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"The man of your dreams is back." - Tagline for A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge

Confession: As blatantly obvious and simplistic (but catchy!) as the above quote is, it just now hit me how it does have a second level relevant to this week's discussion of the further adventures of Freddy Krueger. There will be more on that later. Also, some of this material appears in shorter form, in slightly different context, elsewhere on Box Office Prophets. If you are already familiar with those parts, feel free to skip around to find new and more unsettling terrains.

Setting the stage: Time - Summer 1988. Place - My cramped upstairs bedroom (more like an extended slightly long-ish attic if you want to be specific) in a house resting mere feet back from the world famous Metolius River.

I was 12 and I had two life-size cardboard standees - both movie-related and passed along to me by my connections at the local video store - taking up the lion's share of available space in said cramped dwelling. The first was for Adventures in Babysitting. Why? Simple. Because I was a pre-adolescent male and Elisabeth Shue was the face of womanhood to me. I can picture her singing along to "Then He Kissed Me" right now. And me singing along to her singing along and, sighhh... Um, where was I?

Oh yes. The other featured a pair of cruel, cold eyes narrowed under a dirty fedora peering out over a trio of bad-ass teens, ready to rumble, who lay perched on the blades of a steel-knifed hand. All of this was accompanied by the incredibly awesome tagline, "If you think you'll get out alive, you must be dreaming." That's right. For those playing along at home, it was the standee for A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. The one with the best tag lines ("Welcome to prime time, bitch!") the coolest cameos (honestly, I am sure there were times Dick Cavett wished he could have skewered his interviewees) and the riff-tastic title song by Dokken.

I couldn't tell you anything about them then or now except that the song rocked so hard, it gave Freddy Krueger himself nightmares – that is, if the accompanying video was accurate. While I maintain that The Dream Master is the best of the sequels (thanks to Renny Harlin's direction), Dream Warriors cemented Elm Street's status as a pop-culture touchstone and has become a reference point of sorts, much like Electric Boogaloo. So there you have it: Kris Parker and Freddy Krueger face to face for the majority of my junior-high years. I like to think of it as the angel and the devil on my respective shoulders, whispering into my ears.

Fast-forward two decades later and both Babysitting and Elm Street are up for (re)boot/launch/jigger-ing. I think it's no longer even a case of "what's old is new again" but to paraphrase a Bloc Party lyric, of "things replacing things." There's nothing definitive about the whys and wherefores on the former, but the latter has had a slot staked out for a while now just prior to the start of the 2010 summer movie season. Surprisingly, I am not all up in arms about it, either. I have a strong affinity for the slasher films of the 1980s and denying this part of me would be as ridiculous and false as over professing a love that doesn't exist, for say, the majority of Godard's work. At the same time, I don't consider it an affront to my childhood that Rob Zombie has traded in his Dragula for Michael Myers.

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