoots this talk show. And, they the host is kind of obnoxious in asking her about her kid and asks her to say her kid’s name, which would seem like totally faux pas thing to do. Yeah.

Todd:  And she even kinda looks at the camera, and she’s I mean, there’s an interesting moment there just and it and it adds to this weird subtext of her family being in peril Uh-huh. Where she knows she has a stalker. And so is she gonna say the kid’s name on it there, but she’s on the spot?

Craig:  And so she does, reluctantly. And and the guy says, well, would you ever let your kid watch these movies? And she says, oh, no. No. I would never let my kid watch these movies. And he says, well, what about your costar? Would you trust Dylan with your costar? And she’s like, Robert? I don’t know. He says we got a surprise for you, and out comes Robert Englund and his full Freddie make. And, he comes out and the crowd goes wild and the crowds full of all these kids, and, you know, he’s, you know, waving his arms in the air, and the the light is, like, silhouetting his claw and everything. And, this too was based on a real thing.  Robert Shea, I think, or Wes Craven, one or the other, was invited to speak at this forum about violence in films and and whatnot. And it was, you know, concerned parents and their kids who were in the audience. And when Robert Englund came out, all the kids freaked out and were so excited and were screaming, Freddie, Freddie. And I guess all the parents and the host of the event were, like, mortified. This was exactly what they didn’t wanna happen. You know, they wanted to show that these things were bad for kids, and here the kids are just absolutely loving it. Oh my gosh.

Todd:  Well, that that scene is really cool, and it’s very well placed in the film, and it really points to what Wes Craven is trying to say. And, you know, Freddy comes out like you said, and the kids addresses him, and he was like, hey, everybody. Kinda runs up and he’s like high fiving kids in the wall. It’s where the character has become a commodity

Clip:  Mhmm.

Todd:  And where it is no longer true to the story. It is, oh, honestly, it’s a little bit of what worries me about Disney having the Star Wars franchise is that now we’re gonna see Darth Vader riding the rides at Disney World. And it just dilutes the character to an extent by making all these public appearances and taking them out of the story into this thing where he’s signing autographs and talking to people instead of murdering them.

Craig:  And that becomes a significant plot point. You know, the watering down of the character becomes a significant plot point later. But, Heather gets a call from one of the execs at New Line while she’s still on the lot, and they say, Robert Shea wants to talk to you. He’s really excited. Can you come in? And she’s like, okay. When? And they’re like, right now. So she heads right over there, and, she meets with, Robert Shea, and he tells her

Clip:  How would you like to join us in the definitive nightmare?  I thought you killed Freddie off.  Well, we did. But the fans, you know, the fans, Todd bless them, they’re clamoring for more. I guess evil never dies, right? Anyhow, a few weeks ago I got a call from Wes and he pitched me this really exciting idea, and I started thinking, who better to resurrect Freddy than his creator?  Well, I thought Wes stopped doing horror movies.  Do you know Todd me he hadn’t called me in the last 10 years because he hadn’t had any really scary nightmares? There is his inspiration for this thing. Anyhow, he’s he’s right in the middle of the script.  Which means he’s having nightmares again.  Well, he’s he’s very excited about it.  The nightmares?  No, sweetie, the script. And you should be too because you’re the star.  I don’t know, Bob. I’m flattered, really. But I have a kid now and  Well, so?  So I’m I’m not sure about doing horror.

Craig:  Oh, come on, Heather. Kids love horror.

Todd:  Yeah. That’s a great line, actually, that he says, and she kind of brings it up later too when when she says every kid knows who Freddy is. He’s like Santa Claus. Right? But everybody’s saying that throughout the movie. You know, the host is saying it. We’re getting the physical manifestation of what the kids in the audience and whatnot. And the fact that even though, you know, that Bob Shea doesn’t seem concerned, he’s excited about it. I really like this this particular scene because you can tell and this is just something I pay attention to because I’m interested in it, but you can tell when a sort of a non actor is in the movie because they don’t show their face a whole heck of a lot.  Right? Because they’re slipping in the best line delivery and they’re getting the most of this is on Heather and on her reaction. You get to see Bob Shae just a little bit, but most of his lines are spoken while the while the camera’s actually pointed at Heather. Because, you know, he’s not the best actor in the world. No. But he likes playing himself.

Craig:  He likes popping up in these movies. He does. He cameos in, Freddy versus Jason 2.

Todd:  Oh, is that right?

Craig:  Yeah. And there’s lots of other good cameos in this movie too. Lin Shay cameo. She plays a school teacher in the the first movie. She plays a nurse in this. Well, we’ll talk about more of them as we get there. Yeah. Yeah.  So she’s kinda reluctant about it, and says, how long has he been how long has Wes been working on this? And he says, I don’t know. A few months. And she says, well, in that time, those weird things been happening. And and, Shay is like, what do you mean weird? And she’s like, well, I don’t know. Weird phone calls or anything. And Robert Shay kinda gets this look on his face, and immediately the phone starts ringing. And he looks over at it. And you can tell that he’s nervous or something.  And she says, aren’t you gonna get the phone? He’s like, no. That’s all we have people around here to do. Somebody get the damn phone. But it it seems apparent that weird things are going on. But he but, of course, Bob Shea, the head of New Line, is thrilled about this and and really wants it to go. So I don’t even remember. Does she say she’ll do it? I no.

Todd:  She kind of says she doesn’t wanna do it, but then he reveals that her husband has been working on the new glove. Right. And so she freaks out about that a little bit. And there’s another episode, I think, with her son. Right?

Craig:  Yeah. As soon as she gets home, she can hear the sun screaming inside. And,

Todd:  That’s the whole deal with the doll. Right? Is that where Yeah. Yeah. Where the the dinosaur comes in at that point?

Craig:  Right. Julie, the babysitter, is trying to calm him down. He’s, like, thrashing and screaming. And so Heather takes Julie’s place and is trying to calm him down. And I think he starts he says, never sleep again, or he starts saying the 12 Freddy’s coming for you or something. And she asked the babysitter, did you let him watch that movie? And she’s like, no. I didn’t let him watch anything. He was taking a nap.  He started freaking out. And he says something, I think at this point, maybe not until a few minutes later. I don’t remember. But he says, you know, I I’m the man with the the ugly old man with the knives is trying to get me, but Rex saved me. He’s got this, stuffed tyrannosaurus Rex, and, the Heather pulls it out from under the blankets, and, of course, it’s got the slashes, the slash marks in it. And And so she knows something weird is going on. So she calls, her husband and says you need to get home.

Todd:  And and why didn’t you tell me you were working at our club

Craig:  and all? Right. And he says, no. I can’t leave because the other 2 special effects guys never showed up today. Those were the 2 guys that

Todd:  got killed in her dream. Ah, that’s right.

Craig:  And they never showed up. But

Todd:  she says, it’s Dylan. You’ve gotta come. And so he he goes. But, unfortunately, he’s driving, and it’s late late at night and he’s falling asleep at the wheel. Again, another one of those real life horrors. You know, it’s one thing to just fall asleep and have Freddy come at you, behind the wheels when you can fall asleep and die in real life.

Craig:  And this was the first time that I ever really realized that even if Freddy hadn’t intervened, he probably would have

Todd:  died anyway. Yeah. Exactly.

Craig:  I mean, he was falling asleep at the wheel, which is more I’ve done it. It’s that’s mortifying when you kinda jerk awake from falling asleep at the wheel.

Todd:  Well, once when I was 16 and I fell asleep at the wheel, luckily, I was just outside that my neighborhood. But when I woke up, I woke up because I was half in the ditch. You know, when I was riding the ditch, I was I was almost vertical there, you know, sideways. And, and that scares the daylight Todd me. Gosh. Yeah. That weighs you up real fast. Real

Clip:  fast. Yeah.

Todd:  But here’s another one moment where Robert Englund I mean, Wes Craven really likes to throw in. He gets he gets a little sexual. He plays with your fears, and he plays toys with that a little bit. Where you’ve got Freddy’s gloves coming up between his legs, and at the end of his, his, knife taps his crotch just a little bit before he jerks away. And you’re like, oh, jeez. As a man, you never wanted

Clip:  to be sharp. That’s right. Absolutely.

Craig:  But

Todd:  it that’s also very reminiscent of the scene with Nancy in the bathtub from the first movie. Yeah. Comes up between her legs and takes her under. Yep. A lot of Todd, actually, to the original. None of the others, but the original for sure.

Craig:  Yeah. And, England, when he decided to do this, he sat down and watched all of them in sequence. And when it was over, he said that he just couldn’t even follow the story line anymore. He had no idea. And that’s kinda why he wanted to kinda start fresh and do something new. Right. And and

Todd:  it worked. Craven. Right? You meant Wes?

Craig:  Yeah. Yeah.

Todd:  Sorry. I’m I’m doing the I’m I’m

Clip:  screwing you up, man. I’m sorry.

Craig:  Right. So, anyway, eventually, Chase does fall asleep. The glove comes all the way out and and slices clear through his abdomen, and and he crashes. The police arrive at Heather’s house and tell her, what’s happened, and and she wants to see the body. Yep.

Todd:  She wants that proof that it’s more than just a car crash.

Craig:  Yeah. And she goes, and it’s so funny. Horror movie the people who make horror movies must have a terrible fear of hospital. Yes. Because every hospital in every horror movie is just this nightmarish place. She goes into what I assume is the basement of the hospital where the morgue is, and there are corpses just laying around in the hallway.

Todd:  And there’s, like, screaming or something. Yeah. Somewhere, like, somebody’s moaning or whatever. And it’s, like, shouldn’t that be a unit or 2 up? Right. Right. Insane. But then she meets the the world’s most unprofessional mortician

Craig:  Right.

Todd:  Who, seems, very surprised that she’s there, even though they’ve clearly been told she’s coming. And then when he takes her back to the view of the body, he’s not businesslike about it at all. He’s he’s like, kinda like, are are you sure you wanna see this? Right. I’m I’m not sure. I wanna show it to you. Okay. I will. And and I’m very surprised at every emotional reaction that you’re having to this.  I don’t know if he was an intern that Todd.

Craig:  Yeah. I don’t know.

Todd:  It was a little silly, but, yeah. So she wants to see the whole Todd, and when she sees the whole body, she sees the slash marks

Clip:  on his chest.

Craig:  And she throws up and and leaves. And she, you know, know, it’s obvious that she knows something’s going on at this point. And then I think I don’t remember if it’s the exact next scene, but it comes right up. We we cut to Chase’s funeral.

Todd:  That’s right.

Craig:  And this is another one of those cool parts where several of the actors from previous entries are are there. Tuesday night from part 4 is there. The guy who played Tina’s boyfriend in part 1 is there. Of course, Robert Englund, Wes Craven, are there.

Todd:  John Saxon is there behind her. That’s when you first kinda see him. Right. Who who

Craig:  played her father in the original movie. Funnily enough, I guess, when they were shooting this scene or when they planned this scene, Wes Craven wanted to ask Johnny Depp if he would do a cameo at the funeral.

Todd:  Oh, yeah.

Craig:  But he he couldn’t work up the courage to ask him. Because at this point, Johnny Depp was a huge megastar. Oh. So he he he never got up the courage. And then they ran into each other at some event, some Hollywood event, and, Craven talked to him about it. And Johnny Depp said, you should have asked me, dude. I would have totally done it.

Clip:  Oh, man. What a shame. Right? Right.

Todd:  But then again, if you would put Johnny Depp in this movie, you would have had to written

Craig:  right in

Todd:  the script for him.

Clip:  You know what I’m saying? We would have

Todd:  gone down a whole different scenario, I think, if he had if he had talked you’re willing to do this? You’re willing to do a little more? You’re right.

Craig:  I’m sure you’re right. At at the funeral, the wind picks up, and there’s another earthquake. Heather and her son are are sitting Dylan are sitting in the front row with the babysitter. The earthquake is bad enough that it causes the supports on the coffin to break, and the coffin falls into the grave at an angle.

Todd:  Cat opens up a little bit Mhmm. And she falls forward.

Craig:  Right. I don’t even remember why she lunged forward. She I don’t know if it was just a fall or something.

Todd:  I got the sense it was a combination of her standing up right when the earthquake was shaking, and she fell yeah. She fell as a result.

Craig:  And she falls and hits her head on this one of the supports, for the coffin. And when she and right away, as soon as she hits her head, the earthquake stops, the wind stops, she looks around, and Dylan is gone. And she asked Julie, where is he? And she says, I don’t know. And then she hears Freddie’s laugh, and she looks down into the coffin, and Freddie is pulling, Dylan down through, like, an opening in the bottom, of the coffin. And Dylan’s screaming, and so she dives in the grave and, like, dives down in there, and it’s almost like a tunnel leading down. And she gets ahold of Dylan and pulls him out, but then her husband’s body starts sinking down towards them at the bottom. And

Todd:  he comes to life there for a moment and says to join join me.

Craig:  Yeah. Or stay with me or something. And he’s, like, crying blood tears, and there’s blood coming out of his mouth. And, she screams, and then she wakes up again where she was outside of the coffin.

Todd:  Yeah. And this is good because as you I think I feel like at this point in the movie, we’re still getting very much, their excuses for them to fall asleep, and that’s when the crazy supernatural stuff is happening.

Clip:  Right.

Todd:  Yeah. Which isn’t fitting with the the way that it was envisioned.

Craig:  Right. Robert England says something to her at the at the gravesite, like, if you need anything. And, again, it’s it’s just it’s so strange. Yeah. You know? She’s just encountered this nightmare of her own. And then to be face to face with the guy who personified it Yeah.

Todd:  In the movies. She’s very unsettled by it.

Craig:  Yeah.

Todd:  Yeah. And it it’s just it’s very clever.

Clip:  It’s

Todd:  very clever. And and then John Sachs also kind of comes down and sits down and and is being very fatherly towards her. Right? She doesn’t I guess, does she have parents? Is she supposed to

Craig:  We never hear anything about her.

Todd:  You don’t. Yeah. But he plays his fatherly role almost from the beginning, in being her older counselor. So

Craig:  Yeah. And that leads right into what I think is the next scene. There’s a scene at this park where she and John Saxon are sitting on a bench, and she’s telling him what’s going on, that she’s got this stalker, that she’s having these weird dreams. She, you know, she says, you know, I have a history of mental illness in my family. I don’t know what’s going on. She said my biggest fear is that, if I do have something, that I pass it down to Dylan because he’s been acting strangely too. And John Saxon says, well, he just lost his dad. You know? It’s it’s normal that he would be acting strangely.  And all this time, Dylan’s playing in the background by himself. There’s lots of people around. He’s playing by himself, and there’s this big, like I don’t even know how to describe it.

Todd:  The coolest thing ever. I actually had one of these. Did you? Oh my gosh. It was the it was our favorite place to go when I was a kid. It was a playground, and it’s this giant rocket ship built out of poles, but it has multiple levels in there. So you can climb up to the 1st level, you can climb to the 2nd level, and you feel like you’re outside because you’re essentially in a cage, but you’re generally pretty safe. And there’s even a spot at the very top in the cone where you can go up, except this is the world’s most unsafe of these rocket ships, Because there’s a window up there with with a great audit that you could also apparently open. Right.  Like like you would imagine that that

Craig:  should probably be locked. But it makes for a cool scene, because Dylan climbs up there all the way on the top. And this thing is big. I don’t know. What would you say? Like 20 feet or

Clip:  more?

Todd:  Oh, gosh. It’s way up there. It’s huge. I think as a kid, you know what? Looking back, maybe this thing wasn’t any more than 15 feet tall, but it felt like 30.

Craig:  Oh, right. Sure. And the way they shot shot it, you know, they’re shooting it from below, so it looks like it’s huge and enormous. And, of course, Heather and John see him when he’s up there, and she goes running, and he falls, and she catches him just in the nick of time. And, he says, God wouldn’t take me. He had had a conversation with her about where’s daddy, and she said heaven and, all that stuff. So he I guess, he was trying to reach to heaven, but she she caught him. That’s a cool scene.  A scary scene.

Todd:  Yeah. And another one of those moments where Freddy has nothing

Clip:  to do with him. And real life work.

Todd:  Right? Right? And and that’s really plays throughout here. I I think it’s impressive that a male writer would write so much to what is I mean, it’s not necessarily just female, but sort of your mother’s worst fears are a thread throughout this film, the child in peril. And of course, fathers are just we talked with your dad about the horrors of your children being in peril. But I don’t know. For some reason, we tend to associate it even more so with a mom, and in this case, now a single mom.

Craig:  Right. And that’s the other thing. She’s Interestingly enough, in in some earlier drafts of the script, the the father didn’t die. They ended up killing him off just because they didn’t have enough body they didn’t have a big enough body cam. Oh, really? Mhmm. So they killed him off, pretty early.

Todd:  Because that’s a pretty that’s a big gut, man. Yeah.

Craig:  Yeah. It is. Yeah? It’s just random trivia about that rocket ship scene. Meiko Hughes got to take that home. No way. Yeah. And it’s it was in his backyard for for years.

Todd:  Oh, man. I would have loved to have had one

Clip:  of those in my backyard.

Todd:  We used to we used to ride our bikes out to it. It was the video game place or the rocketship. It was one of those 2 places when we lived in Texas. Oh, nice. I would love to see those back. I’m sure there are probably all kinds of things wrong with them.

Craig:  Oh, I’m sure. Yeah.

Todd:  It’s too much metal on the playground where everything’s plastic and rubber now. But going off of what you were saying, it is a bit of a gut punch. You know, you said it earlier about how we care more about the characters in this movie. Mhmm. You know, usually the first person that’s offed in a horror film is, whatever.

Craig:  Almost somebody that you were wanting to die. Yeah.

Todd:  Or if you couldn’t predict it early on, you know? But in this case, it really kinda hurts that this this guy who we kinda liked and who was being supportive to her and is a member of the family gets offed. It really raises the stakes pretty early on

Clip:  Yeah.

Todd:  Absolutely. I feel. Well, then she goes home and they she has another dream. And it’s interesting the way this scene plays out because as it’s showing her in her bed, sometimes you’re not sure if they’re in the dream world or if you’re seeing them go into the dream world, but they’re these sounds. It almost sounds like a boat. This was just a real subtle thing that’s not overplayed, but the picture seems to be gently rocking. And you see the lampshades moving a little bit and the picture is moving very slightly on the wall, and you’re hearing those creaking sounds kind of like the creaking of wood on a ship, and it kinda drifts in closer to her as this is happening. And I don’t know if that’s supposed Todd, like, symbolize, you know, drifting off into dream world or or if we’re supposed to equate it with maybe another earthquake’s coming.  But in some sense, anyway, she falls out of bed and because she hears, more screaming down she hears more downstairs and she goes downstairs and Dylan’s watching the screen again. Mhmm. He’s watching a scene from the movie, but the it’s unplugged. Right. And, And I feel

Craig:  like she didn’t even notice No. She did. The first time she had caught him watching it, she yanked the cord out. And then Oh, that’s cool. There are at least 2 other times where the TV comes on, and totally you can see the cord hanging on the front. Yeah. I don’t think she even noticed. I mean and, you know, she’s concerned about her kids, so it’s not like she’s looking Todd details.

Todd:  But And this is the point. It’s almost a bit of a throwback to part 2, honestly, where, Dylan has tied some knives or taped some knives to his fingers and he’s almost possessed by Freddie or seems to be. And he comes towards her and raises his knifes, his knifes hands and tries to There’s a bit of a struggle, maybe a little too much struggle between her and her 4 year old son, unless we’re to think kind of like Pet Sematary where he’s got some supernatural strength. But in any case, again, another one of those very uncomfortable elements that that Wes Craven loves to throw in these movies is the phone rings again after they were kind of calmed down and she picks up the phone and it’s a throwback to the first movie with the tongue that sticks out. And he goes, I touched him. Uh-huh. It’s so creepy. Oh my gosh.  Right? Mhmm. Like, there’s every bit of icky about

Clip:  it.

Craig:  Yes. Yeah.

Todd:  And even as if that’s not far enough, she throws the phone down and she goes and consoles Dylan and you see another shot of the phone and there’s just like white saliva looking out of it.

Craig:  You know? It’s frothing out.

Todd:  It’s so sexually suggestive. Yeah. And and again, it also harkens back to Freddie being that child molester.

Craig:  Mhmm.

Todd:  That’s what I mean. There’s just so many layers of unease that he he puts in here that are way more sophisticated than you than you tend to see.

Craig:  Yeah.

Todd:  You know? Definitely. I touched him.

Craig:  Yeah. You know? And there’s really you know, there as as spooky as that is, just knowing that he’s that close is scary, but to say about a little boy Todd say I touched him, you know, that that’s that’s spooky. It’s and it freaks her out. And then and Dylan’s freaking out too and and maybe even throwing up or something.

Todd:  Yeah. He was having, like, a seizure type thing on the stuff.

Craig:  So this is the point where she ends up taking him to

Todd:  the hospital. That’s correct. And, of course, when they get to the hospital, the nurse is asking all kinds of questions. Because she did wake up with knife with, you know, 4 4 knives across her or is that in the That’s

Craig:  it’s it’s it’s later. Okay. At at some point, I think it was even before she took Dylan to the hospital, she called Robert England and asked him if anything was going on weird in his life. He’s like, what do you mean? She’s like, well, are you having bad dreams or whatever? And all this time, we’re seeing him kind of from behind in easel, and he’s painting. He’s clearly like a painter now.

Todd:  Yeah. He’s made so much money, all he could all he has to do at home in his big hands.

Craig:  Think that Robert England really does paint. Todd he? I wonder. Does. But, he’s he’s clearly really intense on what he’s doing. And, she says, you know, I’ve been dreaming about Freddie, but he’s different. And he says, do you mean, like, darker and more evil? It’s like, yeah. How’d you know that? He says, call it a guess. And she says, I wanna talk to you.  Can I come over? And he says, I’m I’m busy, right now.

Todd:  I have something I need to finish.

Craig:  Right. It’ll have to wait. And he’s just he’s dismissive. You know, he’s clearly distracted, and, eventually, he just hangs up. And then we spin around and see what’s on the canvas, and it’s this new scare I mean, it’s not like a photograph It’s stylized. It’s stylized, but it’s the new scary Freddy. So, obviously, he’s been having these dreams too. And I’m kinda glad it ended up getting cut, but there was supposed to be a scene where Robert England had a Freddie nightmare.

Clip:  Oh,

Craig:  wow. And in the nightmare I think that concept could have actually been really cool. Yeah. But the what they had scripted was that he, Robert England, was gonna be, like, in giant spider web, and then it was gonna be a giant evil spider Freddy, that was coming to get him, which seems kinda hokey. And they they they decided it didn’t really fit with the tone of the rest of the movie tonight, so they got rid of it.

Todd:  Well, it’s a little more sinister in that Robert Engle then sort of disappears. Mhmm. That’s true. It’s like the more Freddie comes into the real world or becomes more a part of the picture, Robert England as a character is gone Mhmm. And mysteriously gone. Not that there’s ever any implication that Robert England has gone crazy and is killing people. It’s just this and it and it works. It really almost needs to be that way.  You can’t have Freddie and Robert Englund sharing a scene together.

Craig:  Probably not.

Clip:  You know?

Todd:  You just it doesn’t work. Right. But, yeah, but he’s gone after that. And I think even she tries calling him later, doesn’t she? And the message yeah.

Craig:  It says we’re out of town. You can leave a message if you want to, but we’re gonna be gone for a long time.

Todd:  Like, what is that all about? Right?

Craig:  I think the implication is that he’s kind of running from it. And, again, there was another thing in the original script where, Robert Shea was doing the same thing, that he was kind of on the run. He was having somebody drive him around in this van to try

Clip:  to get away from Freddy,

Craig:  but they, they cut that too.

Todd:  Well, it’s almost implied. You know? You don’t need to. You can imagine that Right. Everybody is going through this once you’ve established that everyone’s going through it.

Craig:  Well, and I think it’s almost better to keep the focus on Heather. Yes. I think it would get a little bit too diffuse if you started messing with other people’s stories. I and I like the focus on her and her family. Yes. It keeps it really centered. She takes them to the hospital. And, like you said, the the doctors and nurses are asking all kinds of questions that you know, because they’ve heard him say stuff about a scary man.  And the doctor says, you surely didn’t let him watch your movies, did you? I don’t know who the actress is who plays this this doctor. But she’s she’s tall, and she’s, you know, she’s definitely this big presence. And she is really condescending

Todd:  Yes.

Craig:  To Heather and accusatory to an extent that really seems unprofessional and and not realistic. Yeah. But this character is based on the president of the MPAA with who was, like, the bane of Wes Craven’s existence. I mean, they butted heads at every turn. This guy, the president of the MPAA, who does who do the, the ratings would always make him make serious cuts, to his movies. And he just he hated the guy. So he, the the doctor’s last name is that guy’s last

Clip:  name.

Todd:  No way. Mhmm. Oh, that’s very interesting.

Craig:  And and explains why she’s such an unlikable character. And she talks so much about the effect of these movies on children and whatnot.

Todd:  She does. Although you do get this at least at the beginning, you get this idea she’s also wondering if there isn’t some abuse going on as well. Right? Mhmm. I mean, Heather’s coming in with cuts on her arm, you know, the scary man thing. But then there’s also that subtext that we’ve heard earlier that Heather’s afraid that whatever psychosis may be in her family has been passed down to her son. Mhmm. And then we hear the whole sleep deprivation thing. Right.  And we realize that her son has actually been trying to stay awake, all this time. He even hides the sleeping pill after they leave and when they give it to him. Wow. It’s really kind of complex. It is. What’s going on in this family and how everyone’s dealing with this and it’s played in a very subtle way. When I say subtle it’s not like you’ve been sleeping. Oh, I’m not gonna sleep.  You know? There’s there’s none of that. Right. You just see her sipping coffee

Craig:  every now and then.

Todd:  You can tell she’s trying to stay awake. She’s not telling anybody she is.

Craig:  Right. But we know. I mean, they don’t need to go out of their way Todd set that up. We know what’s going on. We know why they’re doing that. That’s consistent with the rest of the movies. And it makes sense that they would do that if they’re having these terrible nightmares. Yeah.

Todd:  And it and then what the kid is doing, which is this sleepwalking, makes sense because she starts reading about sleep deprivation and right in there, can lead to these sort of psychoses that manifest itself in the sleepwalking and an odd erratic behavior. It’s exactly so you’re getting almost a very natural explanation as a that that counteracts the super you know, there’s always it’s always nice to throw a little doubt in there. Right. Right? Right. Could this be a natural explanation, instead of the supernatural what’s happening with her son?

Craig:  Well, but around this time, it’s when Dylan’s in the hospital. Because she can’t get a hold of Robert England, Heather goes and visits Wes Craven and talks I love this scene so much.

Todd:  So good.

Craig:  Wes Craven is so subtle. You know? Like, he’s he’s not an actor, but he just plays it naturally. I mean, I guess he’s playing himself, and he knows how movies work. So he knows about angles and all that. But it’s just you know, he’s so not laid back isn’t the word, but he’s just so underplayed. And he explains to her what’s been going on, that he had these it had been a long time, but he had a new nightmare, and he started writing it down. And he just has, you know, a scene will come to him in the night. In his nightmare, he’ll write it down the next day.  He doesn’t have any control over it. Then he tells her kind of this lore, about this ancient evil. And he says, you know, that’s that’s what I’m dreaming about. That’s what is behind this. And she asked him to explain it, and he does. And it’s it’s such a cool concept.

Clip:  It’s existed in different forms at different times.

Craig:  About the

Clip:  only thing about it that stays the same is what it lives for, really.  What is that?  Oh, the murder of innocence.  This is still a script we’re talking about. Right, Wes?  Yeah. Well, I just have to think of it as a nightmare in progress.  Well, in this nightmare in progress then, does this thing have any weaknesses?  Oh, well, it can be captured sometimes.  Captured? How?  By storytellers of all things. Every so often, they imagine a story good enough to sort of catch its essence, and then for a while, it’s held prisoner in the story.  Like the genie in the bottle?  Exactly. Exactly. But the problem comes when the story dies, and that can happen in a lot of ways. It can get too familiar to people, or somebody waters it down to make it an easier sell. You know? Or maybe it’s just so upsetting to society that it’s banned outright. However it happens, when the story dies, the evil is set free.  Great.

Todd:  It’s like bam bam bam. It’s like the stuff that probably pissed Wes Craven off about his character, and then his character got watered down. And it’s also the very real fact that they stopped making the movies about him. Eventually, he’s gonna go away, which would potentially release as evil.

Craig:  Right. And it’s it’s such a clever concept. Is smart. And and she says, well, now that the movie’s over, what’s he doing now? And he says, well, he’s gotten used to being Freddy, and he likes being Freddy. And so he wants to stick with that, and he wants to Craig over into our world, the real world. And she says, like, well, can he? And he says, well, he can, but he’s got a there’s a gate keeper. There’s somebody he’s gotta get past. And he says, and it’s you.  It’s you, Heather. And she said, what are you talking about? Why me? He said, because you were the first one to defeat him. You were the first one to take away his power to humiliate him, and so he’s gotta get through you in order to get back into the world. And, again, it’s such a burden for her. You know? She doesn’t she doesn’t want any of this. Yeah.

Todd:  Well and, again, it is a burden like her previous role was a burden. Right? It’s like, I’m kinda done with Freddie, but it’s haunting me through the rest of my life.

Craig:  Well, and thank goodness, you know, Heather Leningkamp was willing to come back and do it, because it really kind of hinges on her.

Todd:  It does.

Craig:  If they hadn’t been able to get her, I don’t think that the story would have been nearly as effective if they had tried to use somebody else, from one of the other films or something. No. But and and, again, you know, we when we talked about Nightmare 1, it’s not like I think Heather Langenkamp is some sort of Academy Award, you know, worthy actress. But she’s likable, and you feel for her. And you see in her face when she’s told this, like, why me? Yeah. Right. Just leave me alone.

Todd:  She’s so girl next door. You know? She doesn’t look up to the task at all. She just wants to be left alone. She wants to be normal.

Craig:  After he tells her all this, she gets angry because she says, well, you knew it was the implication that he knew that her husband would die. And he says, I swear I didn’t know. It was just a dream. It’s just a script. I had no idea. And he walks over to his writing area, to his computer, and she says, well, what happens now? And he goes, well, I guess it all depends on whether or not you’re willing to play Nancy one more time. And it scrolls down to the screen where the conversation they’ve been having is scripted out. And at the bottom after that line, it says fade to black, and it fades to black.  That’s so clever. So clever.

Todd:  Yeah. I man, that is that I just I love this movie. I really do.

Craig:  At this point, she knows what’s going on, so we’re really getting getting into final act. Yeah. She runs back to the hospital where she’s being questioned by the doctors, you know, they even call security. You know, now Freddie has appeared to her once in her bedroom, and they kinda had a scuffle. And she’s got these cuts now, and the doctor wants to know where those came from. And, basically, the doctor thinks she’s nuts.

Clip:  The man from your films, Freddy Krueger with a claws, Is that who he’s afraid of? You have let your child see your films, haven’t you?  Every kid knows who Freddy is. He’s like Santa Claus.

Todd:  And it’s true. I mean,

Craig:  it was so true at the time. You know, little 5 year old kids were walking around in Freddy Krueger Craig on Halloween and Yeah. It’s hugely popular.

Todd:  I didn’t see the movie and I loved the guy. Right. I got a I bought a poster from a friend of mine and I paid, like, some money for it and he gave you know, it was like the first thing I ever bought off the first And and I had that poster at the foot of my bed plastered up on the wall. I had never seen the movies. I just you know?

Craig:  He’s he’s an icon. TV. Yeah. He’s as big an questions about her mental state and whatnot. And the babysitter has arrived at the hospital, and she’s with Dylan. And Heather has told her, don’t let them go. Don’t let him go to sleep. So she’s trying to keep Dylan awake.  These two nurses come in. The evil nurses. These evil nurses come in, and they trick, the the babysitter and Dylan. 1 of them distracts the babysitter, and the other one covertly gives Dylan an injection.

Todd:  It’s like they knew this was gonna be a problem, and so they worked out this scheme. Right. What’s so hilarious about it is the one who gives them the injection, it’s like just jabs it

Clip:  in his arm.

Todd:  Yeah. It’s such a Hollywood.

Craig:  And then she gives Julie a look like, I gotcha.

Clip:  This is

Todd:  one this is one of the sillier moments in the movie, but

Craig:  It is kind of silly, but I also like it because then Julie decks the other one and just knocks it on the ground, and then grabs a syringe and is squaring off with the other one who has a syringe, and she says, I know what’s in that one. Would I find out what’s in this one? She’s, like, jabbing it at her.

Todd:  She just runs, doesn’t she?

Craig:  Yeah. So the nurses get out. So then it’s just Julie and Dylan alone in there. She locks the door. Mhmm. And Dylan, starts to fall asleep, and she’s trying, trying, trying to keep him awake. And here, really, is where Freddie kind of emerges in his full glory, in the new costume, the new look. I mean, we’ve seen him briefly once with his encounter with Heather, but he just comes he rises up from behind her.  And Dylan can see him and is scared, and he says, Julie, behind you. And she looks around, and she doesn’t see anything because she’s awake. But Freddie just slowly reaches up his glove and then just plunges it right into her back. And then we get a throwback to the scene from, the first movie with Tina

Todd:  still. Yep.

Craig:  Where, he takes her up the walls on the ceiling. Again, just like in the first movie, they recorded this in a a rotating room. Uh-huh. And it’s, you know, it’s a total throwback. And it’s scary. You see this kid, you know, he’s he’s terrified. You can see it in his face, and he’s, like, frozen in fear. And his babysitter’s up on the ceiling, and Freddie’s standing on the ceiling, and the babysitter’s reaching down and saying, help me.  And he reaches out to try to help. And then Freddie, like, breaks her neck, and she falls down to the ground. And Dylan screams he screams, Rex,

Todd:  and and runs off. That’s a neat a thread that, you know, comes up time and time again in the movie about his dinosaur Mhmm. Keeping, keeping him safe.

Craig:  It’s cute.

Todd:  Yeah. It’s very cute. And and so they had managed to get in the room at this time. And and so now everybody’s just stunned. Right. Like, the nurses, everybody, even the the the big bad woman, she just makes no effort to restrain anybody. They’re just like, Dylan’s gone. Yeah.  Oh, he couldn’t be gone. He’s so heavily sedated. And one

Craig:  of my favorite lines in the movie, Heather says, he sleeps off, you idiot. He’s fully capable of walking out of this hospital. She goes chasing out after him. There is another part where she was trying to go visit Dylan, and he was in a restricted area. And some nurse said, this is a restricted area. Do you have

Clip:  a pass? And she says,

Craig:  screw your pass, just like in the first movie. I love these throwbacks.

Todd:  Except it was a hall pass at that time. Right.

Craig:  Right. In high school. She knows, because she had told Dylan, we’re really close to home. It’s just across the freeway. She pointed out the window. So she knows that’s where he’s headed. And then so she goes chasing after him, and in fact, that is where he’s headed. And because he’s sleepwalking, Freddie can mess with him.  And we get this whole scene on the freeway. It was all done with green screens. And you can kinda tell, but there’s no other way you could’ve done it

Todd:  Yeah.

Craig:  With, you know, this little kid walking across the busy freeway, all these cars trying to swerve. And, Heather eventually gets there, and she’s, you know, trying to get to him. The cars are swerving around her. There’s a cool shot where a semi, like, jackknifes and goes right over her head.

Todd:  Oh, man.

Craig:  Meanwhile, Freddy’s, like, huge and in the clouds and picks up Dylan with one of his claws and is, like, dangling him in front of the cars. And, eventually, he drops him, and Dylan goes off, runs off to the other side of the road. Heather gets hit by a car. This is another thing. In movies, I love it that people just get nailed by cars and then just get up and running.

Clip:  I know. Right? This car

Todd:  had to be going what? Like at least 60.

Craig:  Oh, at least. She like rolls up on the hood and bounces off and rolls 20 feet in front, but she’s alright. And when she gets there, she notices that there’s a car in the front yard or in the front, like, drive. And when she goes in, the doors are open, and the first person that she sees is John Saxon. And he’s like, Heather, what happened to you? You know, what’s going on? She says, where’s Dylan? He says, he’s fine. He’s he’s right over there. She goes over. She starts hugging Dylan, and he John Saxon says, what’s wrong? And he she says, I know how Chase really died.  It was Fred Craig. And he says, yeah. Right. And turns and walks starts walking away. And he he tells her, leave Dylan here. I wanna talk to you for a minute. And he he walks her outside, and he says, Nancy, you gotta stop doing this. And she says, why are you calling me Nancy John? He says, why are you calling me John? And he walks a little further out of frame, and he turns back around, and he’s back in the costume from the first movie, his his cop costume.  Same thing happens here, and it’s at this moment that she realizes, now I have to make the choice. Am I gonna do this, or am I not

Todd:  gonna do it? Yep. And she has no recourse. This guy is not gonna help her.

Craig:  Right. Yeah. And meanwhile, in Dylan’s bedroom, you see Freddie coming up under the sheet, very reminiscent of the latex special effect in the first movie. He’s coming up. It’s really, you know, spooky. And she the dad says, I love you, Nancy. And she kinda takes a breath and says, I love you too, daddy. And that’s when Freddie pops you know, rips out and comes through the sheet, and he’s now in the real world.  And, the camera kinda spins around, and we see that Heather is now Nancy again. She’s in her pajamas from the finale of the first movie. Funnily enough, she and John Saxon both are wearing the exact same clothes, not replicas of the clothes from the first movie, the exact costumes. Somebody had kept them, and they got them back and were wearing the exact same ones from 10

Todd:  years previous. Word.

Craig:  And this is where the finale happens. She goes in. Dylan’s nowhere to be found. She kinda hears Freddie laughing and saying, almost there, as he’s been saying throughout. But earlier in the movie, she had been reading Hansel and Gretel to Dylan, and she was kind of disturbed by how dark and scary it was. But he made her finish it so that they could talk about how they found their way home, and it was breadcrumbs. So she notices one of his sleeping pills on the ground and realizes that he’s leaving her breadcrumbs to find him. And they lead to his bed, and she looks under the sheet.  Nothing there. And then she realizes, oh, I I gotta be asleep. He’s left me these so that I can join him. She takes the pills. She goes back under the blanket, and then there’s that tunnel again. And she goes she starts sliding down it. At first, it’s kinda like sheets, like, tented sheets, and then it turns into, like, the vents from the, the the boiler room, and then there’s water and roots and all kinds of stuff in there. And this is when things get huge.  I mean, it it goes to a scale that none of the movies had gone to before. She at the end of the tunnel, she comes out of this huge enormous Freddy head. She comes out of his mouth and plummets, you know, what looks like stories down into this pool. And now we are in, like, this underworld. It kinda looks like a devastated ancient city or something.

Todd:  Yeah.

Craig:  And it’s basically the set from the first part of the movie just on a much more epic scale.

Clip:  Mhmm.

Craig:  And this is where the final, showdown takes place.

Todd:  And the set’s very rare. I mean, it’s like ancient Greece. It’s like we’re really going back to what many would you know, what at least iconically is sort of considered the dawn of storytelling. Right? Right. And so, and on the walls are words carved in the stone like anger and lust and all these elements that go into making drama. So it really is like she’s coming into this world that is representative of the root of storytelling. And that’s where they’re battling it out. It’s such a great idea.  And there, Freddie is not as supernatural. He’s a little supernatural, Let’s put it that way, but he can be hurt. Mhmm. He can be kicked around. He doesn’t have quite the control over the environment. She they also have control over the environment to a certain extent. And so they’re, again, kind of on this playing field, this ancient area. And, there’s some chasing going on, and, she finds Dylan finally.

Craig:  And they find the script Yes. For the movie. And she’s kind of reading about, you know, things that are happening in the moment. And then Freddie pops back up, and he beats her up a little bit and throws her around. Again, you know, it would have been super easy for him to kill her, boom, like that. But he kinda toys with her, and he knocks her. Dylan stabs him in the leg to to get him away from his mom. And so then he throws her, like, in the pool, and, he chases Dylan around for a while.  And he chases Dylan into this, like, furnace, I guess, or an oven.

Todd:  You know, it’s interesting. It’s it’s like Hansel and Gretel. Right? Mhmm. But it’s also the boiler room. Right. It’s like a perfect combination of the 2. Right. It really works.  It’s a great, great way that he set this up.

Craig:  And it was totally foreshadowed earlier with the reading of Hansel and Gretel. Exactly. And it

Todd:  makes perfect sense. Exactly, and it goes right into that theme of these are ancient stories, this is what, so this is his bottle, this is the genie’s bottle and Freddy’s the genie. And so Dylan goes into the oven and he’s able to kind of go around the side of it because it’s an oven with the fire in the middle And that’s where he tries to hide as Freddy, who can’t quite get in the oven, reaches in and tries to grab him.

Craig:  And you’ve got that arm extension effect that they’ve used in the other movies. And, eventually, Heather wakes up, and she’s running to try to get to Dylan. And they do a throwback to that scene of her running up the stairs in her house in the first movie where the stairs turn into goo. The same thing happens here. But, eventually, she gets to him, and she stabs, Freddie, I think. And, she yells, Dylan, get out of there. Dylan kinda takes a side exit, I guess.

Todd:  Yeah. It’s kinda weak, isn’t it? There’s, like, a a hole, but there’s a oh, there’s

Craig:  a snake in it. Oh.

Todd:  Hope he can kick that snake out of the way.

Craig:  But he gets the snake out, and they push, Freddy in and close the doors. So he’s stuck in there, but he jumps up right behind the bars and shoots his tongue out, and it’s super long, and it starts wrapping around Heather’s face and neck. Again, it’s kind of a corny effect, but it’s in keeping. I mean, that’s and, again, it it plays with that kind of lascivious, you know, sexual undertone. Not only does it completely wrap around her face, but then you see that it’s also wrapping around her body underneath her clothes. Mhmm. Dylan comes around with a knife, grabs a Todd of the tongue. It’s kind of funny if the tongue’s, like, struggling.  He’s eventually able to stab it, and the tongue starts to retract back into Freddie’s mouth off of Heather. It eventually, you know, pulls away from the knife so that it’s forked.

Todd:  You know, it’s interesting also the iconography here. You know? Oh, the fork tongue. Got the forked tongue Right. In the in the fire, which then when they turn crank up the furnace, and he, explodes essentially. But he before that, he transforms into essentially a devil thing.

Craig:  Yeah.

Todd:  Yeah. Almost like the root of of of all, evil bad guys in the story.

Craig:  You know? So we kinda it’s really brief, but we kinda get a glimpse of that evil thing that he really is when he’s not in Freddy form.

Todd:  Yeah. Like, arguably, like the first story, Adam and Eve Yeah. The devil, the horse, tongue, serpent. You know? It’s it’s just he’s another manifestation of all the bad characters in a bad story.

Craig:  Yeah. Absolutely. And it makes sense and it, you know, it’s it’s it’s cool. It’s an interesting concept. He blows up. Again, you know, it’s it’s super fitting. Death by Fire, just like Mhmm. You know, in the the original way that the man, Fred Kruger, died, the original way that Heather killed him or Nancy, I guess, rather, in the first movie.  And Dylan and and Heather run, and they jump back into that pool that she initially landed in. Everything. The whole world goes up in flames. The whole supernatural world goes up in flames, and, Dylan and Heather come tumbling out of the foot of Dylan’s bed. And there’s smoke. She looks under the sheets. There’s smoke, but everything else is gone. And Dylan says, the witch is dead.  And they and they,

Todd:  see a there’s a script laying there. It was the script from the Yep. From the world, I guess,

Craig:  that Mhmm.

Todd:  Carried through with them. And she picks it up and flips to the end and can see

Craig:  Well, there’s there’s a note on the front, Like, a Post it note that says, Heather, thank you for having the courage to play Nancy one last time, Wes. Yeah. And so she flips to the back, and, like, you see the the note in the script, and you see what’s gonna happen. It says Dylan says, is it a story? And she says, yeah. And he and you’re seeing all this on the page as they’re saying it. Read me some. And she flips back to the front and starts reading him the scripts

Todd:  of the movie. And that’s it. As they pull out of his bedroom, which has, like, as you’re pulling out, it has, like, a castle there. Uh-huh.

Clip:  And then,

Todd:  you know, all these sort of fairy tale elements. And I feel like this is, this is Wes Craven’s statement about, again, parents who say that these movies are too scary, that these stories that children need to be shielded from this. What I think he’s saying here is no, children live in stories. They need to be told stories. Stories need to be kept alive. I mean, literally in the movie, if the story isn’t kept alive, evil comes out. Right? And this story that she had been shielding him from this whole time that everybody told her she needed to shield him from, she turns to the front and starts reading to

Clip:  him. Mhmm.

Todd:  You know? Like, that’s the way that we defeat the evil is by continuing to tell the story, and we need to tell stories to our children and not be afraid to do so. So.

Craig:  And I love that message. I just absolutely love it, and it’s such a great way to end the series. You know, Robert England, up until recently, has has made appearances at, you know, festivals and whatnot in his makeup. Sometime earlier this year, he said, I’m done. And he said, I’m gonna do one more. I’ll put the makeup on one more time. And you can understand why. It took 6 hours to apply every single time, so that could get old.  And so as of right now, it looks pretty unlikely that we’re gonna be seeing a Robert England Freddy movie again. And while that’s a little bit sad because I love them so much, I really do feel like this really caps off the series really well. You’ve got Freddy versus Jason, but that’s kind of its own standalone thing. I mean, this really bookends the the true series

Todd:  Oh, yeah.

Craig:  So well.

Todd:  It’s the fitting end to it. And and, again, in typical Wes Craven style, I mean, he was an English teacher or professor. Right? I think. I mean, the guy knows what he’s doing, and he pulls from strong literary sources. He’s a fantastic writer. He knew how to make this how to redeem everything and kinda bring it back around and and encapsulate it.

Craig:  Well, and take advantage of it too. You know, take advantage of the way that things had turned out. You just you acknowledge it and you work with it. And it almost you know, it seems like it was meant to play out that way. Like, we wouldn’t have gotten this movie if the other movies hadn’t devolved into something else.

Todd:  Yeah. Because it comments on that whole thing. Mhmm. Now there was a reboot. Right? A remake? A remake. It was terrible. One? Okay. I don’t

Craig:  know. I wouldn’t even tell you to watch it.

Todd:  Oh, I never. Even the completest in me was like, I really don’t even wanna see this.

Craig:  It was awful. I mean, they didn’t do anything innovating. You know, it’s they just tried to retell the same story, almost shot for shot. They focused up a little bit more on the molestation part, and they Freddie was all CGI, and it just doesn’t work.

Clip:  Oh, really?

Craig:  Yeah. I mean, like I mean, Jackie Earle Haley, the actor played him, but they did all CGI on his face. And it it looks fake. It looks like a video game, and it’s not scary. I did not like it at all.

Todd:  Okay. Fair enough. So hopefully, that’s the end of that.

Craig:  Hopefully I will enjoy it. You know that they’ll remake it again at some point. It’s just too valuable of a property to just let go. It’s gonna it’s gonna

Todd:  make money.

Craig:  Yeah. Maybe not huge blockbuster money, but it’ll bring in people because there are so many fans.

Todd:  Well and regardless, Freddy’s Place is pretty much forever cement along with Frankenstein and Dracula Yeah. In in cinema. Way more so, I think, personally than, like, Jason and and many of those other characters.

Craig:  He’s more

Todd:  interesting. More there.

Clip:  Yeah.

Todd:  Mhmm. Just so much meatier. Well, thank you again for listening to 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. If you like us on Facebook and leave us a comment, maybe we can have a little conversation. Yeah. You can tell us what you think and suggest other movies for us to see. Until then, I’m Todd, and I’m Craig with 2 Guys and a Chainsaw.