On Screen

...Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, though truly terrifying, loses a little of its urgency by objectifying the sources of the fear...

...Their "sin" is being visited upon the same children they were trying to protect, now teenagers...

...Several of the wretched adolescents who do not quite succeed in taking their own lives wind up at a hospital for sleep disorders that resembles an expensive boarding school except the patients are locked into their rooms at night...

...BY ANY reckoning Angel Heart is a better film...

...Nightmares derive their power precisely from the fact that the mind is pitted against itself, caught in a dreadful inner world from which it cannot escape...

...At the outset of Angel Heart we are introduced to private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke), whose harmless specialty is searching out missing people...

...Through a strange conjunction of circumstances, it happens that every time he visits someone who knew the man he is seeking, that person dies in a mysterious and horrible manner shortly afterward...

...But Angel Heart has indeed been talked about quite a bit, so that most people are aware it is a weird, "sick" film...

...We are confronted with the awful solitude of the human soul, caught in desperate circumstances, with no voice of reason, no grounding in convention, that might serve as its point of reference...

...When she announces—in what is not the only unintentionally funny moment —that Freddy was "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs," her words literally bring the house down (at least they did at the screening 1 attended...

...The reason for his current rampages, as everyone knows who has seen the first film in theseries, is that the parentsof the Elm Street kids he was preying upon while alive got together and trapped him in the basement of a house, and then set it on fire...

...At the last moment it retreats from teaching us anything and simply entertains, albeit in grand fashion...

...His investigations lead him from Harlem to Poughkeepsie and then down to New Orleans, where he is caught in the thick of eerie superstitions, witchcraft, tarot cards, and a chicken cult led by the beautiful Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet...

...And it is magnified by the wrenching feeling— relentlessly and masterfully exploited by Angel Heart—that civilization is only a superficial veneer whose function is to conceal the evil that is the world's ultimate guiding principle...

...This is the chilly isolation of the nightmare, the sense of inhabiting a universe categorically cut off from the sane one the rest of the world knows...

...The dream sequences in Rosemary's Baby and Wild Strawberries, for example, are among the most disturbing scenes ever put on film...

...Here the nightmare is merely a frame for all the standard tricks of a high-tech fear film, and the concatenation of sophisticated special effects simply does not scare us...

...Inartistic paintings might as well not exist, and the same could be said for mediocre poems...

...Angel Heart is more profoundly disquieting than those films because it shows us how an overpowering sense of evil sets to work upon a single human mind...

...It is something to be enjoyed finally for its own sake, like a roller coaster: It won't get you from one place to another, but you will be thrilled by going around in circles...

...Or when he learns that the jazz musician he has just seen has been found castrated, choked by his genitalia...

...Although as dead mucus-coated child molesters go, he's a spunky guy, his present apotheosis can be put down only to an almost masochistic avidity for high camp...

...The terror that erupts at such moments, though, is sustained throughout by other means...

...Few films have addressed with greater skill or subtlety, not the philosophy of evil, but rather its psychology...

...If the film had succeeded in this respect alone, one might be willing to overlook the weakness of the script, direction and acting...

...A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 3: Dream Warriors and Angel Heart are among recent releases designed specifically for those who like to pay to be scared...

...The problem with Elm Street 3 is that it is too extroverted—it reflects no awareness of the nightmare's possibilities...

...Director Alan Parker is a virtuoso at underscoring the poetry in old buildings—the spiraling stairways, the light filtering through intricate networks of fences and gratings...

...Moreover, it is inartistic to the point of cynicism, exhibiting an unshakable confidence that its audience will go for anything it dishes out (apparently with ample reason—since the present offering is the third, and probably not the last, of the Elm Street series...

...What is the nature of the fear that is purveyed by this film...

...by all the inmates, the very scum of the earth, murderers, perverts and lunatics...

...There is surely a large dose of gore in it, as when the protagonist returns after a few minutes to the room of a doctor addicted to morphine and finds the man's ashen corpse laid out on his bed, one eye open, a bullet through the other...

...Angel is given only a few clues and has no real understanding of what he is being asked to do...

...In fact, they are all haunted by the same demon, Freddy Krueger, a hideous burn victim and one of the living dead...

...He is most fearsome when the fingers of his right hand tum into razor-sharp knives...

...his earlier Repulsion, in its splendidly subaquatic moodiness, is more unsettling...

...The scenes of New Yorkin 1955 are beautifully realized, and the not uncommon attempt to reduce the elements of reality to pure forms is here memorably brought off...

...Or when he comes back to the tarot den of Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Rampling) to find her dead on the floor, her heart in a paper bag...

...Thepublicity department that did the movie's promotion perhaps reached the summit of hubris in having the ads say, "Everything you've heard about it is true...

...A young doctor there struggles to end the menace by giving Freddy's bones a proper Christian burial, which, a vision tells him, is the only way the ghost will be pacified...

...The acting and the direction are artistically superior...

...One aspect of the production that has been especially well received by virtually everyone is the cinematography...

...After a few dramatic pauses, the nun grandly reveals that Freddy Krueger was theoffspring ofthat awful episode...

...Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is a deeply frightening film, too, but its terror is partially neutralized by the charming turn that Jack Nicholson's character takes as he tries to bash in Shelley Duval's head (humor and terror never, ever work together), and by the causes of the fear being so improbable and immaterial...

...To base a horror movie entirely on nightmares is a novel idea, and if executed properly it could be quite terrifying...

...She was raped (for two weeks...

...Informed sources tell me that Freddy Krueger, the mucus-coated burn victim who had been a child molester/murderer, in his third screen incarnation is becoming a cult figure...

...But two movie genres, horror films and comedies, can justify their existence simply by fulfilling their unassuming promises to frighten or to amuse (respectively, of course...

...Freddy appears to them in nightmares and causes them to destroy themselves...

...She explains that a young woman (the nun herself, it later turns out) was once locked up in the tower of an insane asylum while the wardens were away...

...It is further disappointing that Angel Heart is unable or unwilling to reap its full moral consequences...

...A comedy that makes us laugh, however crudely it does so, a horror film that leaves us genuinely terrified, no matter how atrocious its special effects, has done its job well, and we have no right to ask anything more from it...

...If the tension that is created in the course of the film is very impressive, the ending—which I won't reveal—is unsatisfactory: It radically reorients the direction of the plot by disclosing what we could not have known—or worse, what we were led to believe the opposite of...

...However inane the treatment, the f ormula is not unpromising...

...He has an appointment with a certain Louis Cyphre (Robert de Niro), adapper, secretive client dressed in black, with long effeminate nails and a walking stick topped byasilver handle...

...Cyphre merely wants to find out whether a singer named Johnny Favorite is dead or alive...

...he is also able to transform himself into any shape he chooses, high-tech, fungoid or reptilian...

...As it is, they are accentuated to a ghastly degree...

...Freddy is wreaking a vengeance that is rightfully his, according to the film's perverse logic...

...But like less accomplished horror films, Angel Heart is more form than content...

...The doctor who is trying to save the imperiled adolescents learns the truth from a wraith-like nun who appears out of nowhere at various points in the film...

...The latest development in the saga of this unhappy street is that a growing number of teenagers who have lived there are trying to commit suicide...

...But the first of these films, created by Wes Craven and directed by Chuck Rüssel, is not scary...

...Still, the question is whether you like your films weird and sick...

...Freddy, we also know, was bonkers to begin with, and inElm Street3 the extraordinary genesis of his condition is uncovered...

...If its artistic strivings lead it around in unavailing circles, it nonetheless does genuinely frighten the overwhelmingmajority of viewers...