A Nightmare on Elm St. 3: Dream Warriors belongs to a highly exclusive cinematic club of quality third installments. And in this special podcast edition of Friday Night Frights, Rob and Ray are gonna break it on down! Please enjoy this oh so nerdy (not to mention oh so spooky) deep dive into Freddy’s Nightmares!

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There’s this great little retro diner called the St. Francis Fountainlocated in San Francisco’s mission district (Try the Cilantro Chicken Soup, the best in the city). It’s like walking into another era with the decor primarily unchanged from what it must have looked like in the 50’s: Hat and coat racks attached to each booth and there's an adorable little candy counter featuring vintage and sealed trading card packs (along with individual cards that can all be bought for dirt cheap). Well wouldn’t you know it, on a random recent misty afternoon outing we went in for lunch and they had a ton of Nightmare on Elm St. cards to wade through and I of course couldn’t help myself.

Let’s have a look at the only five singles I could find featuring Freddy himself (And yes, I love that three of them just so happened to come from part 2 and are in sequence!).

If one were to rank all of these movies, I’d bet A Nightmare on Elm St. 4: The Dream Master would sit comfortably somewhere in the top 3 on most lists. Maybe even top 2. It’s arguably the most fun of them all, embracing a much more kinetic cinematic style, really cranking up the visuals and overflowing with an overall vision. It’s also just so 80’s, watching it now makes this one feel like the Freddy that comes to mind when you think about Freddy.

It’s kinda iconic.

Released back in 1994, this October A Nightmare On Elm St. pinball officially crosses the 3 decade mark of having never been played by yours truly. While 2,000 tables are reported to have been built (presumably finding homes in arcades, bars, bowling alleys and strip clubs across the country), I’ve certainly never seen one in real life. Have you? How the hell has this Nightmare machine managed to slip by me over all of this time!?

And almost as important, how is Nightmare Machine not a band?

A Nightmare on Elm St. 5: The Dream Child is a tough one to write about because it is easily my least favorite and thus, least frequently viewed entry in the series. I’ve never been in the mood to watch one of these movies and been like, “Y’know what? I could really go for Part 5 right now.” But I did give it another shot recently and am going to do my best to be nice.

Please Freddy, can I reason with you and ask you to not kill me for this review?

Welcome to my Nightmare! You’ve guessed it, this year’s Friday Night Frights theme will be the mainline entries in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. In fact, expect to see a lot of Freddy’s toasted mug here at the Dorkside for a while. And though I’d originally planned on posting write ups following their cinematic chronological order, there’s a 4k disc of the original coming out toward the end of October I’m waiting on so we’re just gonna have to work our way backwards. There are now only 6 Fridays left until Halloween so we’d better get going, beginning with Freddy’s Dead The Final Nightmare.

It’s time for Freddy 101!

Well, here we are now just past the halfway point of September and I’m already feeling like the Autumn season is passing too quickly. Like I’m just not getting enough Halloween in me. The weather has been perfectly moody: brisk chills, dark cloudy skies and falling leaves collecting on every sidewalk. Do you guys know what this means? With only several weeks to go leading up to the big day it’s time to really crank up the scene here, man.

It’s time to hit the pumpkin patch!

While it may still be September for the average citizen, around the Dorkside here there have been signs of Halloween creeping in since mid-August. And now that we have arrived at the last Friday the 13th before the big day, I’d say it’s time to watch Jason Voorhees get his spooky groove on. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the fan favorite 3rd sequel subtitled The Final Chapter, so that’s as good a choice to throw on as any. You remember, it’s the one that slammed a corkscrew into the franchise and ended it forever.

Oh wait nevermind, they made like 8 more after this. Hey where the Hell is that corkscrew anyway?

In the last Nintendo Direct there were plenty of software announcements to get excited about but the one that had the hairs on the back of my hairs stand up was one reveal in particular: A collection of classic Capcom developed arcade games featuring both their own internal characters as well as Marvel IP was miraculously on the way. Now, I have no idea how many legal hoops needed to be jumped through in order for this to happen; but to say that this is truly a huge deal for any fan of fighting games as well as both companies would be the definition of an understatement. And now it’s here.

I’m taking breaks from writing this to play it right now.

It seems to be fairly common with reviewers of a certain age that they often feel the need to lead off by aggressively waving their nerd cred flag back and forth. Y’know how it goes, this general sense of nostalgia fueled ownership seeps in as though the topic of discussion was their own personal discovery. These people are here to provide not opinion, but insight. I’m just going to say that yes I was a huge fan of Tim Burton back in his early days and yes, I have loved the original Beetlejuice since I was a kid. It holds a special place in my heart not only because it’s a great movie, but because I also fondly remember the act of trying to see it.