FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7
Palms
Floundering
Wes Craven resurrects Freddy Krueger one more time, and for the first hour at least he gleefully wreaks havoc on the all-too-familiar conventions of the series. The stars from the original film are back, only this time they play themselves: Craven is rumored to be preparing a script for a new Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, but everything he puts down on paper comes horrifyingly true for the cast members, especially Heather Langenkamp, the actress who played the heroine in the original film. This blurring between the “real” and the cinematic allows Craven to make the film work on a variety of levels–as a self-reflexive commentary on the nature of filmmaking, as a humorous (if all too easy) dig at the film industry, as a poke at the cult of Freddy fandom, and as a tribute to past horror films ranging from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion to Nosferatu and The Exorcist. But Craven appears to have bitten off a bit more than he can chew, and the movie often treads too uneasily between farce and horror; he builds up some good psychological tension only to resolve it in a disappointingly conventional manner. Too bad he didn’t have the imagination to see the game through to the end. But it’s a great deal of fun, and certainly the best of the sequels. (RP) (Pipers Alley, 9:00)
Exotica
See listing under Friday, October 7. (Pipers Alley, 2:00)
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A group of Jewish women in their 70s and 80s talk about their life experiences with an engaging mix of elan and perception in a variety of social settings: card games, water aerobics, mud baths. In this straightforward semidocumentary by Don Campbell, there’s almost a complete absence of the kind of cloying sentimentality or shtick that often sinks projects like this–that is, attempts to portray the elderly in an honest fashion. Weaving snatches of autobiographical information about each of the half-dozen or so women into a loose narrative tapestry, the film is short on story line but long on character development, combining scenes that are at least partly improvised with others that are more tightly written. After barely more than an hour, we feel we’ve gotten to know these women, including 82-year-old Freda, a loving, strong-willed earth mother who loves music and takes singing lessons twice a week; Fay, Freda’s friend, also 82, who talks candidly of overcoming suicidal tendencies and rediscovering an appetite for life; and 81-year-old Edna, who wants to buy a red car, believes passionately in reincarnation, and meditates twice a day. Also on the bill is a short from the United Kingdom’s Tim Watts and David Stoten called The Big Story (JK) (Pipers Alley, 3:00)
Cinema’s Emerging Talents: Student Shorts II
