pumpktoberfest #15 - end of the road.
film: a nightmare on elm street 3: dream warriors
beer: post road pumpkin ale
as far as horror films go, wes craven has definitely solidified his spot as one of the top directors of all time, with an almost forty year resume that includes the hills have eyes, the serpent & the rainbow, shocker & the scream franchise. the most enduring of his films has been a nightmare on elm street, about freddy kreuger, a janitor who was killed by the citizens of springwood, OH & is now obsessed with getting revenge on them by killing their kids in their dreams. it's since become a cult classic, spawning seven more movies (only one of which craven both wrote & directed--1994's new nightmare), with a michael bay-directed remake of the original film set to come out in the spring of 2010. my favorite of the series & the only other one (other than new nightmare) that craven wrote the screenplay for is 1987's a nightmare on elm street 3: dream warriors.
it was the first nightmare on elm street film i saw & it features both the debut of a young patricia arquette & one of the best theme songs ever, "dream warriors," written by the 80s hair metal band dokken. arquette plays kristen parker, a girl who meets freddy early on in the film when he tries to slash her in her dreams with his iconic bladed glove. he doesn't kill her but when she awakens, she has cuts on her arms & her mother thinks she tried to commit suicide, so she sends her to a psych ward. when she arrives, she realizes that the other patients are the last remaining children of the mob that killed freddy & decides that she needs to protect them. freddy still manages to kill a bunch of them, usually with some wisecrack like "welcome to prime time, bitch" (when he kills a girl with a TV). as is par for the course with the films, he's defeated in the end but in the final scene, we learn that he's not actually dead. sequel!
the word on the street in brooklyn these days is that you should probably try brooklyn brewery's post road pumpkin ale before the pumpktoberfest season is over & you can no longer get one. living in brooklyn, i see this pumpkin beer pretty much everywhere i go. to be honest, since brooklyn brewery's beers are in coolers & bars all over the place, i'm starting to think of them as new york's version of sam adams. by that, i mean that while i enjoy their beers & i'd choose them over a budweiser any day of the week, i no longer think of them as anything special. in that tradition, i've sort of already grown tired of the pumpkin ale, but it's still pretty good.
one of the first things that i noticed when i opened it was that, unlike most pumpkin beers, it doesn't have an overwhelming spice smell to it. in fact, when i took my first sip, i was surprised at how little spice there actually is in it. i tasted a little bit of nutmeg, but the spices really just sit back & let the beer speak for itself. in addition, there are apparently hundreds of pounds of pumpkins in every batch, but i guess it must be a seriously big batch because while you can taste the pumpkin, there's really only a hint of it. since the spices & the pumpkin are so tame, it has a relatively smooth taste. so yeah, it's tasty but it's nothing to dream about. that's ok though, because as we've learned from the nightmare on elm street films, dreaming will get you killed.
tomorrow! my #1 horror film in the entire universe & our final pumpkin beer of the pumpktoberfest season! don't miss it!