Wow, and we thought Season One was a hot mess! HOLY FREDD-A-RINO! 1980s America’s most beloved movie monster is back to serve up 22 one-hour anthology episodes that make absolutely no sense.
Like always, my fellow Fred Head, Audrey Farnsworth, and I chose six episodes at random that tackled terrifying subjects like animal testing, mimes, Shakespeare, talking computers that date each other, riverboat gambling, telekinesis, Caprese salads, late-night talk shows, and hospital sex.
This random string of six episodes also featured guest appearances by Kyle Chandler and literally no other relevant name in 2022.
In this article, the RED text represents Audrey’s thoughts while the BLUE text represents my thoughts.
Let’s dig in!
“Memory Overload” (Season 2, Episode 5)
directed by: Don Weis ; written by: Michael Kirschenbaum
cast: Robert Englund, Kyle Chandler, Bill Camp, Andrew Prine, Karen Landry, Eileen Seeley
original air date: October 30, 1989
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
Well, this episode begins with two college girls in a classroom and one of them says to the other one, “The only reason I’m taking English is to stay away from science professors. Because I keep falling in love with them.” What? What, dude? You keep…you keep fuckin’ doing WHAT? Like, all of them? How many science classes have you taken? Do you…want to do science, though? Or are you switching to liking literature because you don’t like literature? Are you maybe just in love with…science itself? None of these questions are answered because the English professor walks in, drunk as shit, and pretends to KILL A STUDENT. By TEARING HER EYES OUT. But it’s actually just a theater major performing! Those fuckers will take any goddamn opportunity, I swear to god. (Note: I was a theater major).
Anyway, she falls in love with THIS pretend murderer professor, too, so, um, I think it’s a different problem than she thinks. The drunk teacher wobbles in front of a bathroom at school before waking up hangover with literal Kyle Chandler banging on his door, who deserted the army because he likes poetry and has been having nightmares about his dad chasing him through the woods. Anyway, the professor stops drinking, but Kyle Chandler starts drinking instead, so I guess they switch places, and now Kyle Chandler is shitty and the professor is nice. The villain of this episode is alcohol, and the hero is poetry. The professor begins teaching good instead of teaching drunk. The girl from the beginning is like “Why are you making me learn?” and the teacher is like “Because this is school” and she’s like “I don’t LIKE that,” anyway, Kyle Chandler and the drunk teacher are the same guy, and he spends forever arguing with his younger self. The shitty girl shows up at his door asking for a tutor because the school told her that she could come to his house to ask him this(?????????????).
And now the new story is about…this girl, who grew up to be an asshole and works at the mortgage store. Or a credit card emporium. I don’t know, dude, she fucking works at a Credit Building. This episode is–and you will not fucking believe this–a noir style crime drama narrated by an actual fucking computer that sounds like a detective. The computer wants this woman, who spends her work days screwing people over by changing credit information (??) and talking to her mother on the phone about hats (???), in JAIL. It’s like, “She’s bad, see? And I’m gonna stop her.”
The computer starts talking to her. It says, “I’ve caught you. And you will go to jail.” And she’s like, what? I’m just trying to help my mom buy a hat? You’ll NEVER stop me! …But stop her it does, when she gets mad at a guy who stood her up for lunch, and gives him the worst credit ever. The computer has her now! She starts thinking her date is talking to her from in the computer and then the COMPUTER PULLS HER INTO IT WITH A HUMAN HAND, but she escapes (what is happening) and her date is like, “Go back into that computer and fix my credit and I’ll marry you,” and the computer’s like, “Yeah, come in here!” and of course she fucking does. When she gets out, she tries to physically beat up the computer but gets taken to jail by a detective that shows up and says, “Hello, a computer told me you are a criminal.” Um. What did I just watch, Michael? And how do we feel about the reoccurring brother/sister characters who once again seem like lovers?
Audrey, we’re like twelve or thirteen episodes deep into this dumb show at this point and I always thought (and I assume you have too) that the reason these stories are so unrelated and hard to follow is because the studio execs or whatever made them combine to half-hour episodes into a full hour show for scheduling block reasons. I’m here to tell you that is NOT the case. Last weekend I watched a four-hour documentary on the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and when they talk about this show, they say the initial idea was to do two vaguely related half-hour stories in a single episode. THIS CONFUSING SHIT WAS THE PLAN FROM SQUARE ONE! WTF?!
Anyway, I too was a theater major, and the classroom opening of a drunken theater professor pretending to rip out a student’s eyeballs while ranting about the Bard, totally checks out. This guy might be an alky, but he’s a real trailblazing wild card of a knowledge dispenser! It’s easy to see why his students keep falling in love with him, who wouldn’t want to wake up every morning next to a guy that most certainly smells like a decomposing cat? And who would never, ever respect an opinion or interpretation of Shakespeare’s text that doesn’t exactly match his. That’s right, unless you parrot his own opinion in your own words, he’ll verbally dress you down in an effort to persuade you to hate yourself. Don’t sleep your professor, students. Just DON’T do it. They suck. They clearly want to be in a relationship with somebody who worships them as a superior rather than appreciates them as an equal. That’s not a partnership, it’s exploitation. And 97% of the time, they have an itty bitty wittle dick.
So this sloppy, stinky middle-aged butthole drags his drunk behind home and is immediately accosted by a jarringly young-looking Kyle Chandler. I mean he always looks boyish, even with salt and pepper hair, but here he looks like he can’t be older than 19 years old. EDIT – He was around 24 years old when this was shot. He bursts into this professor’s apartment announcing he deserted the army and that his dad, an important army dude, is trying to kill him. When Kyle Chandler’s dad shows up, he begins gulping vodka, prompting Kyle Chandler to beg his dad not to drink. It’s then clunkily revealed that Kyle Chandler is actually the professor, twenty-some-odd years ago, and this is all a drunken memory of the professor deserting the army and his prestigious military fam at 18 to pursue a life of poetry and teaching at a community college.
Anyway, the professor dies or something, I dunno, I watched this three weeks ago but it might as well have been three years ago, and the story shifts to one of his students and her day job. She works at some credit place emporium like Audrey said, and she works on a computer. I guess her computer is alive though and a good portion of this story is told in film noir style voice-over from the computer’s POV. The computer talks about having a one-night stand with a Macintosh computer or some shit before trying to capture or kill the main woman. Or kidnap her boyfriend?
Oh so her boyfriend is a character in a later Season 2 episode, “Monkey Dreams”, which we’ll talk about further down in this article. He’s a monkey scientist and gambling addict who is also having sex with his sister. Anyway, there’s a scene where she destroys his credit because she thinks he stood her up. She apologizes and asks if dinner is still happening, to which he very justifiably responds by breaking up with her. Anyway, she gets arrested by a computer and sucked into a computer/server room. That’s about it. She dies.
“Silence is Golden” (Season 2, Episode 7)
directed by: Charles Braverman ; written by: Jonathan Glassner
cast: Robert Englund, Jeff Yagher, Sherry Hursey, Albie Selznick, Gretchen Palmer, Kim Morgan Greene
original air date: November 19, 1989
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
Freddy’s Nightmares loves a good central asshole and it’s difficult to think of a more ridiculous one than the PayLess Shoes version of Howard Stern in this episode. Rick Rake really tells it as it is or in his words, “I say what I mean and mean what I say.” After ragging on “fat, ugly people” for a good five minutes he receives a comically large bag of fan mail and immediately we know this episode is going to be about this asshole losing everything. He and his wife are watching a mime on the streets of LA when a weird fanboy tries to harass them. Rick flies off the handle and accidentally punches the mime, who ends up trying to sue him. This sends Rick into an odd temper tantrum where he begins trashing mimes on the air and referring to them as one of the leading problems of life in 1980s America. Maybe “trashing them” isn’t an accurate term, because he literally calls for their murder over the air. He encourages his audience to go out and physically harm mimes.
This pisses off the mime who apparently is some sort of supernatural teleporting demon mime, prompting him to kill Rick’s wife with a magic sinkhole. This sends Rick into an even crazier headspace as he goes on the air to suggest that baby seal clubbers in Alaska should fly down to Ohio to beat every mime to death like they’re seals. The mime doesn’t joke around with this type of shit so he appears at the radio station and attacks Rick Rake with an actual rake, severing his vocal chords, rendering him incapable of going on the air and spreading mime rhetoric ever again. GOOD FOR THE MIME. THAT’S A WIN FOR COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE IN MY BOOK! It’s a lose for baby seals because without mimes to club to death, those god darn Alaskans are going to keep murdering baby seals for sport. So actually, fuck this mime?
With Rick no longer able to talk, the story then shifts to the mime? Who might be the same mime but is actually a cat burglar posing as a mime? Like the wet and/or sticky bandits from Home Alone, this robbin’ mime leaves his calling card at all the houses he visits – a yellow flower. However, the law is catching up with him, and the people he robbed end up getting murdered. He claims he didn’t commit any of the murders and so we assume it’s the supernatural teleporting demon mime from the first half of the story and not him? They never really confirm. The back half of this episode is much less interesting than the first half unless you like watching a mime take off his makeup and act like a human, which is maybe even more fucked up than clubbing baby seals. Mimes aren’t supposed to talk and if I see one talking, I’m calling the police. Audrey, what are your thoughts?
Well, Michael, I was disturbed pretty much immediately by this guy calling for the deaths of mimes everywhere on a radio station broadcast, but hey, what else can you expect from a guy who loves to say the phrase, “I say what I think, and I think what I say.” Whenever a dude on anything says that, I’m like, oh boy. Here we go. Whatever he says is going to be terrible at best and an actual fucking crime at the worst. And just like any guy in this situation, he’s got a boss who’s like, “I love that you’re terrible! In fact, I want you to be MORE terrible!”
All that mime was trying to do was dance in front of a dinosaur statue, and he gets punched–which was an accident by the way, because he was TRYING to punch a guy who was ACTUALLY being rude! Too late though, because this mime is going to ruin your life. The mime shows up at his house, and he’s like…pretty regular about it? Like? Sir, I think you should be more alarmed that this person has found your home. He then dreams about punching the mime again, but he wakes up and has just punched a vase. Man, this guy has punched both a mine AND a vase. He is out of control.
This guy turns into a raging mime hater, challenging all of the mimes in the city to fight him. Although, for the record, “I challenge any mime that’s out there” is one of the better sentences in the human language. Anyway, I guess he was right, because this mime IS a murderer. Moral of the story here is that everyone sucks. Everyone! Honestly, when they switched the story and started following the mime, who is now ONLY wearing some little panties, I dropped my water bottle on the ground and startled my neighbor.
Mime is a thief, I guess? But also a murderer. But the real villain is…his girlfriend, who has been pretending to be her dead friend for…a year! And she planned this with…the pawnshop employee…who she ALSO kills. God, that was boring. See? Everyone sucks. Everyone, all of these guys!!
“Monkey Dreams” (Season 2, Episode 9)
directed by: Robert Englund ; written by: Michael Kirschenbaum
cast: Robert Englund, Eileen Seeley, Rick Dano, Sherman Howard, Sharon Mahoney, Alan Berger
original air date: December 3, 1989
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
First of all, this was directed BY Robert Englund, and I must say, there are some FUN CINEMATIC CHOICES IN THIS. Wonderful job, Robert. Looks great. Very good looking, a lot of these shots. Okay. Now that I got that out of the way…WHAT THE FUCKING HELL, MAN.
A guy is gambling, and he doesn’t have the money and a guy comes to his house PISSED AS HELL he’s missing dinner with his family to threaten the gambling man by strangling him with a phone cord. Yikes! Enter: His sister. And this is where my “what the fucking hell man” exclamation ALSO arrives, because FOR THE WHOLE EPISODE I THOUGHT THIS WOMAN WAS HIS GIRLFRIEND. Because she ACTS like his girlfriend and he has DREAMS about BEING ROMANTIC WITH HIS SISTER, ALSO.
Anyway, it turns out this guy is a SCIENTIST who works at a SCIENCE LAB trying to…contact aliens. And if he contacts the aliens, he will get a bunch of money and can pay off the angry gambling man! But hang on! He’s a scientist with no money? Okay! No worries, because he gets a message on his computer that says “hello we are aliens from space and we are talking to you.” Wow! He has…contacted space with his computer! He did it! Looks like this is all going to work out after all!
Except…plot twist! He decides to…shoot the gambling man, who is there now, WHILE sitting at his desk! But hang on–a message is coming in from space! BUT THE COMPUTER GETS A GLITCH IN IT because a…monkey in the other room is…actually the one sending the messages? AND WHILE THE MAN IS BEING CONFUSED ABOUT THIS, the gambling man shoots HIM. So he has a sex dream about his sister and dies.
Let’s switch to plot number two, where the lead scientist in the lab…oh god, this is even worse…injects cancer into animals as research. WHAT THE FUCK. The rest of this episode is just this asshole scientist putting cancer into a monkey and a dog! And his assistant is like, “Please stop doing this,” and he replies, “Convince me that these animals are alive and I’ll stop doing it! But they’re NOT alive! Because they’re NOT HUMAN!” What???? What? Why would someone need to convince you that…an animal is alive? “Winston the monkey is a being too!” the assistant pleads. “No he’s not!” the SCIENTIST responds. I can’t. This guy literally spends the whole episode saying, “Do you have something you want to tell me?” to the monkey, as if the monkey suddenly speaking words and being like, “hello. I feel pain and am alive. Please don’t hurt me,” would be the ONE THING to make this guy stop putting cancer into animals.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happens next but I think…the monkey has a dream? And in the dream, the monkey says the word, “Friend.” So the monkey is buying into this and dreams that he can tell the scientist that he is alive. But he can’t. So he doesn’t. But he really wants to. And then the episode ends. Michael, I have one question for you: What?
Well, Robert Englund clearly wants us to think about it because he even says so as Freddy Krueger at the end of the episode. That’s how the episode ends, the monkey having a dream about the Republican scientist making fun of him and imagining the word friend before we cut back to Freddy wearing a Phoenix Suns gorilla mask and prompting us to apply critical thought to this pungent hot pot of seventeen bad ideas someone shoved into a 43-minute telenovela shell. It’s about so many things and pivots so many times and then has the goddamn gall to suggest we didn’t get it because we haven’t thought about it??? Seriously? “Think about it?” Think about an episode that was clearly written in LA traffic on the way to the shoot? Let’s try to make sense of this.
So, we open on this delusional gambling addict who we’re 98% sure is hooking up with his sister. She’s always rubbing his chest and touching him while saying she can’t be around him anymore. Anyway, back to the gambling. How does he get the money for his gambling? Well, he’s a scientist by day doing experiments on UFO and ghost shit. Let’s call him Gambler Scientist. His boss, Republican Scientist, thinks he’s an idiot and his coworker, Monkey Scientist, who works with monkeys, is maybe in love with him? He owes Stone Cold Steve Austin a bunch of money, so he’s getting his bones broken and living in fear of getting murdered. All-day long he dreams of being “a riverboat gambler”, gambling in a little boat room where people wear green visors and lose to him in blackjack. He discovers aliens or some shit and then gets killed by the Mafia.
PIVOT TO –> REPUBLICAN SCIENTIST. He’s clearly very jaded by the cruel politics of the scientific community and has a real “fuck everyone who isn’t me” attitude. He backs it up with absolutely no courage and two healthy scoops of ignorance. He has nightmares about environmental groups hunting him down like Rambo and stealing his federal grant money, probably for pot bongs and abortions, in his mind. The Monkey Scientist tries to tell him they need to stop experimenting on and torturing the poor little monkey in the episode but he says she’s an idiot who wears her heart on her sleeve and should grow the fuck up. He also fantasizes about having sex with her but fears she loves animals so much she might turn into one and kill him. This guy sucks. He’s afraid of literally everything! Anyway, Monkey Scientist ends up trying to free the poor monkeys and Republican Scientist fires her for being a liberal piece of shit. It ends with him having bad dreams about monkeys and a monkey having bad dreams about him, where Robert Englund prompts us to think about it. Think about all this random horseshit that meant absolutely nothing at all. Let’s all take a moment and do that.
At least this one is sporadically entertaining? It’s better than the next one, I’ll tell ya that.
“Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?” (Season 2, Episode 10)
directed by: Bill Froelich ; written by: Wayne Rice
cast: Robert Englund, Suzanne Tara, Sharon Farrell, Courtney Gebhart, Julie St. Clair, Christopher Finefrock, Chris Nash, Jeannine Lewis
original air date: December 10, 1989
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
Possibly the single most boring entry of the series, Do You Know Where Your Children Are? squanders a wonderfully ridiculous title on the dumbest, least thought-out story (maybe) ever to sashay its way down the runway of network television. The Burtons live with their annoying ten-year-old boy and their insane, always-screaming teenage daughter they keep locked in the basement. This isn’t some big secret, they’re really open with multiple babysitters about keeping their teenage daughter chained up in the basement because they don’t trust hospitals. Apparently, their daughter went nuts and murdered her birth mother (the current mom is the stepmom who married into this bloody fiasco) on the living room floor and the state of Ohio was just like, “Yeah if you want to keep her locked up in your basement and feed her Caprese salad every day, we won’t press charges.” This show has never been one for logic but this is just bananas!
Anyway, this high school girl is forced into babysitting for these weirdos, the Burtons, because her best friend/the Burtons’ regular babysitter wants to get stuffed by her boyfriend that night. So, this girl goes over to this house and immediately has her personal space violated by this deranged little ten-year-old boy who has Texas Chain Saw Massacre posters in his room and is somehow comfortable rubbing the babysitter in her breast area. Anyway, the parents tell the babysitter to ignore the anguished screams from the basement and she does. She falls asleep and has a dream about the sister escaping the basement and then wakes up to the sister getting out for real, but then it’s revealed THAT’s a dream, and then, she wakes up again and the sister has turned into the other babysitter/best friend, but that’s just a dream too. The plot just doesn’t progress for 30 goddamn minutes because everything that gets established is immediately written off as a nightmare. WTF kinda bullshit is that?!
Eventually, after half of the episode, the daughter escapes the basement fo real and switches places with the babysitter. The babysitter is now locked in the basement while the maniac daughter tries to become her. The Burtons come home and apparently, the babysitter can’t yell, ‘HEY! IT’S ME THE BABYSITTER! YOUR CRAZY DAUGHTER SWITCHED PLACES WITH ME, GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BASEMENT!” She can only moan and yell like she’s having a painful orgasm. Anyway, the escaped daughter takes the babysitter’s clothes and stages a car accident, so the mom of the babysitter has a mental breakdown because she thinks her daughter died. I guess this is just a ploy so the escaped daughter can take advantage of the mom’s mental state to pretend to be her daughter, returned from the grave. The mom makes the escaped daughter soup in a sauce pan (?!?!?!) and has big blocks of cheese just hanging out at room temperature in her house. The babysitter eventually breaks out of the basement and the mom ends up shooting and killing her cause the crazy daughter convinces her the babysitter is not her daughter, but an imposter.
These fucking episodes are impossible to write about because they’re so all over the place. It’s like a shirt stitched together with fabrics from ten other shirts. Everything is mismatched and gets so convoluted it’s hard not to get lost. In fact, you probably understood like none of the previous three paragraphs. This episode is one of the weaker ones to be sure, with only fleeting moments to enjoy. I wish I looking for writing work in 1989 so I could give these episodes some goddamn structure. They would still be awful but I swear I could make them more palatable. Audrey, what did you think of this weird turd of an episode? And would you write for Freddy’s Nightmares if you weren’t a toddler in 1989?
Dude the thing that I was most upset about was that the main girl’s friend was like, “Can you do my babysitting job so I can bang my boyfriend in YOUR bedroom in your parents’ house?” Is that actually a request? Is that a normal human request? Honestly, I missed the part about them saying she was locked in the basement and thought she was locked inside of the desk BY the basement for like, a good chunk of the episode. I just kept thinking, how did she get in there? But, yeah, I would’ve loved to write for this show, hahaha. *I* would’ve had it so that the girl WAS locked in the desk.
Like, yeah, it sucks that her friend didn’t tell her about the girl locked in the basement. But I think the thing that REALLY sucks is that she didn’t tell her that she would be babysitting a Texas Chainsaw-loving freak of a tiny child who rides around on a tricycle. Sorry, kid, but you’ve got a weird fucking family and a girl trapped in your basement–get the fuck off that creepy little bike.
Oh, Jesus Christ, the second half. First of all, no one ever knows where their kids are in this episode. And this mom can’t even know where her daughter is WHEN HER DAUGHTER IS STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER. Instead, she believes her daughter is…a woman who looks nothing like her and enjoys playing with the largest knife that currently exists. “My daughter, not my daughter, loves to poke a huge block of cheese with her favorite Large knife. I love my daughter.”
Meanwhile, her actual daughter shows up and, as her mom points a gun at her, just FUCKING STANDS THERE CRYING. Dude! RUN! This is clearly a terrible situation and your MOM DOESN’T KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON. GET OUT. Go anywhere else! Leave! Oh my GOD LEAVE okay you didn’t and now you’re dead. Good god. Get me out of here.
“Dreams That Kill” (Season 2, Episode 11)
directed by: Tom DeSimone ; written by: Tom Blomquist
cast: Robert Englund, Dick Gautier, Deborah Rennard, Christine Belford, Don Perry
original air date: December 17, 1989
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
A talk show host wants to do a show about a Freddy victim, but Freddy won’t have it! He tells this motherfucker that he’ll kill him if he does that show! No show! Freddy doesn’t want it! So, they do another show where a guy punches the talk show host so hard, he ends up in the hospital. Okay! Wait…hang on. Freddy is now hosting the talk show. Freddy has taken over the show, and is GRILLING the talk show host on stage. All the guests are passing around the talk show host’s hand and eating it. WAIT IT WAS A DREAM. The talk show host is in the hospital and thinks Freddy is after him, because he is. And guess what? THE DREAM SHOW IS HAPPENING, says the producer, a little baby boy who loves ratings. Then the talk show host girlfriend takes off ALL HER CLOTHES in the HOSPITAL ROOM and they have sex. In the hospital. Normal!
Hope he enjoyed that because now he’s in a coma forever, hanging from the ceiling by some ropes! In a hospital! Because they did the dream show after all, and Freddy electrocuted him with a big cord, not killing him…so he could torture him forever! As he hangs from the ceiling! IN A HOSPITAL. This is how hospitals go! Normal hospital situation. And guess what–it gets more normal, because a doctor decides to illegally and secretly put the talk show host’s working brain cells into a head trauma patient (???). Please welcome our new story: A guy who gets the talk show host’s brain waves put into HIS head and now he acts like him. It’s called science. Learn it.
The guy starts thinking the talk show host’s memories. He knows his girlfriend! And dreams about her…oh god, here we go again, she’s taking off her clothes again and having sex with HIM in the hospital room! She loves to do this! It is her favorite activity. (Okay, I guess it’s just a memory from the other guy, but still, wonderful we get to see it again, thanks). He awakes to his mommy arriving to take him home but makes her pull over so he can…audition to be the new talk show host! So, he basically jumps out of the moving vehicle and NAILS the audition, because…he’s got the old guy’s brainwaves. This confuses Freddy, who’s like, “Uh, didn’t I kill you?” So now Freddy’s in THIS guy’s dreams, thinking it’s the OTHER guy’s dream, which it is, sort of, and all of the doctors are mad at the doctor who illegally PUT BRAIN CELLS FROM ONE GUY’S HEAD TO ANOTHER GUY’S HEAD.
It’s back to the hospital for him! And, I’m sorry, Freddy is here to kill him. So he…kidnaps the bad doctor and ties him up with tape, and injects the talk show host’s brain cells into HIM, AS WELL. Michael! Help me! What just happened!
What happened is that I think we witnessed an episode that wasn’t nearly as interesting as the plot outline promised. Instead of an asshole radio disc jockey who pisses off mimes, we get an asshole late-night talk show host who pisses off Freddy. It begins with him doing a segment on fundamentalist buzzkills hating rock n’ roll music. He has both a rock star and a concerned mother on the show, arguing about the merits or detriments of that music genre. The rock star tells the mother she needs to loosen up and maybe he can help her loosen up by taking her outside and shoving his dick in her. She’s predictably outraged and then he’s like, “You talk too much for a chick, shut up.” As much as I hate fundamentalist Christian stances against pop culture artifacts they’re incapable of understanding, I’m more on her side cause this guy is an outrageous asshole. She calls him a pervert and attacks him with her purse, but ends up knocking out the talk show host with her terrible aim. In his mini-coma, the talk show host is approached by Freddy who warns him not to do a show on dreams or he’ll kill him.
The talk show host doesn’t listen and does the show on dreams only to be murdered by Freddy via electricity. There’s a bizarre, trippy dream sequence where the talk show host gets fired and the studio hires Freddy to replace him. On Freddy’s new late-night show, “Springwood NIGHTMARE!” he has guests ranging from a drag queen to Adolf Hitler. Yes, Hitler is in this episode, with not a single line. On the show, Freddy has the former talk show host tied to a giant charcoal grill where he tortures him.
Anyhoo, after the talk show host dies and his co-host has wild sex with him in a hospital bed, the story shifts to the young 20-something dude who receives the talk show host’s dream juice in an emergency transplant??? This doctor just injects him with dream juice from the talk show host’s brain. Of course, this means the 20-something dude adopts the slimy personality of the talk show host and has sex with the co-host in another hospital bed.
After that, the 20-something travels down to the set and demands the studio give him an audition to host this talk show. They agree and after watching this random stranger with no experience do 30 seconds of a segment, they fucking hire him! But along with the job, comes Freddy, who somehow has access to this new dude’s dreams because of the dream juice injection. The new dude is attacked and ends up in the hospital again. Freddy visits his hospital room to take a huge shit in his bathroom, eat his chocolates and of course, kill him. It doesn’t work out and the new dude ends up killing the real villain of the episode – the American healthcare system.
P.S. – This is the machine they hook the talk-show host up to in the hopsital. WTF is this? How is he suspended? Is this deleted footage from The Cell with Jennifer Lopez? We’ll never know, folks.
“It’s My Party and You’ll Die If I Want You To” (Season 2, Episode 12)
directed by: Tom DeSimone ; written by: Jonathan Glassner, David Braff
cast: Robert Englund, Francois Giroday, Greg Monaghan, Barbara Truetelar
original air date: December 24, 1989 (CHRISTMAS EVE!)
BLUE = MARGETIS ; RED = AUDREY
The very best episode of Freddy’s Nightmares I have ever seen. It’s still god awful but at least it’s wildly entertaining throughout the entire runtime and even though it gives us two stories that never connect, in any meaningful or even sensical way, I couldn’t care less!
It begins with a fake psychic with real Miss Cleo meets Baywatch vibes (mostly because they have her boobs aggressively pushed up, almost completely out of her bra for some reason) This show is always finding gross ways to appeal to its horny straight tween male viewers and this is one of the most blatant examples of that. Anyway, she starts pretending to channel a captain on the Titanic and makes the mistake of mentioning “sonar”, which according to a “professional skeptic”, who stands up and gives her the business, wasn’t invented until after the Titanic sank. Dr. Harry Lee, Professional Skeptic, has been after this psychic for years and now possesses the power to bring her down.
However, the psychic is also being possessed by Freddy Krueger, so Dr. Harry Lee ends up getting his throat sliced with a broken vodka bottle. This is done with the stupidest pun of maybe the entire series, Dr. Harry Lee asks for a Bloody Mary, to which she replies, “How about a Bloody Harry?” and slices his throat off.
Anyway, not soon after that, she dies or kills more people or something, and then that story ends and the second story of the episode begins. It’s about a hacky Hollywood screenwriter played by the dude who played Robert of Robert’s Gourmet Goodies on Frasier. He doesn’t have his French accent, but he’s pretentious enough without it. He’s visiting Springwood, OH for his dumb high school reunion while struggling to finish a script for his editor. He’s having money problems because he’s a writer (LOL) and this might be the end of his career. However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel – Freddy Krueger was in the same graduating class as him so maybe he can just write Freddy’s life story as a movie and sell it? That pisses Freddy off, who appears at the high school reunion to fuck with the writer. Everyone ends up dead and Freddy retains the rights to his story. A happy ending for the ages. Audrey, what did ya think?
Well, for someone seemingly obsessed with the fucking Titanic, this woman, who is dressed as a bedsheet, knows…truly nothing about the Titanic. She “channels” William Murdoch, first mate of the Titanic, who is apparently…a pirate? And likes to show up in a hotel conference room and reenact his death? And here comes this fuckin guy, standing up and declaring himself a “professional skeptic,” which, my god, if that’s an actual job then I’m leading entirely the wrong life.
OKAY, CAN SHE TRY TO SUMMON ANYONE OTHER THAN WILLIAM MURDOCH????? Literally can she know even ONE other person on that ship? Thank god Freddy took over her body and tied her up in a chair inside of her own brain! Best thing for her career. I mean, not so great for her being alive long-term, but what can you do? Stop trying to fucking talk to one guy on the Titanic, my god. Love this look for Freddy of being this woman, honestly. And he picked a great time to do it, because literally everyone else in the hotel comes up to her room! Lots of people for him to get!
Anyway, the next story is wonderfully, thank god, about a writer who is down on his luck. I guess the writer is staying in the same hotel room as the previous murder site? And that is the through-line? Who gives a shit, this guy sucks hard ass and likes to type on the largest typewriter I’ve ever seen in my life. “You promised me that script!” his agent yells at him on the phone, to which—lmao—he responds, “I told you, I have to go to my 20-year high school reunion!” Sir, did you really not finish a movie script because…you wanted to go back to high school? Get this guy out of here. He doesn’t even know what he’s going to write about! So, apparently, someone was just like, “I need a script from you! ANY script! Get it done!” and this guy GOES BACK TO TO HIGH SCHOOL, this is a crime.
The writer’s girlfriend finds out about Freddy’s origin story, and reveals that FREDDY ASKED HER TO GO TO THE PROM WITH HIM. And she said YES as a JOKE! Well, lady, he’s back and here to kill you, which of course he does, and unfortunately, your famous writer boyfriend is too concerned with hanging out with Freddy’s dorky high school BFF and using this whole fucking story for his next movie to give a shit. And…oh for the love of christ, he’s literally writing A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy kills him and the BFF steals the script and writes the movie. Good for him. At least he was actually FRIENDS with Freddy. A happy ending, in my book!
Margetis Movie Reviews 