Coin-Op Review: 'Devil World' (1987)

It's a lot like Gauntlet ... except way, way shittier.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

It being Halloween and all, I figure now is a most opportune time to revisit an obscure, somewhat horror-themed arcade game, ain't it? Unfortunately, I picked Konami's Devil World at random and boy, did I get hosed. 

Also known as Maju no Okoku, Devil World is a game that doesn't even attempt to mask the fact it's ripping off a much better game. This is just a shameless, brazen swipe of Gauntlet, except inferior in just about every way you can think of. The graphics, the audio, the controls, the character design, the pace, the structure, hell, I'm pretty sure all the joysticks on the Devil World cabinets are stickier, too. It's a bad, bad game from one of the greatest developers in video game history, which is even more confounding because it was arguably right around their creative apex as designers; so, if nothing else, I guess we can't say it's not noteworthy for somethin'.

Now, this is the Japanese/European version of the game we're talking about here. The game was ported to U.S. arcades under an entirely different name, Dark Adventure, and it was WAY different. I mean, the levels were pretty much the same and the sprites didn't change, but the core gameplay was completely revamped. But yeah, we'll save the comparin' and contrastin' for the tail end of the article; for the time being, let's just dissect Devil World for what it is - and isn't - why don't we?

Alright, this here is a two-player game. You can either play as this Indiana Jones wannabe named Condor or some bitch in a pink dress named Labryna (pronounced "luh-brine-ugh," as the game's disembodied announcer will remind you over and over again.) Condor has a handgun, and Labryna is armed with a crossbow; beyond that, though, they play practically identically. 

Time for the prologue. Condor opens a tomb, a ghost jumps out and he and Labryna get sucked into the titular Devil World (not to be confused with Nintendo's entirely different Devil World, which was a Pac-Man clone about a crucifix-collecting dinosaur.) 

So here's the gist of the gameplay: seriously, it's fucking Gauntlet. You walk around, all these enemies try to kill you, you collect power ups, you fight bosses in dungeons and that's it. We begin the game in a green field, littered with stone pillars all over the place, with all these treasure chests made out of bones everywhere. So you kill the enemies (mostly, a bunch of green Minotaur guys and giant mud Golems) and you collect orbs, which are kinda' like the hearts in Castlevania because instead of healing you they just allow you to use your current weapon longer. Now, even though you start off with a crossbow or a gun, you can upgrade to more powerful weapons, including machine guns, flamethrowers, laser cannons and bazookas, plus you can pick up some secondary weapons like dynamite. The really weird thing is that you get to keep all five weapon types as you progress through the game, and every time you grab a power orb you get to quickly select which item you want to give more juice to. Of course, in the heat of battle you really don't have time to collect your wits and make a snap judgement on which weapon you want to re-up, so generally, you just wind up refueling your current weapon and don't even bother trying to ration anything.

But wait, I know you're thinking: how do you heal your character? Well, thankfully, plenty of power-up Coca-Cola cans are all over the place, so you're never really in that much jeopardy at any point in the game. And that's the perfect segue to my favorite thing about this otherwise shitty, shitty game: the announcer. Yes, this game features a really, really warbled voice doing play-by-play commentary for the entirety of the game. Even better, the audio stitching is absurdly delayed, so you'll have commentary strings that sound like this: "La-Brine-Ugh ... is given ... (literally a six second delay right here) ... food." It's probably the goddamn funniest thing I've ever heard in my life, and it's pretty much the *only* reason to even think about fishing this turd out of the .ROM folders.

So you get the key, you unlock the crypt doorknob, and that whisks you away to level two. It's another green field, with more bone chests and more Minotaurs (that are blue now.) Awesomely, using the flamethrower sets parts of the foreground on fire, and it stays on fire for a long time. But beyond that - eh, there's not really a whole lot to talk about here. You enter another crypt, and the screen urges you to "MOVE TO EYBENS." 

Yep, it's ANOTHER green field, with rock barricades and green elves lobbing hatchets at you. There's also a new enemy, these living trees that grab you and WILL NOT let you go for any reason ever. No, seriously, if you get caught in their clutches, they just hold on to you until you die, no matter how many times you hit the fire button, so be SUPER careful around these fucks. Even worse, you have to hit them about a billion times before they die, so these things are a strong candidate for most annoying enemy in any game ever - yes, even more annoying than that fucking eggplant motherfucker in Kid Icarus. Anyhoo, you keep doing the same thing you've been doing and eventually you find a shield, and then the screen tells you "MOVE TO DRAGON" and you have a boss fight against a two-headed dragon in a walled off, Zelda-esque room. Thankfully, it ain't too hard to kill, and that's our prompt to "MOVE TO NICOLIA."

Yes, it's the SAME backdrop as before - a lot of grass and rocks and shit. The Minotaurs are now grey and there are some trees (of the non-living variety) acting as foreground obstacles. You cross a rope bridge, kill some more Minotaurs and the announcer reminds you "key unlocks .... (literal five second pause) ... exit," just like he was Stevie from Malcolm in the Middle. So you get the key, you enter the crypt, and we "MOVE TO JOPLIN." Wait, like the city in Missouri?

Anyway, it's EXACTLY the same as the last four stages, so I don't know why I'm even bothering doing play-by-play anymore. The big difference here? The Minotaurs are red, and that's basically it. Then the game compels us to "MOVE TO KALAMAZOO." OK, now these people are just fucking with us now...

This is pretty much the entire game. Except without getting to experience the really, really shitty controls.

But hey, at least it gives us a new landscape! We're now inside a volcano, complete with chunks of molten lava balls flying everywhere. I guess now is a good time to let you know the music loops over and over, and periodically it just cuts off altogether for about a minute at a time. Then you fight ANOTHER two-headed dragon that looks just like the last two-headed dragon boss, and then you start wondering what the fuck you're doing with your life. 

Alright, so you find another key, unlock another crypt and we "MOVE TO PACIFICA." It's still in a volcano. You shoot bats, and you do some platforming across some moving rocks (PS: the jumping mechanics in this game are dog shit, so be prepared to overjump/underjump everything at least three or four times before you finally figure out just how much English you have to spin on it.) And also, the lava in these kinds of games always reminds me of lasagna, but asides. 

"MOVE TO KELARGO." You mean, like Key Largo? Eh, fuck this game's sense of humor. More bone boxes, and you have to deal with some new rat enemies. "MOVE TO LAROUX." Now you're on a rocky ledge, water is everywhere, bats are still chasing after you and what do you know, the stage concludes with yet another two-headed dragon boss fight, because fuck this game, that's why. 

"MOVE TO METROPOLIS" (and also, a lawsuit from D.C. Comics, if you keep it up.) Now we're inside a castle court, littered with blue Minotaurs, (non-living) tree obstacles, and more bone-boxes. Well, this game is shit to play, but at least it's fairly easy to describe. The castle here is actually pretty spacious - a nice-sized labyrinth, really. I got another really great announcer quip, too. "There is no escape, without ... (five second delay) ... a key."

"MOVE TO ESSES." The floor is green, the barriers are purple, some skeletons show up and so do some giant spiders. More bone boxes get broken, then we "MOVE TO ZARGOT." Time for more lava platforming, except now, each tile bounces up and down like a trampoline (you know, 'cause the jumping physics in this game weren't already screwy enough.) And after that, OF COURSE there's another fucking bi-headed dragon fight.

Now we "MOVE TO VEDA." The floating platforms are red, and you kill some spiders. "MOVE TO ENID." Now sentient maces attack you! Well, it's an original idea for an enemy, I'll give them that, at least.

And after that, we "MOVE TO BUNDRA," which thankfully, is the game's final stage. The floor is grey and these columns keep falling down in front of you. Then these giant rock monsters with six arms start shooting fireballs at you and the announcer yells "SPEED UP!" because you ain't killing them fast enough. The final boss fight is against this giant blue demon in a loincloth with Ronald McDonald's hairdo. "My friend will teach you a lesson!" the announcer warbles as these blinking blue Minotaurs start coming after you.

So they chase you around for a bit. There are no other props or obstacles in the room. After you kill them you get to finally go one-on-one with the end boss. Shoot him enough times, he turns into a statue and crumbles apart. The floor blinks red, you turn white and are transported on top of the Statue of Liberty, for whatever reason. And then the game concludes by giving you this grammatically correct message that still doesn't make a damn lick of sense:

So, uh, is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?

Apparently, there's also a "bad ending" you can get where your character winds up stuck on a raft in the middle of an ocean instead, but like I'm going to squander an afternoon replaying this one anytime soon. So back to Dark Adventure (a.k.a, the "Americanized" version of the game.) Aesthetically and structurally it's the same thing as Devil World, but with some MAJOR gameplay alterations. For starters, instead of being a projectile based game, it becomes a melee weapon based game. Condor's pistol gets swapped out for a whip, that one bitch's crossbow is traded for a sword, and there's a third playable character not included in the Japanese/European iteration named Zorlock who looks like a British professor and has a spear. And like in Castlevania, you can upgrade your weapon to increase its range (complete with the announcer quipping "Condor, your whip is longer") and there are a couple of sub-weapons littering the playing space, too. But beyond that, the game are pretty much one and the same. And in case you are wondering, the audio stitching in Dark Adventure is WAY better than in Demon World, even though the commentary remains hilariously garbled (albeit, without the insanely long pauses anymore.)

So, is there any reason to experience this game? Eh, not really, unless you want to see how a company can make one really great arcade horror game one year and then turn around and trot out a colossal coin-op clump of crap during the same 365-day window. It's hardly anything more than a subpar Gauntlet wannabe, and you're way better off playing stuff like Smash TV or Total Chaos or ESPECIALLY Mercs instead. Yes it's obscure and it's quirky and it's way off the beaten path, but none of those "qualities" make Devil World worth a shit; all in all, this is just a bad game, plain and simple, and it ain't worth wastin' anybody's time.

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Book Review - 'It' by Stephen King (1986)

Just in time for the new movie, how about we take a look back at the 30-year-old, thousand page-plus tome that inspired it? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know how it happened, but revisiting a huge-assed literary horror classic of yore has become a de facto Halloween rite here at The Internet Is In America, and since there's that newfangled It movie coming out in theaters, I reckon it was a most opportune time to give you folks my thoughts on - what else? - the original 1986 Stephen King novel. 

People use the term "cinder block" to describe lengthy books all the time, but fuck it, this thing really is a cinder block. The paperback version is roughly the same width as a tissue box and about as heavy as an honest to goodness brick. The one I checked out was more than 1,200 pages long, and since it was used it also smelled like someone pissed on it and then blew menthol cigarette smoke all over it to ward off evil spirits. So yeah, it's not exactly what you would call a quick read - in fact, it'll probably take you a couple of months to churn through everything, even if you do skim most of the motherfucker. 

So, in the proud tradition of Cliffs Notes, here's the official Jimbo X abridged readers guide to Stephen King's It ... please, do enjoy. 

Alright, so it's 1957 in Derry, Maine. It's raining like a motherfucker and it reminds the narrator of the floods from 20 years ago, and this one dude who got swept 25 miles downstream and got his penis eaten off by fish. So Stuttering Bill and Georgie are making a paper boat and arguing about which one of them has the "brownest a-hole." Georgie takes the boat outside, it goes into the sewers and enter Bob Gray, a.k.a. Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who makes Georgie smell all sorts of circus scents (peanuts, cotton candy, animal turds, etc.) in the storm drain. Then the clown rips the kid's arm off and he dies. 

Flash forward to 1984. These three kids confess to killing a gay dude because he won a paper hat at the fair. The youngest kid says there was a clown in the canal at the time of the homicide, and wouldn't you know it, the cop is the brother of the boy who found Georgie's body a quarter century ago. There's some exposition about a gay bar in town and graffiti reading "stick nails in eyes of all fagots (for god)" and the surviving victim says he also saw a clown in the canal, with thousands of balloons in his hand. His boyfriend was apparently stabbed in the lung and testicles and a big chunk was taken out of his armpit. The detective coaches the witness to NOT bring up the clown during the trial and one of the kids gets sent to Shawshank (yep, that one) on manslaughter charges, even though all three kids wind up walking free on appeal. 

Cut to Atlanta, where we join this really rich Jewish couple doing Jewish things, like kvetching about country club policies and watching Family Feud. The husband gets a mysterious phone call and slits his wrist in the bath tub, writing the word IT on the tiles in his own blood. 

Then we meet Rich Tozier, this DJ in L.A. deemed "the man of a thousand voices." He reflects on getting chased by the local bully, Henry Bowers, when he was a kid. He tells his producer he has to stay in Derry because he made a promise to his friends when he was ten to come back if ... well, something happened. He returns to his childhood home. He takes out some hidden money, thinks about Georgie being killed and pukes in a toilet. 

Next we're introduced to Ben Hanscomb. He's a world famous architect, and he's really distraught over something in a bar in Omaha. He drops some lemon juice in his nostrils to do some huge shots of wild turkey. He tells the bartender he used to be fat as a kid and shows him an "H"-shaped scar carved in his chest by Bowers and his gang and then he drives off drunk into the night.

Now we meet Eddie Kaspbrak. He lives in Long Island and he's packing a ton of prescription drugs in his overnight bag and needs a shot from his asthma inhaler. His wife is fat and overbearing, just like his mama. He reflects on this one time his mom yelled at the gym coach in elementary school and embarrassed the shit out of him. His wife (who easily outweighs him by 100 pounds) wants him to stay and tries to coax him with food but he tells her she has to drive Al Pacino (yes, that Al Pacino - he owns some kind of limo service) and he thinks about all the times his mom complained about the Jew York Times and warned him about taking foot X-rays in the shoe store.  

Beverly Marsh is our next character. She's a fashion designer living in Chicago with an alcoholic White Sox fan named Tom Rogan who beats the shit out of her for smoking too much and describes her vagina as "an exquisite oil," and seeing her pummled face with makeup running down it makes him hard. She gets a call from Mike Hanlan (we'll get to him in just a bit) about it returning. She immediately packs her bags and gets into a belt-and-mirror-shard-fight with her husband. She escapes penniless and makes her way toward Derry.

And here's Bill Denbrough, the brother of the kid who got his arm ripped off at the beginning of the novel. He's now a rich as fuck horror writer living in the U.K. with a chain-smoking actress. He talks about his college professor failing him and then sending a story off to get published in some pulp mag. Basically, he wrote a book about his dead brother's fear of a monster in the basement, but he isn't canonically cognizant of such. Hanlan rings him up and he tells his wife about Derry and his dead brother and uh-oh, he starts stuttering again.

Now we catch up with Mike Hanlan, the local librarian in Derry, who is writing an unauthorized town history book subtitled A Look Through Hell's Backdoor (also, he's black - trust me, this will be very, very important a little later on in the book.) After rambling about a turtle for a couple of pages, he lays out his thesis that every 27 years, some majorly bad shit happens in town, and after finding out about the clown sighting in the gay murder case in tandem with a couple of child murders happening over the last few years, he thinks ... well, something is up. "Derry always had shitty luck," the book-within-a-book tells us. Entire settlements of villagers disappeared, this one time a guy ate mushrooms and killed his entire family, Chris Benoit-style, another time another dude went nuts and started nailing dudes' dicks to cabin walls, etc. Oh, and then there was that one Easter egg hunt explosion where 82 children got blown to kingdom come, and they were still finding kindergartner guts in the maple trees three weeks later. The murder rate is six times the New England average, Hanlan says, and how peculiar it is that missing children cases have spiked all of a sudden ... 

We return to Ben, who's on a midnight flight from Omaha to Maine. He falls asleep and has a dream about being in the fifth grade back in 1958. It's the last day of school and he's in love with Beverly, but he's fat and has to wear baggy sweaters because all the other kids make fun of his he-titties. He recounts this one time he stole beer and soda from some kids playing baseball, cashed it in and used to buy candy and then goes on a spiel about how that fat dude from Highway Patrol was his role model. Then he reflects on hiding in the library to avoid getting beat up by Bowers' gang, then he starts thinking about all those child murders leading to a citywide curfew. He recounts a dream about seeing a clown in a vacant field and writing a love haiku to Beverly, but en route to deliver it the bullies caught him and tried to carve their names into his stomach. He escapes and sends Bowers flying down an embankment, kicking him in the balls for good measure. He hides in a sandy pit while the bullies continue pursuit. Then he starts thinking about a mummy-clown chasing him in the winter. He wakes up and sees Bill and another kid almost having a nearly fatal asthma attack while receiving yet another beating from the Bowers' crew. 

Then we flip on over to Bill on a Concord, sitting next to a fat guy who keeps elbowing him. He thinks about his old bike and ridding to the store to get his pal Eddie's inhaler medicine while Ben stayed with him (see, it's carrying over from Ben's dream - try to pay close attention, will 'ya?) So Bill gets the medicine (later, we learn it's just water) and he makes Eddie and Ben laugh by doing an impersonation of Bowers without stuttering once. He also advises Eddie to buy chocolate milk and spill it on himself so his near-sided mom won't know he got beat up. Bill goes him and he flips through an old photo book of Georgie. One of the pics winks back at him and blood starts pouring out of it. Then the narrator tells us about this guy named Richard Macklin being charged with beating his stepson to death with a hammer and how his older brother went missing and his body was never recovered. Anyway, Macklin eventually committed suicide. Then there's this passage about this other missing kid named Eddie (but not that Eddie) who was attacked by his dead brother's zombie ... who then turned into the fuckin' Creature from the Black Lagoon and killed him.

Back to Hanlan. He says he fond the bloody pocket knife of the kid who got killed by the Creature by the canal. He reflects on this one time his dad made him sit in a "torture chair" meant to punish vagrants, and this one time a giant bird attacked him in the abandoned iron works. 

Now we through it to the still living Eddie. He's driving through Boston to Derry, thinking about Ben's silver dollars. He has a flashback to the gang completing a dam back in the day and Bill freaking everybody out with his tales of the bloody picture book. Then he talks about his mom's rank lobster salad farts and this one time a syphilitic hobo chased him and tried to suck his dick for a dime. Then Ben and Eddie recount different instances of getting chased by mummy-clown-lepers, and then an Irish cop makes them take down the dam and then they all take bets on whether or not Neil Sedaka is a negro. The kids go into Georgie's room and find the photo book. Some pictures taken in the 1920s come alive and Richie has his hand slashed by something when he tries to touch a moving picture. Bev, Rich and Ben then go see I Was a Teenage Werewolf and get into a fight with Bowers' gang. Ben hits Henry with a trash can shot like Haystacks Calhoun while Rich talks to Ben using a stereotypical slave's voice. Bill and Rich then travle to an abandoned house and crawl under the porch with a slingshot and a real pistol and find this one room filled with coal. Then the kids are attacked by a shadowy monster in a Derry High letterman's jacket, which turns into the werewolf from the movie they watched earlier. Bill blows its skull off with the pistol then Richie scares it by doing an impersonation of the Irish cop and throwing sneezing powder at it ... which, for whatever reason, fucks the wolf up more than the bullet wound. Then it turns into the clown, chases them on their bikes and the boy narrowly escape certain death.

Now we turn to Bev, sitting in a plane reflecting on getting money from one of her feminist writer friends. She thinks about going to Derry and recounts her love for Bill (who she thinks wrote her the haiku Ben sent here), then she remembers being a girl and hearing voices in the bathtub drain, which periodically erupted in blood geysers only she could see. She reminisces on this one time she and her friends bought frappes and shot pennies by the drug store and this one time a dude with a lisp called her mom a whore. All the other kids help her clean up the invisible blood in the bathroom, then Stan goes into an empty house and sees dead teens everywhere and he has to read the names of a bunch of birds to open a stuck door (yeah, don't try to make sense of any of this shit just quite yet.) Bev runs a tape measure down the bathtub drain, and when she pulls it out, yep, it's all bloody and staff.

Time for Mike's second dispatch. The date is Feb. 14 1985 (hey, Valentine's Day, what are the odds.) He talks about his dad experiencing racism in the Air Force and seeing a giant bird with balloons tied to its wings the night of a night club fire in the 1930s. Then he wakes up, sees balloons with his face on it and gets royally freaked the fuck out. 

Now we arrive at the reunion proper. The gang (they called themselves "The Losers") meet at a restaurant called Jade of the Orient to catch up. Ben talks about his coach grabbing his he-boobies as a catalyst for his weight loss and Mike says he learned about Stan's suicide because he subscribes to the newspapers in all of his friends' current cities of residence. Then Mike starts talking about nine recent child murders in town and Bill begins stuttering again. He says a hermit who drinks paint thinner was picked up by the cops as a suspect, but everybody at the table agrees that IT has returned. Mike says IT also made them successful, except for him, because he never moved. They talk about infertility and sperm donation and Rich does a Mr. T impersonation. Then their fortune cookies arrive and they all have icky stuff inside 'em, like blood, crickets and eyeballs. 

Then Ben goes back to the library and the clown calls him a fat little fuck and does a minstrel show impersonation, complete with copious use of the n-word. Then he turns into Dracula with literal razor blade teeth and shakes invisible blood all over the place. Next, Eddie walks around a baseball field and reminisces on the good old days, then the zombie of a kid killed in 1958 shows up wearing a moldy Yankees uniform. Then other zombie classmates rise out of the diamond and chase him (including that one leper from when he was kid.) He runs for a bit and passes out in town. Meanwhile, Bev visits her old apartment and an old lady showing her around turns into the witch from Hansel and Gretel, eats some cookies, drinks out of a cup with JFK's face on it and it fuckin' winks at her. Then her dad's spirit emerges and yammers on and on about how badly he wants to rape her. Then he turns into clown, shucks and jives and Bev narrowly escapes from his clutches. Elsewhere, Rich reflects on a giant Paul Bunyan statue and being chased through a toy store when he was a kid. He has hallucinations about the statue coming alive and trying to kill him, then he wakes up, walks around Derry, talks about Iron Maiden and The Crawling Eye, sees the marquee at a theater for the "All-Dead Rock Band" and the statue turns into Pennywise. He threatens to give Rich prostate cancer, and Rich scares him off by using - and this is a direct quote from the novel - "a jiveass nigger voice" and calling the clown "a white face bunghole." Then Bill talks to a Boy Scout eating popsicles in the sewer, finds an old bike in a second hand store, grills a few burgers and repairs his new ride (which he names Silver after his old childhood bicycle.)

So Henry Bowers is in the loony bin for killing his dad in 1958. He's also suspected of killing EVERYBODY back in 1958. The moon turns into Pennywise and tells him to go to Derry and kill all the surviving kids. He then gets whacked over the head by a guard with a roll of quarters and passes out. Then the ghost of his dead friend (who was killed by Frankenstein - more on that later) shows up at night and the ghost of an inmate's mother (who was cannibalized a couple of decades earlier) attacks him, then the clown shows up with a Doberman head and attacks a guard, facilitating his escape. Meanwhile, Tom Rogan finds Bev's feminist writer friend, calls her a "bra-burning bitch" and beats the shit out of her until she tells him where his runaway wife is. He hops aboard the first flight to Derry, buys a car out of the want ads, switches plates and gets a hotel beside Bill's wife, who is all worried about a union actress not doing a stunt for a film adaptation of one of her husband's movies.

So yeah ... this pretty much explains everything.

And that's our cue for another Hanlan dispatch. He talks to an old guy who was around when bank robbers came to Derry and pretty much the entire town came out to shoot the shit out of them ... including some guy in a clown suit who didn't cast a shadow, for some reason.

Time for another flashback to 1958. The Bowers family blames the Hanlan family for ruining their chicken business, so Henry feeds their pooch poisoned beef, calls him "a nigger dog," ties him up and watches him die. He goes back home and tells Daddy Bowers what he did and he gives him a beer for his efforts. Then Bill's dad tells him the sewer system blueprints in Derry were stolen so nobody really knows how to get out of there. The kids do some research and determine the clown is probably a manitou (or possibly a glamour, a tallus, an eylak or maybe even a loup garou.) Bill talks about the Himalayan "ritual of child," where a holy man tries to bite off a demon's tongue. We learn Bowers' dad got all fucked up in the war (presumably, World War II) and sleeps with a sword he said he took from a Jap but he really bought it in Hawaii. Then the Losers club goes to the dump to set off some fireworks and they run into a deaf guy who runs them off into the woods. Then the Bowers gang, armed with firecrackers, attack Mike. Bowers tells him he killed his dog so Mike calls him "a honky chickenshit bastard." Then he finds some coal and starts bombarding the gang until they retreat. Eventually, Mike makes it to a gravel pit where the Losers are hanging out and the ultimately hold off Bowers and company with an allied rock/firecracker strike.

Now we're back in 1985. Mike goes to get a beer out of a cooler and finds an 11-year-old Stanley's head waitin' for him in the deep freeze. It turns into the clown's head and balloons reading "Derry niggers get the bird" start pouring out of it. 

And that's a signal for a flashback to '58. Mike recounts his testicles getting goose pimples when he saw the clown at a parade and then he tells the other kids about seeing a giant bird that looked like something out of The Giant Claw. The kids break out the photo album again. They see a photo of a juggler they assume to be Pennywise in human form. Of course, the pictures start moving, and what do you know, there's the clown from a couple of photographs from the 1800s. He jumps out of the pics and changes form several times - a werewolf, a mummy, etc. - to scare the living shit out of the chilluns.

Alright, back to 1985 again. Richie says he is so giddy right now, it's like being on coke (and trust me - that's something Steve King knows plenty about.) Then he has a flashback to the "smoke hole" and starts crying about his eyes being on fire, and you guessed it, it's time to go back to 1958 once more. Bill tells the rest of the kids about this Indian smoke hole ceremony to drive out evil spirits or some shit like that and they all think it's just a dandy idea. So they start a bonfire under their clubhouse and the kids try to see who can stomach the most the smoke the longest. Whoever toughs it out the longest is supposed to have some kinda' prophetic vision. It comes down to Mike and Rich. They pass out and wake up in some kind of wasteland, where they see a spaceship that turns into IT. Bev revives both of them. Mike and Rich try to explain what they saw as some kind of immortal force that lived underground, but they just can't put into proper words.

And since everybody else in the damn story is having flashbacks, Eddie figures he might as well have one, too after he sees a bunch of balloons telling him asthma medicine causes lung cancer. He reflects on this one time the local druggist said his inhaler medication was just a placebo and he got attacked by Eddie. I mean, real fucked up - rocks were ground into his face, his arm got broken and he wound up in the hospital. There, he had visions of IT and his friends come and visit him after hours to tell them how good they're getting at slingshot practice. 

It's still 1958, if you're wondering. Bev is sneaking her way through a junkyard when she finds the Bowers gang lighting their own farts. Then Patrick Hockstetter tries to jerk off Henry, so he punches him and runs off so Pat can start beating off in front of a broken fridge. Well, needless to say, this Pat kid is a real crazy sumbitch, who thinks he is literally the only real thing in the universe. Oh, and his favorite afterschool activities include smothering his brother with a pillow and stealing pets and trapping them in old kitchen appliances until they die and masturbating to their pain. He opens the junky old refrigerator and he's attacked by flying leeches shaped like pom-poms that suck the blood out of his eyeballs. They drink so much of his plasma the narrator says they "explode like water balloons" (the explanation for all this, and really, 85 percent of the book: King's aforementioned coke addiction). Eventually, one of the leeches tries to latch on to Bev, but she wards it off with her slingshot. She later brings the rest of the Loser Club to the dump, where Pennywise has written a warning in blood. Bill freaks out and calls IT "a whore-maker" and the kids decide to share a group hug during the middle of a sudden hailstorm. 

Then the kids makes some silver bullets and crawl underneath the spooky ass Niebolt house again (it's where Rich used the sneezing powder and Irish cop accent on the werewolf earlier.) Ben sees a girlie mag and the woman on the cover winks at him and then little green elves attack everybody (remember - King's cocaine addiction is the answer to all of your questions) and IT turns into a werewolf again and Bev kills it with her slingshot. Then the kids wonder aloud where their supernatural powers are coming from, which is our cue to revisit the future of 1985.

Oh, the 1980s. Back when you could end your novel with an elementary schooler gangbang and nobody batted an eyelash.

Mike is drunk and writing about the Silver Dollar Lodge ax massacre of 1905. Yep, Pennywise was there, too. Mike conjectures IT eats kids because their childhood faith fuels him or some such mess. Then Rich cuts his hand on a brown beer bottle (why King stresses the bottle's color so much, I've no clue) and starts freaking out, and then Bev thinks about that one time her daddy chased her down the street for asking one too many questions about Pennywise, until to run straight into the clutches of the Bowers gang.

Flash forward to 1985. Mike gets attacked in the library by a switchblade-wielding Henry. He stabs Henry with a letter opener and tries to call the police, but Pennywise answers the phone and calls him "a nigger" and "a coon." 

Back to Bev as a child. She momentarily escapes from Bowers by kicking him in the balls.

Now back to Bev as an adult. She and Bill go to a town house and have S-E-X. You know, with their penises and vaginas and whatnot. 

Now we flashback to Ben hiding from the Bowers gang.

Now we flash-forward to Henry walking through an old seminary building, congratulating himself for (thinking) he greased Mike. 

FLASHBACK AGAIN to Henry reflecting on "Bob Gray" mailing him a switchblade, and the moon commanding him to stab his daddy in the neck with it.

FLASH-FORWARD AGAIN to Henry getting a ride from one of his dead childhood friends (his name is Belch, if you need it for bonus trivia/autism points) riding in a pimped out Plymouth Fury. He gives him Henry a sheet of paper with everybody's room number on it. Henry says he's sorry he ran off when Frankenstein killed him (I promise you, we're getting to that.) Then Belch, in the clown's voice, tells him to get 'em and disappears. Henry goes to Eddie's room, knocks on the door and prepares to stab him in the throat, but before we find out what happens ...

...we flashback once more. The kids talk about the diet discrepancies between Jews and Catholics and a story about a kid who supposedly shit Jesus blood in the Sunday School commode (gee, you think this Stephen King guy has some scatological issues he needs to work through?) and then we flash forward...

...Henry attacks Eddie, but Eddie dodges the blade and stabs Henry with a broken Perrier bottle in the stomach. Which means we have to - you guessed it - flashback again...

...to when the kids went to the barrens and had rocks thrown at them by the Bowers gang. The Losers run to the pumping station and individually go down the sewer pipes to evade their tormentors. Which is our cue to flash forward to...

...Tom having nightmares about killing his father and going into the sewers with the Bowers gang. He wakes up, sees a mysterious balloon and hears Pennywise's disembodied voice tell him - well, something. Then Audra - who is just a few doors down from Tom at the Derry DoubleTree - has a dream about being - has a dream about being 12-year-old Bev and starts hearing "we all float down here" coming out of the bathroom tub, then Pennywise shows up on the TV screen and starts splashing blood everywhere. She runs out of the hotel and - LOLOOPS - right into Tom Rogan.

Eddie calls up Bill and Bev and asks them what to do with Henry's body and the agree to not call the cops. Instead, they call the library and a cop answers and tells them Mike is seriously injured but still alive. They and Richie hop in Eddie's limo and Pennywise comes on the radio and starts playing a ghastly message from Georgie. They go to the barrens and find Audra's purse and decide to enter the sewers to find her.

Next, there's a passage that comes about as close as anything to describing what IT is and its motivations. Apparently it's been around since the beginning of all-time, alongside this "stupid turtle" that went into its shell years ago (yeah, I know that's abstract as fuck, but hold it in the back of your head - it's an important plot point to remember heading into the climax.) IT says humans are the best food because they have dreams and fears and stuff. But IT is also pissed the kids almost killed it and that was the first time IT ever felt pain and made IT think for the first time that maybe it wasn't alone in the universe. So now, naturally, IT wants revenge. 

Up next, the book does that thing where it keeps alternating between time lines, so for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to put the year beside the passage so you'll have a (slightly) easier time zigging and zagging your way through everything:

1958 - The kids go into the sewer and find Patrick Hockstetter's mutilated body. 

1985 - IT talks about the children's fears being the purest and the perils of shape-shifting. Then IT says it's going to send a nurse with a drug problem to kill MIKE in the E.R. The gang finds two of Bowers' friends' skeletons and Audra's wedding ring.

1958 - The kids are still exploring the sewers and get attacked by the monster from The Crawling Eye. Eddie, with a broken arm, fights off the monster by telling IT that his asthma inhaler is "battery acid, fuck-nuts!"Then the kids fight off a giant bird and come to a door with strange marking on it, surrounded by the bones of children. Each child interprets the mark as some other subconscious fear. Then they enter the lair of IT.

1985 - The Derry church bells, which usually ring at 5 a.m., don't chime. Heavy rains start coming down. A man gets electrocuted and a sewer back-up leads to women getting killed in exploding toilets, as a nurse with a needle full of something approaches Mike at the hospital. Bill encounters the evil ghost of Georgie and the other convince him to fight it off. Mike knocks the nurse out with a glass, and the rest of the kids (err, adults) see IT in its final form - a 15-foot tall spider pregnant with something so terrible, it made Stan kill himself on sight. 

1958 - Bill runs into a giant, trans-dimensional turtle described as having "galaxies" for toenails. He explains that his great cosmological purpose is to watch the universe while the great cosmological purpose of IT is to eat the universe, and that there is some other force in the "macro verse" he calls "dead lights" that created both of them. Then Bill tells the kids how to defeat IT with their mind, and they telepathically bring its web crashing down. Still, they wonder if IT is truly dead as they begin scurrying out of the sewer. 

1985 - IT grabs Bill. Rich sees Audra and Tom caught in its web. He starts using his voices to fuck with IT and he enters some sort of transdimensional arena. Eddie screams "shut up, ma!" and shoves his aspirator down IT's through and IT bites his fucking arm off and he dies. Meanwhile, Derry gets rocked by a hurricane as a drunk janitor sees blood and hair coming out of bar taps, an old Irish cop has a stroke and dies, the local shopping mall explodes and a doctor gets decapitated by a sewer lid. 

1958 - The kids can't find their way out of the sewer. All of a sudden, Bev takes her pants off asks which of the boys wants to take a crack at he first. Yeah, you read that right. 

1985 - Ben starts stomping on IT's spider eggs and Bev reflects on being abused by her daddy...

1958 - ...long story short, King spends the next five pages describing Bev getting gangbanged by the rest of the group, all while she thinks about birds and flying and shit. Also, Ben may have shot his sherbet during the ordeal, and they fact nobody thought this shit was utterly depraved and tried to get it banned from book stores - hell, the publishing company didn't even try to get King to excise the scene, for crying aloud - is all the proof you need that the eighties were indeed degenerate as all fuck. In case you were wondering, King has gone on record saying he "wasn't really thinking of the sexual aspect of it" when he penned the scene, adding that "times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to the issue." Yeah, whatever you say, President of NAMBLA, Maine Chapter. 

1985 - There's a flood sweeping through Derry as the kids kill IT by literally crawling through its stomach and punching its heart out. Meanwhile, the entire city collapses into a sinkhole. The Paul Bunyan statue collapses, the police chief is killed in a freak accident, etc. A photographer for the local newspaper takes a picture of the Losers as they emerge from the sinkhole and the caption simply reads "SURVIVORS" because I think that's ironic or something. 

In the postscript, Ben and Bev move in together in Omaha, Richie resumes his DJ career in L.A. and Mike is still having nightmares about IT not being over and journaling about it (alas, we never hear anything about Eddie's grieving family - kind of a big oversight there, ain't it, Mr. King?)Audra is catatonic, so Bill moves into what's left of Derry after the floods. He rides through town on his bike one more time and Audra wakes up with no memory of what happened. Then he says he might write about all this shit one day, and this book is finally over.

...so, uh, can somebody check on Big Steve to see if he hasn't become full blown retarded by now?

And there you have it, kids - all 1,200 pages of It condensed into about 5,000 words. All in all, it's a pretty enjoyable read and one of the more accessible King cinder blocks out there, and since there's no way any movie or TV mini-series can fit in all those minute details about children being gruesomely murdered by Universal Monsters characters and running trains on each other next to some subterranean dookie pipes, it's certainly a more unnerving undertaking, as well.

We'll see if the new movie is closer in spirit to the book than the 1990 mini-series - which, considering the MPAA's more relaxed regulations, would seem to suggest that it will be, even if it does swap out the 1950s setting for the Stranger Things-esque 1980s backdrop. It's a pretty safe bet we'll NEVER see a few things from the book in live action form, though, so reading the original novel is pretty much the only way you'll ever experience the undiluted affect of King's cocaine-fueled neurosis. 

Is It worth a read this Halloween season? Eh, as long as you're able to polish off 50 pages a night and don't mind lengthy passages describing discontinued candy and old episodes of Highway Patrol in absurd detail, it's not a bad way to churn through those sleepless autumn evenings. Maybe it ain't as good as American Psycho, but it's probably a bit more enjoyable than Hannibal - and it's sure as hell a better read than anything those overrated hacks Anne Rice and Clive Barker have ever shat out, so really, what do you got to lose here - well, besides about 10 to 20 hours of your free time and by proxy, your life - anyway?

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The ORIGINAL Script!

Had Wes Craven had his way, we could’ve ended up with a very, very different movie. Just how different, you may be wondering? Read on, Freddy fanatics…

I’m going to tell you kids something you already know: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors” is pretty fucking awesome. With all of the hilarious Freddy quips, inventive deaths, big name stars (Morpheus and Patricia Arquette among them!), rockin’ Dokken tunes and a screenplay that’s both energetic and spooky, not only do I consider “Elm Street 3” to be the best of the Freddy movies, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only Elm Street movie. It’s a film that struck a near-perfect balance between the series’ early, pure horror roots and its latter, self-parodying excesses; as such, it’s one of the most revered slasher flicks of the 1980s, and for very, very good reason.

That said, there’s something that’s always kinda’ peeved me about the film...or rather, the film’s poster. For one thing, the kids represented on the flyer don’t really look anything at all like the kids in the movie (where’s the platinum haired new wave rocker chick and the dude in a denim jacket swinging a mace, guys?), and then, there’s that little two-story ranch home near the bottom of the poster. See it just sitting there, being all ominous and spooky, all out in the woods and stuff? Sure, there’s a mechanic in the final film about a papier-mâché house that looks similar to that, but beyond that, the on-poster home has precious little to do with the film itself.

Now, I’m no cinema historian, but if I didn’t know any better, whoever designed the film’s poster looks like he or she based his or her work on the film’s original script. You kids know all about the original “Elm Street 3,” don’t you? You know, the one Wes Craven and pals ironed out sometime in 1986, with a totally different plotline, redesigned characters and totally different deaths and creep out sequences? Well, if not, perhaps its time I gave you fellows a look at what could’ve been, no?

Picture it: 1985. The second “Elm Street” movie had just been released, and it, for lack of a better term, sucked. An executive mandate for the first “Elm Street” movie pretty much wrested the series away from original director and Freddy creator Wes Craven, whom had nothing to do with part 2. Although the second film did make quite a bit of money, pretty much everybody and their mama knew it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the first flick (despite some hilariously blunt homoerotic overtones), so the guys at New Line Cinema said “you know what? How about we give Wes a call, and ask him if he wants to help out with part 3.”

While Wes Craven didn’t end up directing the actual film, he did have a hand in its production and its script. Before Frank Darabont and director Chuck Russell punched up the script (effectively, giving us the movie we all know and love today), Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner were hired by New Line to deliver an initial script, and hells a poppin’, what they sent in was WAY different than the final filmed product. While there are some similarities between the original script and the final script, there are a ton of changes, which really affected the entire tone of the story; ultimately, the original “Dream Warriors” script was a bit darker and more gruesome, with a greater emphasis on Nancy as a sort of vigilante defender. Oh, and it completely rewrites the entire Freddy mythos, so for those of you that are heavy into canon, you might want to pay attention here.

So, what was the original script like? Here, dear readers, is my official Cliff Notes version of the ORIGINAL “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3”…

First up, there’s a pre-credits scene featuring a fetal Freddy literally ripping through his mother’s stomach in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. This is followed up by a montage of  “missing kids” posters across America, with the camera panning in on a flyer for a missing redheaded girl.

Then, we jump to Nancy, driving down some country back roads, listening to radio reports about teen suicide trends. Hey, she sees that one redheaded girl from the missing poster, just standing on the side of the road! Naturally, she lets her hitch a ride with her.

Of course, Nancy gets a flat tire. Sans a spare, she wanders out into an open field, where she encounters the same cabin from the intro. And outside it,  there are kids in little tuxes and party dresses skipping rope and singing the iconic “One, Two” nursery rhyme. As any normal human being would do, Nancy approaches the home, as the kids scatter into the darkness. There’s a bunch of tricycles on the porch. And the wind chime has razor fingers on it!

Inside, she finds an elevator with floor numbers reaching up into the 5,000s. She steps in, gets trapped, and it drops down at like a million miles per hours. And it also goes sideways, like the “Tower of Terror” and shit. Then, Freddy’s claw hand attacks her, but she fends it off. Then the HELL-avater stops, and she encounters both a giant tricycle and her elderly dad -- you know, the police guy from the first movie. He gives her the old “We barbecued his ass way back when speech,” pointing to Freddy’s charred skeletal remains. But there’s only a hand left? Hey, where did the rest of his flame-broiled zombie ass go, he asks?

Then we jump back to the redhead sleeping in Nancy’s car. A gigantic snake (with Freddy’s glove for a head!) yanks her -- by the mouth -- through the windshield. She’s sucked up into an oak tree (not an Elm tree, the script specifically tells us) where…well, I suppose its safe to assume not much good can happen.

So back in the cabin, Nancy and her dad chase Freddy’s hand around, until it squeezes through a barred window. He then pulls his eyelids out like Stretch Armstrong and SLICES THEM OFF with a razor-blade lined finger! Then, Nancy wakes up. Oh, I get it -- she was dreaming in her car the entire time! Enter Neil Guinness, a doctor who just conveniently happened to be out in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

Apparently, Nancy fell asleep at the wheel, and crashed her car in a ditch. He checks her out…medically speaking, of course. There’s blood all over Nancy’s car. Apparently, she hit an animal…yes, that’s right, an animal. Guinness said she can stay at his place. Nancy accepts his offer, because she’s the most reasonable person in the history of the world.

At Guinness’ place, Nancy talks about how she’s tried to find her dad, who apparently went AWOL after the first movie. He said there’s this house he’s been trying to find for awhile, though…

So, Guinness, being creepy as hell, peers at Nancy while she sleeps. He notices her RX meds -- something called  Hypnocil. A psychiatrist by trade, he decides to flip through some medical books. It’s some sort of non FDA-approved experimental drug that’s supposed to suppress night terrors or something.

Nancy seems to have a nightmare, with the hitcher from earlier flying through the window. She’s had her hair ripped off her head, showing a bloody scalp a la that one hooker in “Warlock: the Armageddon.”  THEN THE HAIR COMES ALIVE AND ATTACKS HER! Guinness watches Nancy writhe in bed with the invisible force, so he intercedes. He slaps her, and then his fucking jaw falls off and his skin starts melting into putty. Uh-oh…

With a four foot wide mouth, Guinness starts to “digest” Nancy whole (similar to the snake scene from the official ANOES3.) Right before he eats her head, the snake monster’s head transforms into Freddy’s. Then the REAL Neil arrives and wakes her up. She has a fit about the drugs not working anymore. She looks down at her hands, and there’s some charred, flesh-like shit underneath her cuticles…

Next scene, Neil and Nancy drive back to the field, and what do you know, her car is gone. She notes an ominous looking tree, surrounded by ominous looking birds. Last night, she said, was the first time she’s had a dream of any kind in five years.

Neil and Nancy arrive at the hospital. There, he encounters Kristen, a young woman who had just attempted suicide. What unfurls next is pretty much the same scene from the NOES3 finished product, with Nancy singing the nursery rhyme to “calm” Kristen down. From there, we’re introduced to the denizens of the hospital’s “special adolescent ward”: There’s Jennifer, who has a knack for burning herself with cigarettes; Taryn, a black girl that likes to draw pictures of fire; and of course, Kincaid who is pretty much the same character as he is in the final product. By the way: I cannot tell you how much pride I feel knowing that the actor that played him GRADUATED from the same university I did.

Neil and Nancy talk for a bit. For whatever reason, kids from out of town seem to be flocking to the county to commit suicide. And all of the survivors appear to have sleeping disorders.

Hey, they found Nancy’s car…suspended 200 feet in the air over a grain silo, for some reason! And it’s been slashed to shit, by something…

So, Nancy gets hired by Neil as an assistant. They go to Kristen’s parents’ place, and they are complete yuppie scumbags who only care about tennis. They say they’re going to send her to a boarding school in New York. Yeah, that’ll fix her. Nancy goes into Kristen’s room. She finds a photo of Kristen…and the hitchhiker from her dreams!

Then, the local cops find the hiker’s body in the trees. Nancy decides to investigate the mysterious cabin…which wouldn’t you believe it, just so happens to exist in “the real world,” too…and as soon as she steps into the kitchen, SHE SINKS INTO AN UNDERWATER ABYSS! There, she sees her dad, with bloody eyes, at the bottom. She goes upstairs and encounters “baby Freddy,” which turns into the full grown version we’re all more accustom to. A Mini-chase begins, and Nancy escape from house, and Freddy promises to “shit” on her corpse someday.

By the way; the film doesn’t take place in Springwood, Ohio, the canonical setting of the series. As to where the movie textually takes place, the script never tells us.

So Nancy runs to Neil. He tells her the last Freddy dream was all a hallucination. The cops say the cabin out back is the old “Krueger place,” which some locals think is haunted. In fact, just last week, some dude locked himself inside it and tried to burn it down. And hey, he’s one of Neil’s patients, wouldn’t you know it? Holy shit, that lunatic that tried to burn the place down? IT’S NANCY’S DAD! Somehow, he blinded himself in the blaze. He tells Nancy that the house has to be destroyed, because its some sort of metaphysical portal that allows Freddy to enter people’s dreams or some shit like that.

ENTER Joey and Laredo. Joey is a frail kid with spasms who has built a near perfect replica of the Krueger cabin. Laredo is some long-haired Dungeons and Dragons dweeb. We also meet Phillip, whom we are told “sleepwalks.” So, Phil ends up getting hoisted by Freddy, kinda’ like Phil in the final print. Only, he’s not strung up like a puppet, he’s just being kinda’ carried down the hallway, I suppose. Freddy walks him right through a wall, and straight into the path of an oncoming ambulance.

There’s a group meeting after Phil’s death, and the psych department director is a real bitch. Neil thinks all the kids are experiencing “delayed stress syndrome.” Kristen undergoes an EEG. Nancy thinks she sees Kristen disappear while being probed, but Neil thinks she’s still hallucinating. The next day, Kristen’s parents check her out of the hospital.

Cue Jennifer’s death. It’s virtually the same as it is in the movie, only sans the “Welcome to prime time, bitch!” line.

Kristen returns to school, with bandaged wrists, and all of the snobby girls make fun of her. In psych class, they’re having a convenient lecture about dreaming, and Deimos, and the dream world being a interphase between life and death and shit. Kristen falls asleep, and in her dream, yanks one of the tops off the bitchy girls. Except Kristen really does yank the girls’ top off in class, and it’s all funny and stuff.

Next scene, Nancy looks like she’s going to set the old Krueger house ablaze. A cop and his German Shepherd show up, though and prevent her, so she goes back to the ward to probe her daddy for advice. Her dad tells her the only way to get the job done is to burn the house from the inside, and with the help of some “dream warriors,” too.

Back to Kristen. In her room, she’s looking at some St. Girard Catholic School flyers when all of a sudden she develops stigmata AND FLIES THROUGH HER BEDROOM WINDOW IN A JESUS CHRIST POSE. She’s literally flown to New York and through the school, where all of the girls have bloody arm bandages, too. She winds up in the old Krueger house, where Freddy “crosses” himself and blood and shit comes out. She cries to Nancy, who is awake, and gets sucked through a portal in her mattress.

Nancy finds herself in Kristen’s dream, just in time to make the save. Right before Fred gets them, they both wake up in Kristen’s bed. “We have to talk,” Nancy says.

So, the two go back into Dreamland, to burn down the Krueger house. However, they end up attacked by a GERMAN SHEPHERD with FREDDY COLORED FUR AND A FREDDY HEAD! Kristen pulls Kincaid into the dream, and he punches Freddy. Freddy gets all big and stuff and then the trio wake up in the hospital, where the psych director is really, really peeved…and not really asking any questions about how THEY ALL ended up in the secured facility through the apparent magic of teleportation.

In the next scene, Nancy and Neil have sex -- and trust me, it’s about as clumsily written as you’d expect a love scene penned by the dude who made “The Last House on the Left” would be. Nancy has a dream that all of the dead kids offed earlier in the film approach her and ask her to kill Freddy for them. She wakes up. She goes to the hospital, and her dad tells her that all the kids in the hospital are “dream warriors” that have gathered for a final battle against Freddy. They escape into a group meeting, and all of the kids “vanish” during some sort of meditation ritual. Neil can’t believe his eyes!

They awaken on some mystical hilltop, all transformed into real “Dream Warriors.” Joey is now all muscular and shit, for example. Nancy gives them a Patton speech about why they’ve been assembled…a “Seven Samurai,” basically, to kill Freddy. A door literally appears out of nowhere, leading to Freddy’s home, presumably. They all chant “We’re home!” before entering the great unknown…

Back at the hospital, there’s a massive manhunt going on. At one point, Nancy’s dad -- no longer usable in the Dream World, we were told earlier -- runs across the lawn, on fire and shit. Before he dies, he tells Neil that he has to physically go to the Krueger house and burn it down.

In dream world, the kids TRY to set the Krueger house on fire, but nothing happens. So, they all have Molotov cocktails, saying shit about how they’re going to get Freddy. Taryn gets distracted, though, by her “Grandma’s” voice. Of course, it’s Freddy, who yells “Grandma, your black ass!” and EATS her alive with his torso, which has “The Thing” teeth now. “Sometimes, you’re hard to stomach,” Freddy quips.

Joey gets it next. He walks into a room that turns into your typical high school girl's dorm, where he meets up with one of the girls at school he used to have a crush on. She kisses him, but her tongue turns into a snake and rips his goddamn eyeballs out. Then Freddy TURNS INTO A BED and rips his arms and legs off. Some gruesome shit right there, for sure.

Then Neil shows up at the ranch and quotes Shakespeare. Then he looks at the wind chime, which is now made out of human fingers! He goes in, and cuts off one of his fingers, and then puts it back on. Which, I guess, means he’s officially in the dream world now. And Freddy puts out the house fire by simply opening his mouth and spraying the flames with water.

Now, we come to Laredo’s death, and holy shit, this would’ve been something. Freddy shows up disguised as Laredo’s little brother, and tries to guilt trip him about his drowning. Laredo, displaying more sense than anyone in the movie thus far, kicks his “brother” in the balls and says he ain’t falling for that shit, Holmes. And realizing that he can do anything in dreamland, HE TRANSFORMS  INTO A TEN FOOT TALL GARGOYLE! Freddy responds by transforming into A GIANT CROW, to which Laredo responds by transforming into a giant fucking net. And then, Freddy jumps out with a post-hole digger(?!?), screams “screw you,” and he’s dead. Needless to say, it would’ve been a hoot to see how Kevin Yagher and pals would’ve made this one come to life; and considering how shitty the “transformative” battle sequence from the second “Mortal Kombat” movie turned out (which came out A DECADE after this film was released), it’s a pretty safe bet we would’ve seen ourselves some Grade-A lame-oh special effects here.

So, we’re down to Neil, Nancy, Kristen and Kincaid. The script says Kincaid spit’s a giant clam at Freddy (a shellfish or a booger, I’m not sure) and they napalm his ass with Molotov cocktails. Kristen manages to yank everybody out of the dream right before a fire incinerates them in dream world…

…and they wake up RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of her parents’ big soiree. And of course, Freddy follows them into the real world, and we’ve got some CRAZY SHIT coming our way. Freddy kills a ton of guests as collateral damage, and the kids run into Kristen’s dad’s TROPHY ROOM where he has a ton of guns and shit. Kincaid grabs an AR-14 and goes Al Capone on Freddy, but it doesn’t really daze him. The four try to dream teleport once more, and they wind up back at the mental institution. That is, everybody except Kincaid, who is STUCK IN A WALL between the real world (Kristen’s parents’ place) and the dream plane! Freddy then gives Kincaid a razor claw colonoscopy, with his glove popping out of his mouth. Through the aperture, Freddy’s head turns into a crocodile, and he BITES OFF THE HEAD of the bitchy psych director!

“Are we dreaming, or is this real?” Nancy asks. We as viewers have no idea at this point. The surviving three then find themselves back at the ranch home. Freddy calls Neil a “faggot” and knocks him out with a Dhalsim punch. Freddy calls Nancy and Kris the “c-word,” and a boiler room chase ‘tis on. Eventually, Nancy remembers how she beat him in the first movie -- by pretending that he’s not real -- and sure enough, it makes Freddy burst into flames.

In comes Nancy’s dad, all burned up and shit. Of course, its Freddy in disguise, but unlike in the final movie, Nancy KNOWS it’s not really her dad and stabs Fred with a shard of metal. Unfortunately, it also allows Fred to stab her, mortally wounding her. Kristen gets a pre-death lecture from Nancy, and Kristen promises to dream her away to a magical fantasy realm. With the house in flames, Kris drags Neil out.

So, the house burns to the ground, revealing a newer house, circa the 1940s. Apparently, its created a time loop, sending Kristen back to Freddy’s birth. She finds fetal Freddy, slams him up against a wall a few times and stabs him with his own claw blade thingy.

Flash forward a few months, and Neil and Kris are having diner. Apparently, Neil gets to visit Nancy nocturnally now. She bids him adieu, and there’s the little replica of the Krueger house Joey made. And then, right before the credits roll, we see a light mysteriously flick on inside the prop…followed by an ominous metal scratching sound.

So, uh, yeah, there’s a lot of changes there, no? I guess, mechanically, it’s the same film, but the characters (especially Nancy’s dad) and especially the chronology of the Freddy mythos are totally different. Whereas the latter films established Freddy as an actual human being (albeit, one that’s the alleged bastard son of a thousand maniacs), in this film, it’s VERY clear that Freddy was never a “real” human being at all, instead, being some kind of murderous mutant, claw handed freak that, I guess, has always lurked in the shadows. Of course, that opens up a huge timeline paradox; if Freddy has always been this mutant freak-o, then doesn’t that completely contradict the entire mythos established by the first film? I mean, shit, the very first scene in that one was Freddy assembling his claw hand, and here, the movie is telling us that it was something Freddy was born with. The part about Freddy being a molester and getting burned and shit remains canon, but its seriously skewed by the re-invention of Freddy’s background; I’m not saying it’s a complete plot hole, but it certainly muddies what was, up to that point, a fairly cohesive character origin story.

I actually liked Nancy taking on the vigilante role in the film, and I thought the dynamic of her and her loony asylum-bound dad working together to fight Freddy would’ve been awesome. Hey, it’s better than just using him as a drunk that gets killed by a shovel, I suppose. Overall, I also liked the “Dream Warriors” as assembled in this film more than I did the final product “Warriors” -- they are largely the same characters, but the minor tweaks, I thought, really created a more interesting cast.

Furthermore, I really liked the retooled bit players, especially Nancy’s love interest, who comes off as a bit more of a jerk here. I also fucking LOVED the idea of making Kristen’s parents super yuppie scumbag don’t-give-a-fuck socialites, and the “Freddy crashes the party scene” would’ve been all sorts of awesome. I also liked the psych director character, who was excised out of the final shooting script; she definitely made for a great “sub-villain,” of sorts.

The death scenes in the original script I thought were way better than the death scenes we got in the final film -- although as stated above, I’m not sure how good they would’ve looked using contemporary technologies. All in all, the deaths just seemed more gruesome and vicious, and the idea of hearing Freddy yell “Grandma, your black ass!” would’ve been the funniest thing in the history of anything.

As far as the Catholic imagery, I guess it would’ve been cool, even if that “crucifix” nightmare scene would’ve likely looked like shit on the Silver Screen. There’s also a ton of iconography about Deimos and the blind -- an allusion to Greek mythology, almost assuredly -- but it really doesn’t lead to anything too noteworthy. And the ending, I think, set up the series for a new franchise tandem team -- Neil and Kristen -- with Nancy probably in line to return as a “Dream Angel,” sort of a good version of Freddy Krueger, as was a plotline in the old “Elm Street” Marvel comics.

Of course, the “Elm Street 3” we got was just flat out awesome, so I can’t complain too much about the heavy script changes that went on from draft one to the finished product. Alas, in an alternate reality somewhere, you can rest happy, knowing that there exists -- somewhere in the multiverse -- an “Elm Street 3” featuring Freddy Krueger as a giant bird. Lord knows, that helps me sleep a little better, each and every evening…

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Jimbo Goes to the Movies: “Carrie” (2013) Review

Bloody terrifying, or just bloody awful? 

The 2013 “Carrie” remake gives us our fourth film adaptation of Stephen King’s big breakthrough novel. While De Palma’s version form the ‘70s is usually considered one of the best horror films of all-time, the other two shots at the material -- the in-name only 1999 misfire “The Rage: Carrie 2” and an early 2000s TV movie starring that chick from “May” -- were both savagely criticized and promptly forgotten about.

The fourth go-around, helmed by “Boys Don’t Cry” director Kimberly Peirce, is a pale imitator of the original film, a movie that, outside of a few contextual changes, is more or less a scene-by-scene remake of De Palma’s movie. Alike Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho,” 2013’s “Carrie” is sub-par work from a director surely capable of doing much better. To be fair, topping the original was a tall order, but I still believe Peirce could’ve put a bit more effort into her direction. This is a movie that seems to have no desire to do anything at all original, to deviate from the 40 year old template before it. Yeah, there’s some stuff in there that comments on the times (now, Carrie is the victim of cyber-bullying), but beyond that? It’s a spiritless retread, and one that feels astonishingly lifeless from start to finish.

If you’re familiar with the first film, there’s not much new to tell you here. Carrie -- played by what’s her name from “Kick Ass” -- is your typical home schooled weirdo, who’s having a hard time adjusting to life in a public school. Her mom -- played by that chick that played Clarice in “Hannibal” and gave her son a hand shandy in “Savage Grace” -- is a bible-quoting maniac that operates a dry cleaning business and constantly refers to her own daughter as a cancer. At school, Carrie is picked on for being so awkward, culminating with her being pelted by tampons when she has her first period in the shower after gym class.

So far, there’s nothing going on here that wasn’t in the first movie -- and done worlds better, too. The biggest problem with the movie, for me, was the acting, which felt especially wooden. This Chloe chick definitely lacks the acting chops of Sissy Spacek, and she does very little to bring any sort of real humanity to the character -- she just stares into the camera the entire time, occasionally sputtering out this weird almost-Southern accent despite the fact the film is supposed to take place in Maine (that’s what all the license plates in the movie say, anyway. Too bad the film itself was actually filmed in Toronto.) Julianne Moore is surprisingly dull in this one, lacking the over-the-top, super melodramatic hellfire and brimstone overacting that Carrie’s mom demonstrated in the first flick. The rest of the cast is about as vanilla as you can get, with the actors and actresses doing incredibly weak impersonations of the supporting characters from the De Palma flick. The supportive gym teacher, the kinda’ sympathetic popular girl, the bitchy-bitch, the bitchy-bitch’s greaser boyfriend, the sympathetic popular girl’s sympathetic popular boyfriend; it’s clear that all of these guys watched the first movie, and boy oh boy, do they all falter in their quests to turn those performances into their own.

Literally the only thing new here is the auger of the Internet. Now, Carrie learns about her telekinetic powers through Wikipedia and the school uber-bitch decides to stick it to her by posting embarrassing videos on YouTube. Oh, and there’s a lot of texting going on, too, because clearly, kids weren’t doing that shit in 1976. The aesthetics are somewhat different, but really, we’re just staring at a copy of a copy here.

Additionally, Peirce went overboard with the telekinetic CGI, with Carrie using her mental moving powers to weld her mama inside her prayer closet and, towards the end of the film, do her in with her own sewing devices. The problem here is that the effects look very unconvincing, and there’s way too much slow-motion stuff going on -- especially when the bitchy bitch and her boyfriend have their respective faces erased in a somewhat climactic car crash finale.

Of course, the whole point of the movie is the prom mega-death finale, and odds are, you’ll be disappointed, After years and years of “Final Destination”-style overkill, when Carrie gets all crazy-eyed and tele-killy, the end results are actually pretty mundane. We get some broken class, some mean girls get trampled to death by stilettos and a dude gets eaten by a bleacher, but other than that? Nothing really all that grisly, or original. Shit, at least “The Rage” gave us a scene where that kid from “Home Improvement” had one of  his testicles shot off by a spear gun.

The ending is by-the-books, but Peirce decided to forego the super-shock conclusion the original film had…I guess that one would be a bit too clichéd, but in a film filled with nothing but clichés, I’m not really sure what one more would have hurt, exactly.

The strength of De Palma’s “Carrie” was that it existed in a time when revenge fantasies were cool, and the idea of making all your school tormentors die horrendously was a true novelty. That, and it was just SO goddamn 70s, with John Travolta killing pigs and that crazy ass dance montage finale at the end. The problem with Peirce’s “Carrie” -- outside the fact that the 1976 movie still exists -- is that it’s released at a time when unpopular cast-offs HAVE gotten revenge on their school house foes, and in the wake of Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook, the prospect of a youngster killing a whole shit load of other youngsters just feels a little…iffy. I mean, yeah, kids are getting picked on and bullied over the Internet, but even the most savage prankery is hardly worth the end dividend of an entire gymnasium of teenagers getting massacred. At heart, that’s the structural problem of the film thematic: you’re supposed to relate to -- and CHEER for -- the person that just murdered 400 people. In the ‘70s, filmgoers could take refuge in such a ludicrous concept; today’s filmgoers, I am afraid, are entitled to no such luxury.

As a total film, I can at least praise the flick for moving through the motions quite briskly. The thing is over and done with in 90 minutes, and Peirce never really lingers too long on any one scene in the picture. The film is watchable, I suppose, but it’s far from rewarding, or at the end of the day, even all that entertaining. Slapdash directing, really lackluster acting, a boring and uninspired script, lame special effects and on top of it all, it tries to address a serious issue (teen bullying) and its serious consequences (youth violence) by subverting them into just another popcorn-munching murder-a-thon.

Carrie ‘13 isn’t the worst horror remake of the year, but it’s certainly a major disappointment nonetheless. And alike the prom goers in the finale? You’re probably better off staying at home, too, folks.

Score:

Two Tofu Dogs out of Four.

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