Robert Englund

  • Night Terrors (1993)

    Night Terrors (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) The downfall of writer-director Tobe Hooper remains one of the sad stories of horror filmmaking (“drugs” are often mentioned as a contributing factor), and you can take a look at featureless films such as Night Terrors to show how quickly he fell off the map after his early successes. Nominally a horror film in which a woman is swept up into a cult led by a descendant of the Marquis de Sade, the result can never quite find its footing despite decent production values and concepts that could have led to more. Setting the film in the Middle East doesn’t add as much as you’d think, and the parallel historical timelines don’t lead anywhere. Robert Englund in the lead role(s) doesn’t have much to do (Sade ends up feeling like a pretentious emo guy rather than a force for erotic horror), and the lighthearted touch shown by Hooper in earlier projects is nowhere to be found. The result is an intensely generic and forgettable 1990s horror film that barely deserves any discussion except as one of many illustrations of how far Hooper had fallen.

  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

    A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2016) I was about to watch the 2010 remake of Nightmare on Elm Street without paying homage to the 1984 original … but then common sense came back to me and I had to take a look at it. Despite the film’s flaws, I’m glad I did, because this original Nightmare has a few things that weren’t captured by the remake. Probably the most significant of them is the eerie horror of the film’s dreamlike logic: Freddy’s first confrontation alone has more disturbing imagery than the entire remake, and the roughness of the film’s execution often highlights the disarming surrealism of writer/director Wes Craven’s vision. It’s this nervous energy that runs through Nightmare on Elm Street and makes it far more memorable than many slasher horror movies of the time. In other aspects, the film doesn’t fare as well: The acting isn’t particularly good (Heather Langenkamp is disappointing as the lead, and Johnny Depp does not impress in his big-screen debut), the pacing stops and goes, the cinematography is recognizably low-budget. And that’s without mentioning the somewhat unsatisfying ending, which just throws reality and nightmares in the same dumpster, then sets fire to everything and runs around laughing. Meh. It’s worth noting, from a perspective thirty years later, that Freddy’s character in this inaugural film, even played by Robert Englund, isn’t the wisecracking chatterbox of latter films: he largely remains this implacable threat and that further distinguishes this film from latter sequels and remakes. While this original Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t, strictly speaking, an exceptional movie or even a particularly good horror movie, it does have, even today, something more than other horror movies of the time. No wonder it still endures.

  • Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

    Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2016) Watching this movie without much knowledge or affection for either the Friday the 13th or the Nightmare on Elm Street series had me feeling as if I was attending a very strange party to which I hadn’t been invited. The concept of horror villain fandom baffles me—I had the impression that Freddy vs Jason was trying to get me to cheer for one mass murderers of children or another, which just seems wrong. It doesn’t help that Freddy vs Jason is, in most aspects, a thoroughly forgettable slasher: Here are a bunch of teenagers, there are the monsters, watch as they get picked off one by one until the final girl. Yawn. The film’s sole distinction is the amount of worship that Freddy vs Jason has for either Freddy Krueger (cackling one-liners) or Jason Voorhees (silent brute), which doesn’t translate into anything meaningful. Again: I’d like a horror movie that doesn’t make me feel like a psychopath, please. Some aspects of the film warrant mention due to imperfection: the CGI effects, in particular, look fake and dated. Some of Ronny Yu’s direction has some high-energy moments (with Robert Englund clearly having fun in a familiar role), even though the Crystal Lake third act feels far too long for its own good. I almost certainly could have gotten more out of Freddy vs Jason had I watched the interminable series that inspired it. But frankly, I have better things to do.