Charles Fleischer

Two friends try to kick their drug addiction after a friend overdoses. When they try to enroll in a detox program, things quickly go wrong. After a friend overdoses, Spoon and Stretch decide to kick their drug habits and attempt to enroll in a government detox program. Their efforts are hampered by seemingly endless red tape, as they are shuffled from one office to another while being chased by drug dealers and the police. —Andy Bogursky <bogursky@erols.com>

On a desert road in New Mexico, a powerful demon in human form, The Collector, pursues drifter Frank Brayker. The vehicles crash and Brayker flees. Local drunk Uncle Willy takes him to a decommissioned church converted into a boarding house, where he rents a room and observes the residents: owner Irene, prostitute Cordelia, postal clerk Wally, and a convict on work release named Jeryline. A misogynistic cook named Roach arrives and informs the group about a theft attempt on his employer's car, unaware it was Brayker, and a suspicious Irene calls the sheriff. Sheriff Tupper and his deputy Bob encounter The Collector at the crash site, who convinces them that Brayker is a dangerous thief. At the boarding house, Tupper and Bob learn that Brayker is in possession of an important artifact and that he is carrying false ID. Tupper also gets word from his base that both cars were stolen and he arrests Brayker as well as The Collector. The Collector kills Tupper by punching through his skull. Driven outside by the key-like artifact Brayker possesses, The Collector draws his own blood on the sand and produces a team of demonic creatures. Brayker uses blood from the artifact to protect the building and tells the group they must wait out the night. Unable to get in, The Collector uses psychic powers to seduce and possess Cordelia. Cordelia kills Wally and cripples Irene before Brayker kills her. The group attempts to escape through old mine tunnels under the building, where Jeryline finds a boy named Danny hiding. The other townsfolk, under demonic possession, drive them back into the church. The residents demand an explanation, and Brayker reluctantly tells them the history of the key artifact. Following the creation of Earth by God, demons used seven keys to focus the power of the cosmos into their hands. When discovered, God created light, which scattered the demons and the keys across the universe. The artifact that Brayker holds is the last key needed to reclaim power; and to protect it, God had a thief named Sirach fill it with the blood of Jesus Christ. The guardians of the key, immortal while holding it, have since passed it on, refilling it with their own blood when they die. Brayker received the key from his commanding officer during World War I. Danny disappears and Jeryline rallies everyone to look for him, during which Roach sneaks the key out of Brayker's satchel. In the church attic, Irene and Bob discover that Wally was planning to attack the post office with a trunk full of weapons. The Collector soon possesses Uncle Willy, who attacks the others. While battling Willy, Roach makes a deal with The Collector to trade his life for the key, but The Collector betrays and kills him soon after Roach walks away. Brayker retrieves the key in the battle and Irene and Bob sacrifice themselves to stop the remaining minions. In the attic, The Collector brainwashes Danny, who mortally wounds Brayker before Jeryline kills him. As he dies, Brayker initiates Jeryline as a guardian of the key, deactivating all blood seals. The Collector overpowers Jeryline, taking the key from her. When he offers her a place at his side and prepares to take her heart as a trophy when she silently refuses, Jeryline confronts The Collector and spits blood from the key in his face, causing him to revert to his actual demon form before being destroyed. At dawn, Jeryline refills the key with Brayker's blood and boards a bus with her cat, sealing the door behind them. Down the road, the bus stops to pick up a stranger (Mark David Kennerly), who declines to get on stating that he'll catch the next one. Dressed identically to his predecessor and carrying the same suitcase, Jeryline realizes that he is the next Collector. After exchanging a glance in passing, the new Collector begins following on foot, whistling the theme song to the Tales from the Crypt television series.

In present-day New York City, an Eastern bluebird named Buster runs away from his siblings and he meets an intelligent orange Tyrannosaurus named Rex, who is playing golf. He explains to Buster that he was once a ravaging dinosaur, and proceeds to tell his personal story. In a prehistoric jungle, Rex is terrorizing other dinosaurs when a spaceship lands on Earth, piloted by an alien named Vorb. Vorb captures Rex and gives him "Brain Grain", a breakfast cereal that anthropomorphizes Rex and vastly increases his intelligence. Rex is introduced to other dinosaurs, altered by the Brain Grain: a blue Triceratops named Woog, a purple Pteranodon named Elsa, and a green Parasaurolophus named Dweeb. They soon meet Vorb's employer Captain Neweyes, the inventor of Brain Grain, who reveals his goal of allowing the children of the present time to see real dinosaurs. He plans to take them to Dr. Julia Bleeb who will guide them to the Museum of Natural History, and warns them to keep away from Professor Screweyes, his nefarious and evil brother who travels around causing mischief after losing his left eye several years ago. Neweyes drops the dinosaurs off in the Hudson River in the present day, but they are unable to meet with Bleeb. Instead, they meet a young boy named Louie, who plans on running away to join the circus. Louie agrees to help the dinosaurs get to the museum. Riding on Elsa, Louie soon encounters a girl named Cecilia, who is miserable with her life because of her neglectful parents. She agrees to run away with Louie and help the dinosaurs, and when she threw away her Thanksgiving hat, it lands on a little girl who wished for a similar hat and ends up granting her wish. To prevent mass panic, Louie decides that the dinosaurs need to stay hidden during their journey to the museum. He disguises them as floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. But when Rex sees the Apatosaurus balloon coming out in the parade, Rex naively greets it, thinking it is real and already intelligent like he is. Then in the process of hand-shaking, Rex unwittingly punctures the balloon, causing it to run out of air and fall on the dinosaurs, but left them unharmed. When the audience realize that live dinosaurs are among them, they fly into a panic, and the dinosaurs flee to Central Park while being pursued by the police and the army. Meanwhile, Louie and Cecilia meet Professor Screweyes, who is running his "Eccentric Circus". Unaware of Screweyes' sinister nature, the children sign a contract to perform in his circus troupe. When the dinosaurs arrive at the circus, Screweyes explains that he delights in scaring people and believes that the dinosaurs would make a great addition to his circus. Using his "Brain Drain", pills that are the polar opposite of his brother's Brain Grain, Screweyes devolves Louie and Cecilia into chimpanzees. When he offers the dinosaurs to consume the pills and join his circus as a ransom in exchange for the two children's freedom, they reluctantly accept and Screweyes releases Louie and Cecilia, agreeing to tear up their contract in the process. Knowing their friendship will be lost forever, Rex transforms Louie and Cecilia back to their human forms with his gentle pats. And before leaving, he sadly tells the two children to remember him. As the kids awake the next morning, they are greeted by a circus clown named Stubbs, who works for Professor Screweyes, serves them breakfast and explains everything. Upon seeing the dinosaurs returned to their natural savage states, Louie and Cecilia plan to sneak into the night's show and save the dinosaurs with Stubbs' help. That night, Professor Screweyes opens his circus with a parade of demons and evil spirits, and then unveils the dinosaurs to the terrified audience. Screweyes says he can control Rex, and proceeds to hypnotize him, while bragging that he is never afraid. However, a crow unintentionally activates the flare lights, breaking Rex out of the trance. Realizing he has been tricked, Rex becomes enraged and attempts to eat Screweyes, making him afraid after his talk. However, Louie steps in and desperately talks Rex out of killing Screweyes. His impassioned pleas and loving touches, along with Cecilia's, return Rex and the other dinosaurs to their kind and friendly natures. Just then, Captain Neweyes arrives in his ship and congratulates Louie and Cecilia, who proceed to kiss, while Stubbs puts on an act announcing his resignation from Professor Screweyes' employ which wins the audience over with laughter. Neweyes, Louie, Cecilia and the dinosaurs board the aircraft, leaving Screweyes to be swarmed upon and devoured by the crows and one crow flies off with his now powerless screw. The dinosaurs spend the rest of their days in the museum, allowing children to see live dinosaurs, and thus fulfilling their wishes. Back in the present, Rex tells Buster that he and his fellow dinosaurs are still in the museum. He also reveals that Louie and Cecilia have reconciled with their respective parents and become a couple. Rex returns Buster to his family, ignoring his brothers' taunts while hugging his mom, and Rex tells him to remember his story before leaving for the museum

The film opens with a bizarre sequence where we see an unidentified individual, visible only by his hands, creating a strange weapon: a glove with sharp knives for fingers. Tina, a young girl in a nightgown, is rushing down ominous alleyways filled with steam and shadows. Suddenly the bizarre man lunges at her, brandishing the glove. Tina screams and sits bolt upright in her bed; the entire episode was a nightmare. Tina's mother comes into her bedroom, alerted by her scream, and notices that Tina's nightgown is slashed near her stomach. The cuts are similar to what would be made with the glove from the dream. Tina meets her friends at school the next morning: her boyfriend Rod, her best friend Nancy, and Nancy's boyfriend, Glen. Nancy and Tina discover that they have both had the same nightmare, and although Glen and Rod try and hide the fact, they seem to have been having nightmares, too. That night, Nancy and Glen decide to stay with Tina, because her mother has gone out of town. Rod shows up later and frightens the three of them by making strange sounds in the back yard and then jumping out at Glen. Rod and Tina go upstairs into a bedroom to have sex, while Nancy and Glen sleep separately downstairs; Nancy resists the idea of fooling around, since she and Glen are supposedly there as moral support for Tina. As all of them fall asleep, strange things begin to occur. The wall over Nancy's bed seems to lose its solid form, and the shape of a human figure looking at her seems to lean out of it. Nancy does not see it, her eyes closed in half-sleep, and when she awakens, the form disappears. In the room where Tina and Rod are sleeping, Tina is awakened by noises at the window; someone is in the back yard hurling small rocks at the glass. Tina knows this is whoever has been trying to frighten her, and she goes downstairs to confront whoever it is. When she ventures out into the back yard, a phantom voice lures her into the alley, the same as in her dream. She is startled by strange things such as a goat suddenly lurching into the alley, and then finally her stalker emerges, a man in a fedora, a dirty red and green striped sweater, and the deadly glove with knives for fingers. He taunts Tina by laughing at her and whispering her name, and he walks towards her with his arms stretching further than humanly possible, spanning the entire alley, blocking her escape. Tina retreats into her back yard and the figure leaps out again, this time from behind a tree. He slices off his own fingers and strangely colored blood spurts out. Tina tries to make it into her back door, but the man grabs her, and she struggles with him. We see Tina in bed next to Rod, trashing around; she has been dreaming this incident, as well, only the man seems to actually be under the covers with her. Rod awakens and pulls off the sheet. He can only see Tina, but she is being manipulated by some unseen force. Her stomach is slashed open, four wounds appearing all at the same time, obviously from the glove. Tina is dragged screaming up the wall, over the ceiling, and falls down dead into the bed, which is now covered in her blood. Nancy and Glen have now awakened and burst into the room to find Rod gone, apparently through the window. Tina is dead. At the police station, Nancy is giving her account of what happened and she talks to Lt. Donald Thompson, who also happens to be her father. Nancy's mother, Marge, and Lt. Thompson are apparently divorced, and they greet each other with restrained hostility. Rod is the obvious suspect in the murder, but Nancy feels that this is not the case; although Rod has a reputation as a delinquent, Nancy knows he is not a killer. As Nancy walks to school the next morning, Rod appears and pulls her into some bushes. Rod swears to Nancy that he did not kill Tina, but before they can talk any further, Lt. Thompson appears with his men and arrests Rod. Nancy is offended that her father used her to capture Rod, and she storms off. At school, the exhausted Nancy falls asleep in English class, and she thinks she sees Tina standing outside the classroom door. Tina speaks to her from a bloody body bag, and Nancy sees the bag dragged away by some unseen hand. She drifts out of the classroom and follows the bloody trail down into the basement. On the way, she is confronted by a female hall monitor, who scolds her for not having a pass. Leaving the girl behind, Nancy turns around when she speaks to Nancy in a man's voice, brandishing the weird knife-glove and cackling at her. Nancy goes down into the basement and is confronted by the killer, who is dressed in the same sweater and hat. His skin is horribly scarred, burned almost beyond recognition. He traps Nancy in the boiler room and backs her against the wall, taunting her. "Come to Freddy!" he says, but just before he can slash her with the glove, Nancy burns her arm on a hot pipe. The burn wakes her up, and she disrupts her English class by screaming and jumping out of her chair. Even though she is now awake, she has a large burn mark on her arm. Embarassed and frightened, she leaves school for the day. She visits Rod in prison and confirms her fears: Rod is having the same nightmare, haunted by the same figure with the glove. She tells Rod that she knows he didn't kill Tina, and leaves. Nancy has another incident where she is threatened by "Freddy"; she falls asleep in the bathtub and she is pulled underwater, dragged into some kind of abyss underneath. She manages to swim back up to the opening of her bathtub and pulls herself to safety. Marge, hearing Nancy's screaming, bursts into the bathroom, but Nancy tries to pretend she simply fell. Marge sends Nancy to bed, but Nancy is now afraid to sleep. She drinks coffee constantly and has a fresh pot hidden in her room, just in case. Nancy enlists Glen's help in an experiment. It appears as if she asks Glen to follow her, but she is in her nightclothes, so we presume she is dreaming. Nancy goes to the jail where Rod is being held, and by peering in the window she can see his cell. Rod is asleep, and she can see the killer approaching him, walking right through the bars of Rod's cell. Nancy yells for Glen but he is no longer there; instead, the voice of the killer answers "I'm here, Nancy!" and he lunges at her, chasing her back to her house. She runs inside and finds she cannot escape because her stairs have suddenly turned into a sticky mess. The killer smashes the window on the front door and peers inside as Nancy struggles to get away; he is wearing Tina's face as a mask, and imitating her voice, he says "Nancy, help me, please! Save me from Freddy!" Nancy wakes up, and she is furious to find Glen asleep next to her bed, as she had asked him to keep watch and wake her if it looked like she was having a nightmare. Nancy and Glen hurry over to the jail to see Rod, as Nancy is convinced the killer is going to strike. Sure enough, before they can intervene, Rod's nightmare becomes real and an unseen hand twists his bedsheets around his neck, stringing him up in his cell and breaking his neck. Lt. Thompson is skeptical of Nancy's claims that they are being haunted in their dreams, as it appears Rod simply hung himself. Both Marge and Lt. Thompson seem to share an unspoken realization about Nancy's allegations, but they will not admit anything to Nancy. Instead, Marge takes Nancy to a sleep clinic where they monitor her body as she sleeps. Her nightmare sends the instruments haywire because of its intensity, and when they wake Nancy up, she has a sudden gray streak in her hair from terror. There is another shock for all of them: Nancy is inexplicably holding the killer's Fedora. She says she was holding onto it when she woke up. Nancy's mother continues to deny that anything strange is going on, and she insists that Nancy get some sleep. Instead Nancy produces the Fedora and points out that it has a name written inside: Fred Krueger. Marge denies knowing who that is, and Nancy reacts angrily. Nancy has a conversation with Glen where Glen tells her that certain zen masters could control their dreams. Nancy asks what they would do if they met a monster in their dreams, and Glen says they would turn their back on it. If you take away a nightmare's energy, it disappears. Glen is surprised that Nancy believes she will die because of a nightmare, and also that she is reading books on creating booby traps and survival techniques. Nancy's mother finally opens up to her and tells her the truth. Taking Nancy down into their own basement, Marge tells her about Fred Krueger, who was a murderer that preyed on young children. When Krueger was apprehended, a technicality (being an improperly signed search warrant) caused the evidence against him to be inadmissable, and he was not convicted and was hence, released from prison. As a result, she and Nancy's father, along with other parents in the neighborhood, murdered Krueger on their own by setting him on fire. Marge reaches into the furnace and removes a dirty bundle; unwrapping it, she produces Freddy's glove, which she took the night they murdered him. Nancy realizes that Freddy is out for revenge, somehow reaching from beyond the grave to murder them in their dreams. Nancy tries to warn Glen but his parents will not allow her to talk to him. She receives a taunting phone call from Kreuger, even after she rips the phone out of the wall, and she realizes that Glen is about to die. Nancy can't rescue him because her mother has placed metal bars on all the windows and doors. Glen falls asleep and is killed by Freddy, being sucked into his bed and apparently shredded until nothing is left but gore, which erupts into a horrible fountain all over his bedroom. Nancy realizes she is now alone and must face Freddy or die. Calling her father, she tells him that she is going to go and get Freddy and bring him out of her dream, and she wants her father to be there to arrest Freddy when she does. Lt. Thompson doesn't believe her, but he patronizes her so that she will go to sleep. Nancy sets up a number of booby traps in the house for Freddy in order to give herself an advantage after she 'captures' him. After saying goodnight to her mother, who is now completely drunk, Nancy falls asleep and goes down into her basement. There she finds a door that was never really there before, and it leads down a long staircase into another basement. She continues to climb further and further downwards, following ladders and stairwells, until she is in Freddy's boiler room. Freddy is nowhere to be found, and time is running out before Nancy's alarm goes off and wakes her up. Finally he attacks her and she struggles with him; her nightmare suddenly shifts and they are outside of her house. Nancy's scheme succeeds, and she brings Freddy into the real world, holding onto him as her alarm goes off. The booby traps she has rigged for Freddy help her get an edge on him, but she is unable to get the attention of her father; the cop he has posted to watch Nancy's house seems to be unable to understand that Nancy needs help. Freddy chases Nancy through her house and down into her basement, where she sets him on fire. Lt. Thompson breaks into the house, but he and Nancy are shocked to see fiery footprints leading out of the basement. They follow the trail upstairs and find Freddy struggling with Marge in her bed. When they pull back the bedclothes, Freddy is gone. Marge is nothing but a charred corpse, and the body disappears into the bed. The supernatural manifestation shocks Lt. Thompson, but Nancy seems resolute. She asks to be alone for a moment and when Lt. Thompson leaves, Freddy appears, rising up out of the bed. Nancy turns her back on him this time, remembering what Glen told her. She curses Freddy, telling him "You're nothing. You're shit." He lunges at her, but her lack of fear renders him powerless, and he vanishes into thin air. Nancy leaves the bedroom and suddenly finds herself outside, dressed for school. Marge stands on the porch and sees Nancy off to school in a loving way, telling Nancy that she is going to quit drinking. Glen, Rod, and Tina pull up in Glen's car to take Nancy to school. When Nancy gets in, the convertible roof suddenly slams shut over their heads; the roof is red and green, like Freddy's sweater. The windows go up and the car drives off, with all four of them trapped inside. Marge seems oblivious, waving goodbye to the kids, when suddenly Freddy's arm smashes outwards through the small window in the front door. In a bizarre movement, Marge's entire body is pulled through the tiny window, and she is gone.