ah shit.
watched New Nightmare and Nightmare on Elm Street (original) within the last week, both are on Netflix. Sorry you had to close it out with Scream 4 pal.
I could never get a handle on him out as an artist. His earliest films were grotty and based on pretty tony material, after he made it out of the grindhouse ghetto he turned mostly into a brand name who snuck in creative but wierd as shit ideas into his films. Its easy to forget just how gol-dang strange A Nightmare on Elm Street is, and especially must have been to audiences who had never seen anything quite like it before. And if Nightmare became banal over time due to its success and influences it spawned, well good news, Deadly Friend is just as batshit bizzare and everybody else had the good sense to not copy those ideas.
When he wasn't being a gun for hire or a rented name he could make an inspired film. But the peculiar texture to his more personal works, and even his mercenary ones is hard to quantify (like his De Palma lite technical prowess, or his very strange way actors talk and interact to each other in his films) and even harder to replicate. The guy was an original, no doubt about that. People copied his commercial successes, but they would have been better off doing what he did and trying to make whatever crazy ideas they could hatch up into a semi-conventional film. I mean just think about how bugnuts crazy The People Under the Stairs is, or Vampire in Brooklyn, or The Serpent and the Rainbow...
