Friday March 13th A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Freddy Krueger returns to kill troubled teens in a mental health institution.
The most intriguing part of this film to me was how it portrayed the relationship between young people and mental health professionals. This also tied in nicely with the recurring theme of inter-generational conflict that runs through much of the Elm Street franchise.
The social conservatism of the older characters is shown to be detrimental to the younger characters as their fears and problems are minimised by those in authority. Not believing the kids that Freddy is stalking them, Dr Simms puts the blame on trauma and “overt sexuality”. In one revealing scene, Doctor Gordon says that one of the supposed suicides was an act of weakness. Ultimately, Freddy took a backseat for me in terms of scares, because the banal gaslighting of mental health professionals is far creepier.
One final thing: somebody on this movie has the hots for Ray Harryhausen. This is most obvious in the skeletal Freddy scene.
Saturday March 14th Girl King (2002)
A virgin butch must find a mysterious treasure for a horny queen. That’s the set-up for Ileana Pietrobruno’s lesbian pirate adventure Girl King.
Damn, this movie is sexy as fuck. Pietrobruno’s editing together of footage from pirate movies in the public domain is mmmm *chef’s kiss* my shit.
Yet what makes Girl King truly special is the way it interrogates the relationship between butch-femme identities, concluding with an encompassing embrace.
Was pleasantly surprised to see a familiar name pop-up in the opening credits: Amon Tobin. The Brazilian musician did the score for the video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. One of my favourite tracks from that game is the theme for Battery. The Brazilian composer delivers a slightly trippy score for a film that fits well with the deliciously sapphic fantasy aesthetic.
Girl King can be found on Pietrobruno’s Vimeo channel in two parts. I decided not link it here because it includes footage from porn films and I’m scared of getting into trouble.
Side note: while the film I came to realise that the splicing of old films with old video, is kind of hot. Like there’s something about the enmeshing of forms, like two souls in union is super awesome. Sorry I’m getting carried away there. Will save it for any creative writing workshops I might attend in the future.
Monday March 16th The Alligator People (1959)
A newlywed nurse arrives in the Southern swamps to find her husband who mysteriously disappeared on her honeymoon. SPOILER ALERT: he’s an alligator person. The story is told through a frame narrative where two psychiatrists interview the nurse while she is under sleep hypnosis.
There’s so much dark psycho-sexual energy bubbling underneath what may just appear to be a silly B-movie and I fucking love that. It opens up so many interpretive possibilities and I can’t really do justice to it here. Maybe I’ll write a longer piece about it sometime in the future. The white 1950s attitudes towards race and gender make these Freudian themes all the more unnerving.
Another interesting thing about The Alligator People is its cinematographer Karl Strauss. Originally a photographer in the 1900s and 1910s, Strauss went on to work in Hollywood, doing the cinematography for Murnau’s Sunrise and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. There’s an ebook about his photography that you can borrow from archive.org which I would recommend.
In The Alligator People, despite its cheap production values, one can see that there is a visual flair to it, and I can’t help but wonder whether Strauss’ compositions led me to read the film in the way that I did. The shot below from when the nurse is being interviewed is so subtly sexual, with he phallic microphone hovering inches away from the nurse’s face.
Yeah yeah I know this all Freud 101 shit, but it’s impossible not to see it. Especially with the oedipal subplot.
Sorry this was a bit shorter than last time. I had some freelance work which I hope you’ll get to see soon.
In the meantime, here’s the music video for Dream Warriors. Stick around to the end for this one.