Beauty vs Beast: The Dream Team
Monday, October 6, 2014 at 2:17PM JA from MNPP here, gleeful to say tis the season for spooky shenanigans, aka my favorite time of year - the trees are turning, the Moon is creeping out earlier every day, and the shelves of the local drugstores are stuffed with those beastly orange and purple Peeps - Happy Halloween-time, everybody! Y'all ought to know by now I'll take any chance I can to cram horror up in here, so here's the deal: we're gonna spend the next few ocassions leading up to The Big Night using our weekly "Beauty vs Beast" poll to face off some of our favorite Final Girls and the Big Bad Nasties they've faced off with.
This week we're getting the ball rolling with Wes Craven's classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, which celebrates it's 30th anniversary next month, to give you the choice between the police chief's haunted daughter Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and the man in the tattered fedora slicing and dicing up everybody's dreams, ol' Fred Krueger (Robert Englund)...
You have only seven days to sleep on your decision, so be wise about it, and do try to wake up in time. (And as an aside, a happy birthday to Jsu Garcia, who played Rod in the movie and gave my teenage self a real appreciation for the art of rocking tighty-whities.)
PREVIOUSLY Last week we shook and shimmied our business across the high and low-end stages of Las Vegas, attempting to answer one of life's most existential quandary: is it weird not having anybody cum on ya? No, not that. I mean Stardust or Cheetah, of course. In a battle of Showgirls' veteran diva versus the hard-knocks ingenue... we went Diva, natch. Cristal levitated above the competition with 67% of the vote. Said brookesboy:
"Gina Gershon is an actress of such uncanny resourcefulness she can find inspiration from a fried chicken leg or, here, drugstore nail polish. Gotta go with Cristal (trashiest spelling EVAH!)."
Reader Comments (9)
I hate Nancy. Such a dull final girl and Heather is a terrible actress. Give me Laurie Strode or Sidney Prescott any day.
Aw, no way. Nancy, aka Heather Langenkamp, is great! Not particularly a shining thespian but a charming and sincere one. Rooted for her all the way. Mopey Sidney Prescott, aka Neve Campbell, now there's a lousy actress for you. Totally one-note all the way.
I liked that she was able to poke fun at herself in NEW NIGHTMARE... that was a surprisingly fun and fresh entry in an otherwise stale saga.
How can any of you vote against Freddy?
Love Nancy, but Freddy contains multitudes
Also, Nancy and Sidney Prescott are both great
Rob: Agreed. Neve Campbell is not horribly performed, but is kind of one note. (Also: Halloween over Elm Street has always baffled me, ESPECIALLY on the concept of a "franchise" level. Chucky had the growth toward meta commentary and self deprecation after film three and is more a labour of love for Dourif and the creator at this point, Jason Voorhees eventually became a weird kind of zombie and had some arguably really cool off the rails stuff eventually happen (Jason Goes to Hell, anyone?) and Freddy had the potential idea of manipulating dreams to possibly justify sustaining a franchise for more than two-three films without becoming completely boring on, at the very least, an aesthetic level, but I NEVER bought that Michael Myers needed more than three films to cover every possible avenue of aesthetic and narrative exploration with his concept, so how he could get seven films in his original series baffles.)
David: Haven't seen New Nightmare, but seems like one of those movies that should at least be seen for what it attempts, whether or not you think it succeeds.
New Nightmare is Wes Craven's Nightmare 2 idea crossed with a remake of Nightmare 5.
Volvagia: agreeance on the tedium of the Halloween series. They shoulda stopped after the second one. The rest are really dire. (We'll leave #3 out of this as it was a non-MM entry). For me the best of the 3 series is easily ANOES.
That said, A New Nightmare is highly overrated, I feel, including by its creator (even while watching it you can tell Craven is thinking like, wow, I am so brilliantly awesome). Don't get me wrong, it's definitely worth seeing, and there are some real jolts in it, but there are problems as well. Such as: the TV movie lighting that saps away any atmosphere, there's that competent-but-annoying child actor, and several silly, very non-scary scenes such as the one on the freeway. That stuff does tends to hamper things. But! it also has a lot of ideas, and in that it gets a major pass. Too many horror films, esp. sequels, have no ideas whatsoever.
I was a junior in high school when the original was released, and my Psychology class was thisclose to seeing this movie as a class field trip.
And then the parents figured out it was a slasher flick, and vetoed it. And that's why I am not a Pscyholgist now.