I think I see your problem. You have this list. It’s a list of people you need/want to buy a Christmas gift for. The trouble is that they’re into home theatre, and you don’t know Star Trek from Star Wars. You couldn’t tell a Wolf Man from a Wolverine. And you always thought that Paranormal Activity was something too kinky to talk about. Fortunately, Upcomingdiscs has come to the rescue every Christmas with our Gift Guide Spotlights. Keep checking back to see more recommendations for your holiday shopping. These gift guides ARE NOT paid advertisements. We take no money to publish them. This time we turn our attention to Warner Brothers and a couple of their great 4K releases from this year.
A Nightmare On Elm Street Complete Collection In 4K
“One … two… Freddy’s coming for you, three… four… better lock the door, five… six… grab your crucifix…”
Freddy might have been born in the mind of Wes Craven, but he grew and developed in the knife-wielding hands of Robert Englund. Granted, not all of these films are equal in quality, but the first was everything you could ask for in a horror/slasher film of the era. Freddy himself is by far the most colorful and animated of the slashers. His burned face, fedora, striped sweater, and knife-blade glove were all integral parts of the wise-cracking maniac. Now Warner Brothers has released the original 7 films on UHD Blu-ray in Ultra High Definition. It’s a dream come true… well… at least a nightmare come true.
You know the story already, so I’ll stick the main idea. Freddy was a child molester and killer before the parents of Elm Street decided to burn him to the ground in a boiler room. Good home-style justice goes wrong when Freddy reappears in the nightmares of the children of Elm Street. He has become a demon of sleep where he is able to manipulate the world into the most terrifying images possible for his victims trapped by their own slumber.
What was just as iconic as Freddy himself were the fabulous dreamscapes that were his domain. Unlike the other slashers of the time, Freddy didn’t operate in some dark place out in the real world. No lake campgrounds or quiet any town streets here. Freddy created a domain of pure evil and Hell inside the dreams of his victims. Here there were no rules of physics. Reality was whatever the dark corners of the human mind could conjure. It was a land of endless possibilities, and Freddy was king. He could manipulate these dream wonderlands to his own brutal purposes. Some of the most memorable scenes in the franchise can be found in the sleep world of Freddy’s intended victims. Who can forget the stretching arms in the alley with those knives sparking against a metal wall? An incredibly vivid and bizarre look is what this dreamland brought to the movie and its sequels. This film doesn’t have the Hell playland kind of sets that later films would employ, but Freddy’s boiler room has a fanciful, yet stark reality that creates superb atmosphere. It’s a very sweet treat indeed to be able to finally see those images in high definition. I’d love to see the entire series get the Blu-ray treatment sooner rather than later.
There should be some talk about the cast of A Nightmare On Elm Street. Of course, it all begins with Freddy himself and the incredible Robert Englund. More than any actor of this genre, Englund created a real character that relied more on who was playing him than any of the others. In fact, various actors ended up playing the likes of Jason and Michael Myers during even the original runs. But Englund gave life to Freddy and continued with the character through all of the sequels. It makes me just a bit nervous to think about the current remake and having someone else, for the very first time, fill that fedora and sweater. John Saxon delivers as the police lieutenant whose own culpability in Freddy’s demise makes his daughter one of the killer’s intended targets. He carries just the right amount of determination tinged with that nuanced look of guilt and regret to make us understand the situation with that much more clarity. Heather Langenkamp is an unusual and effective choice as the primary representative of the victims. She’s not the typical great-body-survivor chick. She’s far more everyday girl than you ever see in these things. She manages to make it that much real for us. Finally, you just can’t talk about the cast without a mention of one of the kids that is here purely to get knocked off. This would be the very first movie for future superstar Johnny Depp. Yes, that really is a teenage Depp getting swallowed by his bed. He would later make a cameo on the 6th film as a guy on the television. I think you can say that Depp has come a long way.
Ain’t nothing like the real thing, Baby. It was such a treat to have the original in 4K. I was never happy with the remake and as good of an actor as Jackie Earle Haley really is he’s just no match for Robert Englund. Of course, Englund is much to old to ever do it again but I think I’d take an old Englund over any young whippersnapper the studios might be tempted to pull out. Jason and Michael are well hidden and rather stoically violent. Freddy has a strong personality that can’t be recreated. It’s why this film alone from all of the slasher franchises just hasn’t been remade after the first and only attempt. “It is now twelve midnight and this is station KRGR leaving the air.”
Here’s the thing: either you love Freddy or you hate him. Entering Freddy’s world is like one giant haunted house at your local amusement park. There’s enough going on that you can usually see new things on repeated viewings. Maybe what makes this series more effective than some of the others is the material itself. We can all try to avoid the creepy places and people in life, but we’re all prisoners of our dreams. It’s the one place where we are a captive audience. Invite Freddy, and you never know what’s going to happen. “nine… ten… never sleep again.”
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest On UHD Blu-ray (4K)
“Well, gentlemen, in my opinion, if we send him back to Pendleton or we send him up to Disturbed, it’s just one more way of passing on our problem to somebody else. You know, we don’t like to do that. So I’d like to keep him on the ward. I think we can help him.”
R.P. McMurphy (Nicholson) is a repeat criminal who has caused more than his share of trouble in the system. He is sent to the Oregon State Hospital to have his sanity evaluated. There the head psychiatrist Dr. Spivey (Brooks) doesn’t really think he’s crazy. But McMurphy is held over for observation. He’s placed inside a general population ward where he comes into contact with the resident “crazies” of the hospital. He takes a particular liking to Billy (Dourif) who is a sexually repressed teenager who stutters and lacks any kind of self-confidence. In a big way, he is the opposite of McMurphy himself, who is quite the extrovert and borders on manic most of the time. There is an Indian man who is about as big as a mountain who the staff and inmates simply call Chief (Sampson). At first Chief is the subject of mockery from McMurphy, but the allegedly deaf and dumb Indian soon earns McMurphy’s respect, something we quickly understand is a rarity for McMurphy. Other patients include the childish Cheswick (Lassick), the shy and naive Martini (DeVito), the borderline psychotic Taber (Lloyd), and Harding (Redfield) who was pretty much the crew’s unofficial leader before McMurphy came along. In charge of the ward is the indominable Nurse Ratched (Fletcher). A battle of wills soon develops between McMurphy and the cold nurse. What McMurphy doesn’t know is that she has the power to keep him even after his original jail sentence has expired.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest has about as storied a history as any film made in the last 50 years. The book was written in 1961 by Ken Kesey. It was immediately controversial. It didn’t help that the author himself was a self-admitted drug addict who was high while he wrote a good deal of the book. But that didn’t mean that the story wasn’t a powerful one. It shone a light on the mental-care industry from a man who had worked in the field himself. One of the early admirers of the book was Kirk Douglas, who got a copy of the manuscript while it was still in galleys. He quickly obtained the rights and turned it into a Broadway play where he played the part of McMurphy. The play only lasted three weeks but had stirred up quite a buzz. That was fine with Douglas, because he had always intended it to be a film anyway. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find financial backing, and there wasn’t a studio out there willing to touch the property. After 10 years of trying, he gave up on the whole idea.
Enter his son Michael, who was just starting his own acting career on television with the popular Streets Of San Francisco. Michael was also very intrigued with the story and asked his father to let him have a crack at getting the thing made. He decided to go with private financing and partnered with Saul Zaentz to produce the picture. They hired Kesey to write a screen adaptation of the book. But Kesey was still very much in his drug days and created a film that showed the Chief having weird hallucinations throughout the film. I guess we all know which character the author identified most with. The author had a rather messy split with the producers, who went in a more conventional direction.
Once there was a script, the film had to be cast. Both Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando turned down the part of McMurphy. It was then that the producers and director Milos Forman came up with the idea that they wanted a known name, but maybe not so much of a big star. That was much of the concern of studios and investors when Kirk wanted to do the lead role. At the time Jack Nicholson had established himself as a solid actor and was just ready to break out into another level of stardom. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest would become that break-out role for the eccentric actor. Danny DeVito came about his supporting role because he had been a long-time friend of Michael Douglas. The two are still the best of buddies today. The final piece of the cast puzzle was The Chief. Apparently large Indians are not so easy to come by. Will Sampson was a criminal who had just gotten out of jail for “borrowing” a horse that didn’t belong to him when he was discovered by a car salesman hired by Douglas to locate a large Indian.
Still, it’s Nicholson’s incredible performance here that makes the cast what it is. Many have admitted that it was easy to just react to Nicolson’s antics and methods as their characters would to McMurphy. It took the actor out of his laid-back reputation and made him one of the most animated actors of our time. You wouldn’t be quite so surprised at his turn as The Joker after watching him play McMurphy. He doesn’t get near enough credit, because he makes it look so easy and natural. One falls into the trap that he isn’t acting, the performance is so seamless.
Finally, the movie was ready to shoot. The location would be that last hard-fought piece to fall into place. Douglas had always intended that the film be made at the real Oregon State Hospital, but ran into considerable opposition. There was fear, not entirely unfounded, that the movie might make the institution look bad. Fortunately, the supervising doctor, Dr. Dean Brooks, would fight to have the film made there with some conditions that included the hiring of many of the inmates as extras and technical craftsmen on the film. Dr. Brooks himself would snag the role of Dr. Spivey in the film. His staff would also act as the other doctors on the film. So the cast and crew practically lived in a wing of the hospital. The dressing rooms were actual cells, and many of the cast members would sleep there rather than go home for the short respites between shoots. Nicholson became the manic leader of the actors and was found to be as vocal and protective of them as McMurphy was. Even Louise Fletcher was kept at an arm’s length from the boys to maintain that detached coldness in front of the cameras. Dr. Brooks also ended up bringing the cast and crew some tragic news. Acting as the film’s medical doctor he diagnosed actor William Redfield with leukemia. The production stalled a bit as Michael Douglas and his team had to decide if they should recast the part and reshoot the actor’s scenes as Harding the inmate with wife issues or hope that Redfield could finish the work. He was given 18 months to live by Brooks and he was so good in the part, as was everyone here that they stuck with him and he survived to see the film released. He died almost 18 months to the day of his diagnosis. If he had not been diagnosed at that time it’s likely he would not have had even that much time.
The movie is loaded with symbolism that survives the many drafts and incarnations from the original book. McMurphy was always intended to be a Christ figure. He comes to the ward to bring a kind of salvation to the patients and ends up dying for his trouble. He had the same anti-establishment credentials. Nicholson was made aware of the symbolism and attempted to bring it to life. It’s odd, but in my many conversations about the film, that analogy escapes most viewers. You should watch the movie with an eye to all of the symbolism. It’s loaded.
The film did begin a debate in the mental health industry that brought about many reforms and rights to patients that did not exist in most states before the film was made. It’s almost dated today because of how much the field and the hospitals have changed in the 50 years since the movie was released.
Many of the supporting cast went on to pretty healthy careers. This was Brad Dourif’s first film, which would lead to his wonderful Chucky portrayals and voice work. He had a wonderful turn in The Lord Of The Rings. Christopher Lloyd and Danny DeVito would go on to star in Taxi together where they shared wonderful chemistry. Both have since had very illustrious careers. Lloyd, of course, peaked as Doc Brown in the Back To The Future Films. Scatman Crothers has a small but entertaining part in the film as well.
It’s about time that One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest received the kind of clean-up that this release demonstrates. It deserves the attention and careful restoration it finally got. I didn’t find the Blu-ray “restoration” was quite so genuine so Warner Brothers is now giving you a definitive copy of the film just in time to celebrate 50 years. “No man alive could resist that.”
