Oh hey, looks who’s back? Seems like you just can’t keep this guy down. As a bonus to the Friday Night Frights Nightmare on Elm St. marathon, I’ve compiled every music video I could find from the various installments in the series. There are 4 songs altogether and in my opinion the quality lands squarely in the 50/50 zone. I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Make tonight a Freddy night!

I have a theory that the first introduction you have to a long running film series typically will wind up becoming your favorite installment. It may not be the best one but it was your initial experience. This is the reason that Temple of Doom is my favorite Indy, Return of the Jedi my favorite Star War, E.T. my favorite E.T. and whatnot and so on and so forth, etc. What’s crazy is that as you get older, taste normally develops and totally shifts around, but not here though. No. A Nightmare on Elm St. 2: Freddy’s Revenge was my first taste of Freddy Krueger’s adventures and time has only poured concrete on it as the towering gold standard of the entire series for this particular fan.

Let’s do this thing.

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!

Click Here to Listen!

There’s this great little retro diner called the St. Francis Fountain located 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!

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.

If my frequent posts throughout the Halloween season didn’t give it away, I’m a pretty big fan of Horror films. So the excitement really kicks in when a new movie comes out that gets the scary movie nerds all worked up and talking about how “oh man, you’ve just gotta see this one!” It seems to happen on a semi-annual basis and here we are again with Late Night With the Devil. I typically like to squirrel away these new releases throughout the year and go into something I just now decided to call “Horror Hibernation”; saving them for that early August until the end of October Halloween time sweet spot.

What can I say, I was feeling a pretty strong itch and this one looked like it had the potential to be one hell of a scratch.

Tales From the Darkside is a horror anthology series from the mid 80’s that was created by the great writer/director George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Other Living Deads). Essentially picking up where his and Stephen (You know this guy) King’s Creepshow feature film left off, the show was also inspired by EC horror comics from the 50’s. Each story involving some sort of morality tale or monster or spooky something or other (with the occasional misguided attempt at a humorous episode). It is also highly regarded for being my favorite television show of all time as well as an obvious inspiration for this little website here.

Now before all three of you get too excited, listen: I have absolutely no intention of writing up Holiday Horror flicks all throughout Christmastime the way I did in September and October. At least I don’t think that’s gonna happen. But who knows? Until we find out, consider this write-up a one-off because to be totally honest, scary Christmas movies are a sub-genre I’m not really all that familiar with and haven’t been compelled by in the past. Not to sound like a prude, but the idea of introducing slashers or monsters into the season has always felt a bit tacky to me. But many years back I came across a little something called Christmas Evil from 1980 and whoa boy, did it become quite the exception!

Here’s a fun idea for you to try sometime during this Halloween weekend: Go into a bar or any place serving drinks where you can initiate a casual chat with whoever’s working. Gradually turn your conversation toward horror movies (specifically ones from the 80’s) and after a while, mention C.H.U.D. If the person you’re yapping it up with recites what those letters actually stand for (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller), congratulations! You’ve just met someone pretty cool. However what happens next will determine whether this person is actually super cool. Say this: “Yeah C.H.U.D. is fun but come on, C.H.U.D. II is even better.” There are only two things that can happen after making such a bold statement. You’ll either have your ass instantly kicked and thrown into the back alley where it will be kicked some more or that bartender is buying your drinks for the rest of the night.

Let me know how that shakes out.

Psycho II is nothing short of miraculous: It’s a movie carrying around the stones big enough to even attempt the impossible by following up the original Hitchcock classic 22 years later yet *spoiler alert* folks, it manages to succeed in just about every way imaginable. From the beautifully clever and twisty (not to mention twisted) script courtesy of Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child’s Play) to just a flat out all timer of a return performance by Anthony Perkins (Psycho, This One, Psycho III, Psycho IV: The Beginning), this is a sequel that knows it has something to prove. And not only does the movie step up to the plate and point to the cheap seats…

…it swings and knocks the skin off the ball before that thing flies out of the park.