Nightmare On Elm Street Part II

June 21, 2011 @ 3:27 pm

*This rating was given before reviews were required*

May 2, 2011 @ 2:03 pm

Of all the ELM STREET films it’s Part 2 which I’ve always had a love hate relationship with. For every effective scene where we see Fred Krueger at his evil best (still far from the wise cracking Freddy of latter sequels), there are clumsy dialogue scenes aplenty, a very wooden Kim Myers as the main female lead, not to mention the whole S&M subplot with Coach Schneider which always seemed a bit superfluous to me. I was therefore hopeful that Camp Blood Pictures could present a more focused and refined version for his first fanedit.

The intention as stated is to make the movie more intone with the rest of the series – in particular Craven’s original – or at least that’s how it feels whilst watching the edit. The choice to start the film with Jesse’s dream, seeing Krueger in the basement and then the excellent close up on Krueger’s eyes as he says “we’ve got special work to do here, you and me”, is a good one as it sets the dark tone effectively and gets the story moving right away. Plus, it’s probably the creepiest moment in the entire movie. Surprisingly I didn’t miss the “school bus dream” at all, which in the original cut is one of my favourite scenes. Here however, it just doesn’t seem necessary at all, so kudos to Camp Blood for that.

It becomes quickly apparent that nearly all the school scenes are missing and thereby means that Coach Schneider is also absent. Again, this is a plus and focuses the movie purely on Freddy’s attempts to possess Jesse and control what he does. The confusion as to when we’re in dreamland and when we’re not is still apparent. Whether that’s a good thing is purely subjective and sure enough the scene at the party still has me arguing both for and against it. I still see it as Freddy absorbing the strength through Jesse to enter our world and leave it as he wishes (or at least when he has the strength to). It breaks the rules of the first film, but I still kind of like the scene and am glad Camp Blood left it in this edit.

At 51 minutes long this is certainly a heavily truncated edit and there are a couple of moments when scenes don’t seem to flow as naturally as they might otherwise. I particularly thought that we kept going back to the breakfast table scenes with Jesse and his parents too much, but it’s not so distracting that it leaves any lasting damage to the effectiveness of telling the story.
I still find Kim Myers quite annoying as Lisa, and even Mark Patton as Jesse is a little bit too much of a wet blanket to have you truly rooting for him – sorry if that sounds harsh, but he’s less of a man than Nancy was! This does mean that as love conquers all in a fiery grand finale (which maintains the inconsistent ways of shooting Mark Shostrom’s bizarre puppet creatures from the netherworld), I still didn’t feel as emotionally involved as I thought I should be. A shame, as with a slightly better script and lead performers, this could quite seriously have been the Cronenberg of ELM STREET films.

On the technical front Camp Blood Pictures does pretty well all in all, particularly for a first fanedit. I could not notice any harsh audio edits at all, so I would give the audio 10/10. I know that there’s a 5.1 dolby track available to choose from, but to be honest that doesn’t bother me in the slightest – I am more concerned with audio levels in terms of balancing of dialogue and music etc, and on that front this is perfect.

The quality of the picture is good throughout, and I assume this is taken from the excellent R1 Nightmare Box set. It’s disappointing therefore that interlacing is riddled throughout. It’s not so bad on a normal TV, but I certainly noticed it whilst watching it on my PC. I would therefore score that 7/10.

The menu design is simple but adequate, but it would have been nice to have some details on the edit as I’m always interested in reading what went into an edit. Also, the custom credits are fine – I actually quite like the big comic sans font and it works well here. However, the decision to have a white background with black writing for the end credits is a strange one and doesn’t fit that well for me. 7/10.

Overall then this is a vast improvement on Sholder’s theatrical cut. Even at 51 minutes this will still be the version I would prefer to watch in the future. It certainly has a more focused and dark tone to the story and whilst I still believe it to be one of the weaker entries, Camp Blood Pictures should be congratulated on a very promising first edit and I would give this an overall score of 8/10.

Want to rediscover NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET II? This would be the perfect way to do so.

I just finished watching this so here's my review. I want to start off by saying that this is my personal opinion and opinions may vary. No offense is intended.

Menu: We start things off here with an animated menu featuring footage from the film of Jesse turning into Freddy. The Nightmare On Elm Street logo is also on the screen while this footage plays. The menu was nice but the bar which underlines the "Play" button is present right from the start which is kind of distracting since the buttons will fade in. I also found it odd that the "Play" and "Trailer" buttons are at the top of the screen instead of at the bottom like on most DVD's. Underneath the logo for NOES is the word "PART II" which is written in white and appears to be written in the Comic Sans MS font. I find that using this font makes it look rather amateurish. No offense intended.

Score: 3/5

Video: The video quality is consistent throughout the film. The region 1 disc from the box set was used for this so the quality is comparable to it. In case anyone is wondering it's in anamorphic widescreen.

Score: 5/5

Audio: The audio is 2.0 and I'm pretty sure, without digging out my copy, that a 5.1 audio track was present on the region 1 DVD from which this edit was created from so I'm docking 1 point because of this.

Score: 4/5

Editing: The audio and video editing was seamless. I didn't notice any hard cuts, audio dropouts, glitches or any other technical issues.

Score: 5/5

Custom: Wasn't sure where to put this since technically it didn't fall under any of the other categories so I'm calling this one Custom. This is in regards to the custom credits and the effect shot that was created for the final scene in the film. Once again the Comic Sans MS font is used for the opening credits and "Part II" is added just underneath the Nightmare On Elm Street logo. I liked that custom credits were created for this but I think a better font could have been used, and if I'm not mistaken there's a NOES one floating around. Also since you created custom credits I think you should have probably recreated the logo as well so as not to make it so distracting when "Part II" is shown underneath it.

Custom end credits were also created but I'm left wondering why you chose to have the background be in white and the text be in black. Seems kind of an odd choice. Now regarding the effects shot. A strobing effect shot was used when Freddy's hand comes out of that black chick's chest at the end which I liked but then the shot changes to one from the outside as we see the bus drive off and the remaining of the scene, which is only a few seconds, is shown in negative color. Again, an odd choice.

Score: 2/5

Entertainment: The second film in the NOES franchise is one of the least liked films in the series but personally I love it. I was kind of hesitant about this edit at first because of the drastic amount of cutting but being a NOES edit, and myself being a huge NOES fan, I wanted to give it a shot anyways. I can honestly say that I loved it. There is quite a bit that was cut but I find that this works out for the best as it shows Jesse's descent into madness at a much faster pace. Most of the film's homosexual undertones are also removed. The only scene I kind of missed was Coach Schneider's death scene but you couldn't really leave that scene in since the rest of his scenes were removed.

Score: 5/5