Cult-Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

In many ways, the Elm Street movies are a lot like the James Bond films. Consider: there is one larger-than-life figure at the center of each film (Freddy or 007), and much of the action and plotting seems to be determined by the need to feature spectacular set-pieces. 

But also like James Bond, the Freddy films seem to need occasional re-grounding in reality. 

This re-grounding has happened on a few occasions in Bond history.  The out-of-balance nuttiness of Moonraker (1979) was deliberately redressed by the back-to-reality For Your Eyes Only (1981). Recently, Casino Royale (2006) re-imagined the 007 series after the surfing-tsunami, ice castles, and invisible car excesses of Die Another Day (2002).

The Dream Child (1989) is, in many ways, a similar kind of effort.  

A Dream Master is a pop-music laden, slick Freddy film (that I like a great deal…), but which takes the series quite far from its original horror roots. Freddy the Ringmaster has replaced Freddy the sicko.  

Stephen Hopkins’ film, the fifth entry, adopts a new approach. It continues the rules and formula of Dream Warriors and The Dream Master, but attempts to inject more horror -- specifically body horror -- into the proceedings.  

Freddy is also on screen less frequently, and his make-up has changed some to make him look more malevolent.  

The movie doesn’t even begin with a light pop song.  Instead, The Dream Child commences with a creepy musical composition that accompanies disturbing views of Dan and Alice having sex. We don’t actually see them in their entirety, only shots of their bodies -- their flesh -- moving up and down in unsettling blue light.  This is the beginning of the movie's thesis about body horror, but our the unsettling nature of evil that can grow inside.

This disturbing first scene is an indicator that the Freddy movies are attempting here to move into adulthood alongside their original audience, instead of staying permanently arrested in teenage concerns. 

In keeping with that approach, the film meaningfully discusses hot-button issues in the culture, including abortion and eating disorders.  The focus is still on young people, but The Dream Child isn't afraid to explore deep problems in that milieu. Like Nancy Thompson, this film isn't afraid to dig beneath the surface.

The Dream Child is not as light, not as slick, as The Dream Master, but I appreciate its dedicated attempts to move the franchise forward, while simultaneously returning some element of fear or terror to the Freddy character.  

On the down-side, the film definitely showcases some artistic exhaustion in terms of the retread supporting characters -- who come across as replacement friends, and bad copies -- and there are some continuity issues that the film must contend with as well.

But as a Freddy Krueger body horror show, The Dream Child impresses, and distinguishes itself from the Elm Street pack.

“This is one of God’s creations.”

High school graduation nears for Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel), but Alice feels increasing anxiety about Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund); about the possibility that he might manage to return from the grave.

Her intuitions prove correct.  Freddy is alive, though weak, living in the dreams of her unborn baby. As Alice soon learns, she is pregnant.  And babies dream most of the day, which means that Freddy has access to a universe of nightmares, even when she is wide awake.

Freddy uses his new power base -- Alice's womb -- to reach out and grab others, including Dan, whom he murders.  

While Alice grapples with what to do about a baby that could be born evil, she must also protect her friends, including Greta (Erika Anderson), who has an eating disorder.

“Your birth was a curse on the whole of humanity.”

The Dream Child -- the fifth entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street film series -- suffers a bit from its placement in the series.  It has not been long since the events of the fourth film, for instance, and yet Alice is fully ensconced at Springwood High with a new set of friends: Yvonne, Greta and Mark.  

Nobody talks about the friends who died last year, and certainly these friends would have gone to high school with them, right?  It's like Alice just opened a six pack of new friends, and there they are!

The film features some baffling continuity errors with the rest of the series too. 

Westin Hills -- which audiences saw up and running in Dream Warriors, and which could not have occurred more than two or three years earlier -- is described in the film's dialogue as as having been abandoned for years.  

Also, it is now located across from a park and is a huge, Gothic construction (represented by inadequate matte painting).  This is a dramatic rewrite of series history, since Kristen, Kincaid and Joey -- all classmates of Alice’s -- were warehoused there for a time.

And now we also learn that Sister Krueger’s body was never found, and has been hidden in the walls of the hospital for forty-something years? 

That’s new information too, and information that doesn’t really line up perfectly with the events of Dream Warriors either.  In fact, we saw the Sister’s grave in that film.

Also, when we witness Freddy’s birth (or is it rebirth?) in the film, why is he physically-deformed, a physical terror from birth?  

The real Freddy was a normal person, in terms of appearance, before his burning in the boiler room, right?  

So is Freddy re-born as a monster in this case, because we  are witnessing his rebirth, not a flashback of his original birth, in the movie?  It would be nice to have a bit more clarity about this, but the movie provides none.

These changes are vexing -- and continuity is not at all a strong-point of the Elm Street franchise -- but I admire Dream Child for attempting to be more psychologically adroit and thematically interesting than some of its predecessors.

In particular, I admire the film’s courage in dealing with two important issues involving young adults.  

The first involves Greta.  She feels tremendous pressure from her mother to be “Polly Perfect,” in her own words. This means that she is constantly being monitored in terms of what she eats and what she wars. 

Greta is not seen for who she is, but what kind of fame -- vicarious or direct -- she can bring her to her mother. Greta’s mom is thus an Elm Street Parent in keeping with others we see in the films: one who is corrupt and sinful, and unable to legitimately love her child for who she is. The message, voiced in the film, goes beyond even “pushy parents can drive you nuts.” Rather, parents can create pathology in their children.  And Greta, obsessed with her weight, and eating the right foods (“you are what you eat”) is sick.  She may be bulimic, or even anorexic.

Freddy, of course, attacks this pathology, and force feeds Greta until she dies. 

This is one of my favorite kills in the Elm Street series because it expresses something vital about the teen-centric “body image” crisis that is on-going, wherein teens are encouraged by media, parents and society to be of a certain weight, of a certain appearance. It’s a pressure that people still feel, and if anything it has gotten worse, since now men and women both are urged to conform to social norms in terms of their bodies.

Similarly, The Dream Child doesn’t shy away from examining unwed mothers and their problems. 

For a time, Alice contemplates abortion, because she simply doesn’t feel equipped to be a mother at this point.  Ultimately, she chooses to keep the child, Jacob, yet then faces scrutiny from Dan’s parents, who want to raise the child themselves.  

The upshot?  Alice lives under judgment, no matter what she does.  

She is judged for being pregnant, judged for contemplating her choices regarding having the baby, and judged for her fitness in being a parent.  

It’s not an easy situation she’s in, and it’s rewarding that The Dream Child goes to these places, and doesn’t give any of the issues it raises short-shrift.  The on-going subtext of the Elm Street films is that the sins of the parents are delivered upon the children.  Alcoholic, demanding, corrupt and pathological parents of the Reagan Era don’t pay attention to their children, and allow a monster to slip into a place that should be safe: the family hearth.

The Dream Child goes further than any other film, excepting perhaps the original, in diagramming this equation.  Alice and Greta deal with some major problems in the film; problems that arise not just from Freddy’s presence, but the behavior of the adults in their lives.

Some folks won’t like the presence of the abortion debate in the film, I know. Yet The Dream Child is very even-handed in discussing abortion, and doesn’t adopt either a hard pro-life or a hard pro-choice stance.  Instead, Alice just contends with the situation in front of her, trying to make the best decision he can. 

There’s something very realistic about the debate in the film.  In real life, choices about abortion are not an abstract, binary, either-or decision. For those involved, the choice is not a political hot potato, nor an opportunity to grand stand.  There are shades of grays, there are personal considerations, and there are repercussions, no matter what path is selected. 

In terms of set-pieces, I’ll be the first to admit that The Dream Child doesn’t rate positively beside some of the other films in the saga.  The Phantom Prowler comic-book scene is a travesty, with Freddy comically aping a graphic novel superhero with bulging muscles.  The Dream Child's purpose is clearly to re-establish Krueger as a serious threat, lurking in the shadows before striking his enemies.  This set-piece is so silly it undercuts, largely, the film’s attempts at re-grounding.

Much more fascinating and on-point is Dan’s death scene. Freddy becomes a motorcycle, and sort of “grows” into Dan, shearing off his flesh and perforating him with tubes, coils, and other mechanical devices.  

It’s incredibly grotesque, and almost David Cronenberg-like in both conception and execution (think: Crash).  When you couple this scene with those  shots of Jacob in the womb, and Greta’s over-stuffing, there is a fleshy, tactile nature to the death scenes in this film.  They feel more organic, and less fantastic, and, frankly, I prefer this approach.  

But the organic nature of these scenes also make the comic scene stand out like a sore thumb.

Many critics and Freddy fans don’t like The Dream Child very much, and I suspect this is because the film is the only one of the sequels that really succeeds in making folks feel...uncomfortable.  The organic nature of the deaths, and the questions raised about body image issues and reproduction are not easily digested as mere entertainment. There’s a queasy, discomforting aspect of the film. It’s painfully aware of the fragile nature of our bodies, from birth onward.  The movie begins in a dank, squalid insane asylum, where a group rape occurs, follows on to the birth of a monstrosity, and then features many scenes that showcase how vulnerable and pliable our flesh really is.  There's nothing light about The Dream Child.

In other words, The Dream Child is a legitimate horror movie, not just another roller-coaster Freddy sequel, not just a lark with Freddy as circus ringleader. 

I rather like it, and appreciate what it was trying to achieve, though I readily admit it has flaws.  I remain disappointed that Freddy’s Dead (1991) dropped Alice’s story, and went in a less satisfying, less human direction.

The Films of 1989: Cyborg

Welcome to the post-apocalyptic future as it was imagined in the late 1980s.  If it looks familiar to you, all the better.  There can be little doubt that Cyborg is heavily inspired by the success and artistry of George Miller’s The Road Warrior (1981), a film that generated a slew of imitators in the Decade of Reagan.

Cyborg’s (1989) anarchic world is one of mullets and shoulder pads, not to mention roving gangs and the total breakdown of law-and-order. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Gibson Rickenbacker, a taciturn, Clint-Eastwood-like outsider known as a “slinger” whose tragic personal past is explored in the film through a series of flashbacks.

The Clint Eastwood connection is important not only because Van Damme play a man of few words, but because Cyborg can easily be parsed as a transplanted Spaghetti Western. There’s a Sergio Leone-vibe to the film’s visual presentation. To wit, action is frequently punctuated by close-ups of creepy, physically unusual characters, like the film’s gold-toothed, glow-eyed villain, Tremolo (Vincent Klyn).

Produced for just 500,000 dollars, Cyborg was the final theatrical release under the Golan and Globus Cannon banner. The low-budget film might be deemed somewhat silly-looking by today’s standards, since its evil gang is so two-dimensional and stereotypically villainous, and because the fashions reflect the late eighties to an alarming degree. Similarly, it’s not difficult to discern that the filmmakers take any excuse whatsoever to have Van Damme inflict his van-damage while shirtless. 

Yet Cyborg still works hard to earn a degree of respectability.

It does so primarily through crisp, cleanly-directed fight scenes that don’t hide the stunt-work or rely on quick-cutting or herky-jerky cameras. At least two fight scenes -- one set in a Southern marsh, and one set in the pounding rain -- are unforgettably crafted.

Similarly, the film’s quiet moments (which don’t require Van Damme to speak or emote much…) are oddly affecting. These moments are abundantly simple -- almost more like sketches, or memories half-visualized than full-fledged movie scenes -- and they add to the sense of a fractured, fallen world, and a half-remembered, past.  There’s a dream-like, hazy feeling here that works in Cyborg’s favor.

Cyborg operates on two parallel narrative tracks for most of its duration, telling one story in flashback, and another one in the present. The commendable quality about this structure is that the stories connect in a meaningful way, and each story helps to generate interest in the other.  For instance, the flashbacks reveal Gibson’s sad history, thus explaining his anti-social nature in the present. Similarly, his deliverance, in the final act, hinges on the (surprise) re-appearance of a character from his past.  It’s not like you go to see a movie like Cyborg for the character touches, I realize, but the film actually offers more of value than just a series of increasingly picturesque kickboxing tournaments.

Cyborg may not be a great film, but it features neo-classical touches worth noting.  And since so many post-apocalyptic movies of the 1980s are outright terrible (like Warrior of the Lost World [1981], or 1990: The Bronx (1982), Cyborg’s general competence, thrills and visual legerdemain qualify it, at the very least, as a better-than-average example of the then-popular post-apocalypse sub-genre.

“Just get us out of the City!”

In the not-too distant future, civilization has collapsed and a plague -- the living death -- has decimated the human race. Savage gangs now rule the cities, raping and pillaging wherever they go.

A female cyborg from Atlanta and the CDC, named Pearl (Dayle Haddon), has discovered a cure to the plague, but gang leader Tremolo wants it for himself.  Indeed, he plans to take Pearl back to Atlanta, and control the cure himself.

A loner and “slinger,” Gibson (Van Damme), who has a shared history with Tremolo, shadows Pearl’s journey with an unwanted sidekick, Nady (Deborah Richter). They brave many dangers together, and along the journey, Gibson recalls the family he lost because of Tremolo, and the pain he has suffered.

Before long, Gibson and Nady must confront Tremolo, and get Pearl safely back to Atlanta.

“I Like Death. I Like Misery. I Like this World.”

In several significant ways, Cyborg mirrors an underrated and unheralded post-apocalyptic film from the 1970s: The Ultimate Warrior. 

In that film, Yul Brynner played a loner and fighter who -- at the behest of Max Von Sydow’s character -- had to transport one woman from NYC to North Carolina.

In both cases and in both films, the hero must contend with a villainous gang, and risk emotional connection so as to save the future itself.

And in both films, of course, the journey takes the lead characters from the dangerous “city” (the Big Apple) to the South.  And in both cases, that woman holds the key to the re-birth of the human race. Cyborg isn’t quite as good as The Ultimate Warrior, frankly, but it is not unimpressive.

As noted above, the Pyun film is pretty low-budget, and yet it features two matter terrific paintings of the future world (NYC, and Atlanta) that go a long way towards selling the End of the World as a reality. 

Another scene, also cheaply-produced, sells that reality in another, more intimate way.  Pyun’s camera pans across a series of wagons at a bazaar, and at one point, the audience sees the gruesome imagery of one person being treated for the plague. The patient screams in agony, but is largely unnoticed by others.

The moment is not big and epic, for certain, but the economical imagery sells the reality of this world in a way that is both memorable and economical.

Suffice it to say, you wouldn’t want to live here.

If one is inclined, one can also gaze at the film as a kind of extended Jesus Christ metaphor. After losing his earthly connections -- his family -- Gibson wanders the wastelands and cities, an outcast. At one point, he is crucified by his enemies, literally, but then resurrected, stronger than before.

In his new, fierce fighting form, post-crucifixion, Gibson battles not for personal happiness, but for the future of the planet itself.  He fights to save Pearl (a Pearl of great price), and bring a cure to suffering mankind. 

The Christ comparison is telegraphed in an early fight scene in which we see Van Damme beside a graffiti cross, and then fulfilled, at least, during the character’s crucifixion on the wetlands.  

In fact, if you go back and watch the first frames of the film (following the matte painting), you'll notice, even, a crucifix in a kind of urban junk-yard setting. 

Although Cyborg raises some questions about its post-apocalyptic world (which features both barbarians and high-tech cyborgs…), and relies on clichés occasionally (like the sting-in-the-tail/tale ending), it really goes for broke with its careful and evocative imagery.  The Christ metaphor is valid, certainly (and has been used before, in the post-apocalyptic arena, in The Omega Man [1971]), but other visuals remain just as powerful. 

For instance, in one scene, we see a traditional wedding cake topping burn and melt, a sign forecasting the end of civilization, and more specifically, the end of Gibson’s happy “marriage” because of Tremolo. Two worlds (ours, and Gibson’s) burn down.

The film’s fight scenes, similarly, make the most of their locations.  The scene leading up to the marsh fight -- a pitched chase after a run through the sewers -- gets the adrenaline pumping.  

And it indeed feels like real (if post-apocalyptic) justice, when Gibson finally takes down the film’s villain in a cleansing, cathartic rainfall.

So Cyborg may not be great, it’s true.  The film’s opening scenes -- with the ridiculous over-use of slow-motion photography and the mood of a bad Italian action movie -- portend bad movie disaster.  

But Cyborg avoids that fight with its dedication to trenchant imagery, and a nice focus on humanity.  

Gibson’s memories -- like gauzy and diffuse photos from another era -- make us feel for him, and understand his refusal to be drawn back into battle.  He’s lost everything, and wants nothing from the world.  

Commendably, the film allows him to pull back from that point of nihilism and re-join the war in a noble way.  Sure, it’s been done before (see: The Mad Max movies!), but Cyborg is so crisply shot and lean in presentation that the film succeeds on an artistic basis: as a straight-forward transplantation of the Spaghetti Western to the science-fiction genre.

A cyborg is a being who is part machine and part human. The nice thing about Cyborg perhaps, is that the film’s focus lands more on the human and less on the machine side of that equation than one might rightly expect from a low-budget post-apocalyptic movie of late-eighties vintage.

The Films of 1989: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

I first saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) when I was in college. In fact, I saw the film with a trio of friends, and if memory serves, my film professor at the time….who had to be dragged to the theater kicking and screaming.

At the time, I thought then that the movie was a sort of sweet, dopey take on time travel that didn’t necessarily provoke deeper thought.

And Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure certainly fit in with its historical context: of teenage-based science fiction comedies made in the aftermath of Back to the Future (1985).  My Science Project, Weird Science, and Real Genius all emerge from the same cultural ripple created by the Zemeckis film. 

And, in a way, Bill and Ted’s adventures also forecast the adventures of Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World (1992) and Wayne’s World 2 (1993), at least to some extent.

Critics at the time -- including my professor -- were not amused.

Hal Hinson at The Washington Post called the film “paltry” and “undernourished.” And Variety’s staff reviewer noted that “Each [historical] encounter is so brief and utterly cliched that history has little chance to contribute anything to this pic’s two dimensions.”

On a re-watch this week, I found a few more points of interest in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  The film’s philosophical approach to time travel is intriguing, especially as it relates to the gimmick of the telephone switchboard, only with time circuits not phone circuits.

Also, I enjoyed the film’s sense of fun about time travel, and the idea that anything you can think of can be instantly produced, assuming you remember, later in the day, to travel back in time and provide what you needed at that juncture in the past. 

This is precisely the way that Bill and Ted get out of their worst scrapes.

Probably the most significant thing to recall about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is that it is a comedy film first, a science fiction film second. Accordingly, I can’t really quibble with the success of the scenes involving Napoleon eating an ice cream sundae, or enjoying a San Dimas water slide. 

Those moments are pure silliness, and yet still garner big laughs. Napoleon is the film’s break-out character, in part, perhaps, because he is granted the luxury of the most screen time.

I prefer Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) to this film by a wide margin, in part because it throws about a billion silly ideas at the wall to see what sticks and consequently never has a dull moment. But also because this inaugural effort doesn’t treat school (or school teachers) with much verisimilitude.

In other words, I can buy that Bill and Ted go time traveling in a TARDIS-like phone booth.

I can even buy that these two slightly dopey kids become the foundation of a future utopia. Party on dudes!

But I simply don’t believe a teacher would allow them to pass their history classed based on the final project as it appears in the movie, or even that all the world’s great figures of history and philosophy would agree to participate in it. 

Genghis Khan wasn’t known for going along to get along.

Yet, in a sense, that last joke reflects on the magical spell cast by Bill and Ted themselves. They are such amiable losers, I guess, that the future and the past bows before them without complaint.

They’re not worthy.

At least not until the sequel…

“We’re destined to flunk most egregiously.”

In San Dimas, CA, in 1988, Bill Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), are in danger of flunking their final history project.  If they do fail, Ted’s father plans to ship him off to military school in Alaska.

Fortunately, a life-line arrives from seven hundred years in the future.  

A man named Rufus (George Carlin) provides the boys a time traveling phone booth that will allow them to experience history first-hand, so they can prep the greatest school project ever.

For Rufus, this is a vital matter. If Bill and Ted don’t pass this test -- and their history class too -- a future utopia in 2688 will fail to come into existence…and that is the very culture Rufus hails from.

Bill and Ted head back in time to round-up historical figures including Napoleon (Terry Camilleri), Billy the Kid (Dan Shor), Genghis Kan (Al Leong), Joan of Arc (Jane Wiedlin) and Abraham Lincoln (Robert Barron).

But will they get back to San Dimas in time to deliver their report, and can they manage to police an unruly crop of historical figures?

“Be excellent to each other.”

The undeniable magic of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure arrives in the central characters’ atypical mode of expression. In particular, the boys are (unknowing) masters of the malapropism, not to mention (as Vincent Canby did…), superlatives. 

In short, Bill and Ted’s Southern California mode of expression is horrific to grammarians but hysterical to audiences. Most of the laughs in the film arise from the conjunction of their very modern Surfer-type speech with characters we remember from history books and thus deserving of a modicum, at least, of respectful discourse.

So Joan of Arc is described here by the dudes as “Noah’s wife,” and Napoleon is referred to as a “short dead dude.”  

When angered, Bill is prompted to say things like “You medieval dick weed!”

The film repeats the same joke over and over again (whereas the sequel parodies modern expression, Star Trek, views of the afterlife, Ingmar Bergman films, board games, and about a dozen other topics…).  But for most of the first film's running time, this joke about expression and vocabulary is pretty damned funny, or at least chuckle-worthy.

In terms of sci-fi concepts, the time travel angle of the film is intriguing, and unique. Most films concerning time travel don’t postulate that the present “continues” moving while time travelers are away in other epochs.  But that’s the logical conclusion to be drawn from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  

Even while they are in other eras, the clock keeps counting-down in San Dimas towards their history project dead line. In other words, because they are of that present, they move with it, even while they are in the past.

The corridors of time themselves, are depicted visually as vast cords or cables in an old fashioned telephone switchboard. You can dial into any time period you want and make a connection to it, but the “present” keeps on trekking. 

In a sense, then, the present is a moving target. This idea is seen the prologue as well, as a Trio of future Elders/leaders check their watches and realize that a major test is coming up for Bill and Ted, the so-called "The Great Ones."  Yet of course, that test occurred, chronologically-speaking, seven hundred years earlier.

More significantly, I appreciate the film’s comic discourse on paradox.  Early in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, our heroes get bogged down in one. Their band, Wyld Stallyns, needs a “triumphant video” to succeed, but it also needs “Eddie Van Halen” on guitar. 

Yet he will not join the band unless they have a triumphant video.  

And they can’t have a triumphant video without his participation.

Voila, a paradox!

This idea is reflected in the film’s last act, when Bill and Ted realize that they can -- while in the past – devise a plan to carry the day (like getting the police chief’s prison keys…) and have it happen instantaneously.  

They do so by traveling back in time, and planting those items when they are needed. 

Of course, this is a paradox too.  If the boys don’t get out of their present predicament, they can’t return to the future to execute their plan of escape.  

But they have executed their plan of escape, because the items show up when and where desired, suggesting they were successful.

This joke goes right back to the debate over which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Or in this case, Eddie Van Halen or the triumphant video.

Where Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure proves markedly less than enthralling are in the terrains of production design and production values. The future looks cool enough, but the visits to the past are spliced with old movie stock footage (for the Napoleon segment), familiar back-lot Western towns, and other cheap expedients. The movie looks more like a cut-rate time-travel TV series of the 1960s – 1980s (Time Tunnel, or Voyagers! maybe) than it resembles a full-fledged motion picture. 

And because so many historical figures are brought into the present of 1988, they come off as one-note jokes instead of characters, with the exception of the aforementioned Napoleon.  

Joan of Arc gets into aerobics, Sigmund Freud fondles a corn dog (sometimes a corn dog is just a corn dog…) and Beethoven plays a modern synthesizer.  None of this behavior is terribly surprising or original.

In other words, the jokes are okay, if obvious, and don’t lead into any deeper or more humorous material.  Similarly, George Carlin -- quite possibly one of the funniest human beings ever to inhabit the Earth -- is not given funny material in the movie.

In the end, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure seems a meditation on the concept that there are some of us who go through life working hard, barely making it. While others, like Bill and Ted, seem to glide through life with no real obstacles or anxiety, only to find all their non-effort rewarded by history, and society at large.  

They are dopes, it is true, but harmless, good-hearted dopes. The sequel is much better, in my opinion, because it puts them up against greater odds, and against more ferocious villains (including the Devil, and De Nomolos).  They must earn their future in that film, rather than just sort or surf a wave to it, as they do -- metaphorically-speaking -- in this film.

On Thursday: Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

The Films of 1989: Back to the Future Part II

Back to the Future Part II (1989) is the franchise’s own The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and therefore the finest film in the Zemeckis trilogy.

This rousing middle chapter of the saga transforms the cheerful triumph of the 1985 picture into personal tragedy, thus taking Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to his lowest ebb. The sequel also elevates Biff (Thomas Wilson) from school yard bully to Evil Incarnate, a kind of grotesque “lounge lizard” variation of Donald Trump only with a murderous streak, not merely bad hair.

This sequel also proves brawnier in terms of visual imagination and sense of humor than its critically-appreciated predecessor was, and includes some nice, amusing nods towards 1980s nostalgia.

In fact, Back to the Future Part II even lives up to its featured Jaws 19 holomax tag line:

This time, it’s really, really personal.

What that means, specifically, is that our hero, Marty, has not overcome the seeds of his own downfall, and, therefore, the future could still turn out quite badly for him. The black pick-up truck -- the first film’s valedictory symbol of his promising, successful (and yes, yuppie…) future -- becomes, instead, the vehicle of his ultimate destruction.

This 1989 sequel has been in the news a lot lately, since we entered the year 2015 in fact, for both those things it gets right and those things it gets wrong about our current epoch.

But just because everyone seems to be talking about Back to the Future II doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth discussing at length here on the blog. On the contrary, this dark middle chapter forms the emotional heart of the Back to the Future trilogy by forecasting the darkness in Marty, and increasing, by degrees, the trilogy’s narrative and intellectual complexity. 

For example, Back to the Future Part II’s remarkable final act not only goes back to 1955 and the events of the original film, it actually travels "inside" those events, and inside the frames and compositions of the previous entry. It inhabits that same milieu (and the Enchantment under the Sea Dance) with remarkable technological wizardry (forecasting Forrest Gump [1994]) and ratchets up the suspense, as events we think we know take new twists and turns.

If Doc Brown created the time machine to examine the “pitfalls and possibilities” inherent in human nature, Back to the Future Part II also serves that mission ably. The first film concerns how, via time travel, we can understand and appreciate our parents as people who were young once too...not just weird old folks.  The second film, uniquely, pursues that same end, but reveals that the faults that plague us as teenagers have the power to totally destroy us as adults.  Life -- and time -- can be quite cruel.

Paradoxically, time has been anything but cruel to Back to the Future Part II. It was once critically-hated by the establishment, but now seems to be the film in the BTTF trilogy that everyone absolutely adores.

Better late than never...

“No one should know too much about their own destiny."

Immediately following his return to 1985 (from 1955), Marty (Fox) is confronted by Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), who warns him that something terrible will happen to his children in the future, in the year 2015.  

Accordingly, Marty, Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) and Brown time travel thirty years to a brave new world, to a Hill Valley of flying cars, hover boards, holomax movies and 1980s nostalgia.

There, Marty must save his son from a future in jail, a future caused by Biff’s son, Griff (Wilson).  

After the future is restored, Marty purchases a Sports Almanac from the Café 80s, realizing that it features all the winning teams circa 1950–2000, and he can get rich gambling on them. 

Brown stops Marty from taking this road of greed and cheating, but elderly Biff has overheard the plan, and takes the DeLorean back in time to 1955, so his younger self can execute it.

Meanwhile, Jennifer visits her home with Marty in Hilldale in 2015, and learns that Marty was injured in accident thirty years earlier, primarily because because he couldn’t tolerate being called chicken. 

Worse, his boss in 2015, Needles (Flea), wants to engage Marty in an illegal activity, calling him chicken if he doesn’t comply. Marty succumbs, and is promptly fired from his job.

Marty, Doc and Jennifer return to 1985 in the returned De Lorean, only to learn that elderly Biff has changed everything.

George McFly is long dead, murdered by Biff, and Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is married to the scoundrel.  Biff controls the police force, and has turned Hill Valley into a den of gambling and sin.  

Doc and Marty realize what has happened, and determine they must travel back to 1955 again, this time to prevent Biff from using the Sports Almanac that has altered the past, and can change everybody’s future.

 “Be careful in the future.”

Back to the Future Part II’s three act narrative structure is also, significantly, a three age or three epoch structure. 

The film goes from the adventure in 2015 to the dark passage involving Biff-World in 1985, to the tense and ultimately despairing span in 1955. 

Thus, in a subversive way, the film plays like Back to the Future in reverse, with every new challenge being met with a greater challenge, and any sense of closure or triumph proving, finally, impossible to attain...at least until the next sequel.

Specifically, Marty succeeds in saving his son and daughter in 2015, but his avaricious plan with the Sports Almanac is adopted by Elderly Biff, and rewrites Marty’s present. 

When Marty and Doc arrive at that present, in 1985, they are unable to beat it or over-turn the nightmare -- one depicted in endless night-time shots and punctuated by images of grave-stones, cemeteries and obituaries -- without traveling again, this time to 1955.  

And in 1955, crucially, the events that made Marty’s future “happen” (his folks’ first kiss at the Enchantment under the Sea dance) are intruded upon by a "new" version of Marty, whose object this time is not to assure or cement a high-school romance, but to steal back the item that has made Biff’s frightening ascent possible: the almanac. Marty is back in 1955 for business, not love. He must not only succeed in his quest, he must avoid being spotted by his Mom and Dad to be, and also by the version of him we met in Back to the Future.

In the final act, Marty attempts, again and again, to re-acquire the aforementioned sports almanac, but is vexed at every turn.  He thinks he gets it at one point, for example, but finds that it is just the dust jacket hiding a girly magazine. The second time Marty gets it, he loses it because Biff calls him chicken....and he can't let it stand.

And when he finally gets the almanac and burns it, Doc is zapped by lightning out of 1955, along with the DeLorean, trapping Marty thirty years out of his time, with his own future on the line.

And that future doesn’t look good, because we know that even if Marty sets the time line straight, he will be in a car accident, one caused by his constant and continuous inability not to take the bait when called “chicken.”

So where Marty went back in time and succeeded in his mission in Back to the Future, this sequel takes him from failure to failure, with no triumph or victory in sight, and personal injury and failure looming in his future.  

In both circumstances, importantly, Marty is to blame.  Using the Sports Almanac is his idea in the first place.  And the psychological foible involving being called a coward is also his own cross to bear.

Yep, this time it is really, really personal indeed.  Marty’s life is being erased because of himself, and his own failings. He may escape 2015 and Biff World, but can he escape his own nature?

This sly creative structure purposely subverts what we know about the Back to the Future saga up to this point.  As I noted in the introduction to this piece, the black pick-up truck -- a symbol of success -- becomes instead a symbol of Marty’s failures.  

Furthermore, the triumph at the Enchantment under the Sea Dance from the first film gets re-written as a tense action scene with the ultimate kicker being not that Biff knocks out Marty and takes the almanac, but that one version of Marty knocks out the other Marty.  

Again, Marty is to blame for his problems, and that moment -- with Marty #1 storming through a high school exit and knocking out Marty #2 -- is the perfect embodiment or visualization of that leitmotif.

Structurally-speaking, the middle part of any literary or film trilogy finds the hero at his or her weakest, and the forces of darkness gathering.  

The middle part is the point of highest danger, highest risk, and one can detect immediately how this is true in Back to the Future Part II. The film takes Marty to his lowest point, where Biff is strongest, but also to a place where Marty faces another nemesis: himself. What makes the film more than merely subservient to a standard formula, however, is the film’s increasing sense of complexity and despair.  

Events in the year 2015 seem to turn out well, with Marty’s son saved. But then we learn of Marty’s car accident, and his firing from his job. Then Biff rewrites the eighties. And then, finally, the moment of innocent romance and triumph we associate with the original film is broken up, spatially and event-wise -- intruded upon literally by new footage over old footage -- so that it becomes essentially, a battle-ground where paradox (and therefore the end of the universe) is possible at any moment.  

In this way, Back to the Future Part II starts out as being consistent with the mood of the 1985 film -- joyous and light -- but builds inexorably towards a sense of total catastrophe, or at least collapse.

Because Back to the Future Part II is the only film in the franchise that travels to the future, it has become the subject of articles describing what it gets wrong and what it gets right about 2015. We haven’t yet had 18 sequels to Jaws (1975), for example, but uniquely, the film gets right our march of technology in regards to entertainment. 

Today we don’t have Holo-Max, but we have I-Max, and that seems a close enough reckoning about our age, doesn't it? Consider together the Jaws name attached to a sequel, and the update of Holo-Max technology and you get an accurate comment on 2015 film-going. 

Basically, we’re seeing sequels and remakes (Star Wars VII, Mad Max IV, Jurassic Park IV) instead of new cinematic visions, but they’ll have a fresh coat of paint thanks to technology (I-Max and 3-D).  

So Back to the Future Part II gets the franchise and sequel number wrong, as well as the technological nomenclature...but it gets the idea absolutely right. The year 2015 is mired in high-tech un-originality.  In a sense, this idea is reflected, too, by the "remake" aspects of the film's first action sequence.  We get the skate-board chase in the town square of Back to the Future all over again in this sequel...but this time with hover boards (from Mattel).

And no, we don’t have self-drying clothes or hover boards in 2015, and we don’t live in houses filled with Fax machines (“You’re FIRED!”), but we do have large flat screen TVs, and Doc Brown makes an intriguing point about fashion. 

In particular, he notes that in 2015, all the kids wear their pants inside out. Again, that’s not technically accurate, but it seems like a reflection of the idea that so many folks of a certain generation where baggy pants that dip on their hips and reveal their underwear.  In other words, something that would have seemed baffling and unthinkable in 1985, perhaps, seems to have come to pass in terms of fashion in 2015.  To put it another way, the actual detail is wrong, but the idea is spot-on.

Certainly, Back to the Future Part II gets much right in terms of 1980s nostalgia; the enduring myth of St. Ronald Reagan being a prime example in 2015. It doesn’t matter that President Reagan raised taxes (several times), granted amnesty, or exploded the deficit, the myth of his conservative perfection (as opposed to practical pragmatism) persists. 

The Café 80s segment of the film -- with Reagan, Nintendo, Michael Jackson and Ayatollah Khomeini -- is one of the most amusing in the film, and aptly notes that thirty years seems to be the perfect span in which to forget a decade’s flaws, and remember only the good stuff. 

That means, in 2045, we should all be waxing nostalgic about this year. I’ll be 75 at that point…

Ultimately, how wrong or how right Back to the Future Part II is about 2015 probably doesn’t matter. The film can be judged a remarkable success for a number of reasons.  

First, it brilliantly serves its purpose of taking the trilogy from triumph to tragedy, just in time for the emotional rally in Back to the Future Part III (1990).  

Secondly, it establishes -- despite the mythic villainy of Biff -- the fact that Marty is, in fact, his own worst enemy. And for me, that idea very much plays into the franchise’s over-arching commentary on family.  How often have we seen those we love make the same mistakes?  How often have we wished that they could change?  How often do they fail to change?

In some sense, Back to the Future Part II is about the difficult time between teenage years and adulthood when we become set-in-our-ways, no longer pliable. Instead of bending, we break.  Instead of being willing to adjust and change, we fall back on old beliefs and behaviors instead. We might grow up, but we also grow rigid; we grow old.

Marty himself is on the verge of that point here, about to make a mistake that he will pay for later in his life.  

Back to the Future Part III brings this idea into focus, and Marty gets one last chance to escape an unpleasant destiny.  

We start to see then, in this remarkable sequel, that 1985 is Marty's pivotal year, as 1955 was George and Lorraine's pivotal year. 

In my review of the original Back to the Future, I wrote about the same events happening over and over again in Hill Valley, film to film, but to different generations. That same idea carries on in this sequel, with the torch of mid-life crisis and disaster passed on to our main protagonist.

Next Tuesday: Back to the Future Part III (1990).