Condor, Man.

My Soul to Take, written and directed by Wes Craven, starring Max Thieriot (Bug), John Magaro (Alex), Zena Grey (Penelope) and Emily Meade (Fang) (2010): Buried in this mostly-mess of a slasher movie are some interesting bits about the condor in Native American mythology and the idea of multiple souls being housed in one body. Unfortunately, neither of these concepts get developed satisfactorily by old warhorse Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream), as by-the-book teenager slashing occupies way, way too much screentime.

One of the oddly jarring things about this movie is that it confuses schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorder in its tale of a schizophrenic serial killer with multiple personalities, one of which is a serial killer. Frankly, it's sorta dumb. Seven teenagers born the night the serial killer -- blandly named the Ripper! -- died in the small town of Riverton are now 16. Apparently, that means they're of legal age to get slaughtered.

But is the serial killer dead? Is one of the teenagers possessed by the evil spirit of the serial killer's serial-killing personality? And why is there an entire subplot about the evils of high school that plays like a bush-league version of Heathers?

Yes, there are many mysteries here, including how a slasher film ended up with a jaunty cartoon for its end credits. The abrupt tonal shifts and ridiculous developments kept me interested, though not in a way that would make me say, 'This is a good movie.' Too many rote killing scenes and too many characters one doesn't care about. Not recommended.

No Pulse

Pulse, written by Wes Craven and Ray Wright, based on the Japanese film Kairo by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, drected by Jim Sonzero, starring Kristen Bell (Mattie) and Ian Somerhalder (Dexter) (2006): Horror movies involving emerging technologies can often be hilariously overwrought, especially when those emerging technologies aren't understood by the makers of the film. In Pulse, life-stealing thingies that ride the cell-phone and wifi network invade a college campus. Hilarity ensues.

The colossal dumbness of this movie is really quite invigorating. It starts as a horror movie, turns into a global apocalypse around the 45-minute mark, and ends with five minutes cribbed almost verbatim from the end of The Terminator. All that, and it's based on a Japanese horror film. Hoo ha! And as it turns out, this is all the result of a telecommunications project that tapped into hitherto "unknown areas" of the electromagnetic spectrum. Um, OK. And get this: the thingies are afraid of red duct tape.

Seriously. A particular type of red duct tape is a colour that blocks the thingie-signal. Did Red Green script-doctor this movie?

In a better, wackier movie (one probably starring Bruce Campbell), the efficacy of the red tape would cause our protagonists to wrap baseball bats, tennis rackets and golf clubs with duct tape so that they can do some serious supernatural ass-whupping. Unfortunately, the smartest characters in this movie, played by the eerily good-looking Kristen Bell and Ian Somerhalder, aren't that bright. Thankfully, the thingies have serious trouble walking through walls, so escape is always an option. No one in this film had heard of a cellphone jammer, though.

I'll leave you to figure out the crowning stupidity of the last five minutes. It won't take long. Earlier, though, there's a great sequence in which a thingie emerges from a non-working college-dorm clothes dryer. Did someone leave her cellphone in her pants? Does the clothes dryer get great cellphone reception on its own? And why is this movie called Pulse? Oh, for a roll of red duct tape. Really not recommended unless you need a good laugh.

A Nightmare for Filmgoers

Nightmare on Elm Street, written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer, based on the movie of the same name written and directed by Wes Craven, directed by Samuel Bayer, starring Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner and Jackie Earle Haley (2010):

"Initially, Fred Krueger was intended to be a child molester, however the decision was changed to him being a child murderer to avoid being accused of exploiting a spate of highly publicized child molestations that occurred in California around the time of production of the film.[9]" -- Wikipedia entry on the original A Nightmare on Elm Street movie (1984).

Well, we come first to the first problem with this leaden remake of what is generally considered to be, at the very least, one of the well-made slasher films of the 1970's and 1980's. In the original, Freddy is a child-murderer. Somehow, this seems way more wholesome than pedophile, which is what the new Freddy is -- though he's a pedophile who appears to be sexually attracted to the late-teen-aged versions of his pre-school victims.

Psychologically speaking, this somehow manages to be both ridiculous and truly repulsive because of the way the movie operates. We're still on a roller-coaster ride. This isn't a remake of Fritz Lang's criminal underworld vs. sweaty little pedophile/child-killer masterpiece M. The pedophilia referred to throughout the movie sucks pretty much all the air out of this reboot; what remains gets sucked out by the pedestrian minds of the film-makers.

The original Freddy was an interesting character because he talked. A lot. The other two serial-killer icons of the first Slasher Film era, Jason and Michael Myers, were pretty much mute killing machines. Freddy Krueger instead had the tendency towards awful jokes and puns that had previously been seen only in James Bond-type heroes and the grisly hosts of 1950's horror anthology comics that included such titles as The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror (this would be officially adapted as Tales from the Crypt on HBO).

Of course, the real draw of the series was original writer-director Wes Craven's realization that nightmares were both scary and a fertile playground for slasher-type horror. Later writers on the series would take this further into the realms of the uncanny and the surreal, while Craven, when he returned for the New Nightmare, reimagined Freddy as a sort of tulpa figure threatening the world of the filmmakers themselves, given physical form by millions of movie-watchers.

Here, though, we're trapped in a world of sketchily written characters both teenaged and adult, and in a concept made far too heavily disturbing to be the foundation of this type of movie. You can't have a pedophilia-themed haunted house ride. It's fucking ridiculous. The actors do what they can with the material, but there's really nothing to be done withy the material as it thuds and blunders its way to another "shocking" twist ending which only caused me to say, out loud, "Oh, great. Now he's Candyman too!" Not recommended.