Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street With The Man Of Your Dreams

When I was about seven there was this show called Nightmare Cafe. We had the first three episodes on tape and it disappeared three episodes after that. One of the characters on the show was this old timey gambler guy named Blackie who I just loved. He was the coolest dude on television (after Dean Stockwell on Quantum Leap) as far as I was concerned.
Then my brother told me he was played by the same guy who played Freddy Krueger and my brain broke. Blackie was so cool and Freddy was so scary. I was terrified of everything remotely resembling a horror movie at that point in my life and Freddy was probably the worst offender because he had finger knives.
I actually became obsessed with horror movies before I ever had the nerve to watch them. I'd memorize everything Brad told me about the movies I was too scared to watch and then repeat him pretty much verbatim at school so people would think I'd actually seen them. I'm glad nobody ever asked me about scenes Brad never talked about. I'd've been screwed.
Anyway, the point is because of Blackie being Freddy I developed a weird obsession with the Kreugenator. I was still scared to death of him but I also loved him. To this day he's my favorite of the Big Five (Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers and Pinhead); he's the most lovable and the only one who still has the ability to scare me. Nikki thinks he's a sissy whose ass she could kick, but he's the only one of the five who I honestly see no escape from: Leatherface can be killed, you can run away from Jason and Michael and if you don't want to meet Pinhead just avoid puzzle boxes. Freddy, though, can't be killed (he's already dead) and he gets you in your dreams. You can't escape that. Everybody has to sleep.
So, to make a long story short (too late) I love Robert Englund. And I just finished reading his book. And I felt it was appropriate to begin my review of his book with the tale about how I came to be aware of him.
Hollywood Monster is like the Robert Englund version of Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, but in book form. It's a series of stories about his life as an actor, starting with joining a youth theater group to meet girls and ending with getting a ten minute standing ovation for an Italian art film. Most of the book is about playing Freddy (he only wrote, like, two paragraphs about Nightmare Cafe, dang it) but that makes sense. He played the guy in eight movies and it's still his best known role (runner up: Willie in V).
Anybody who's seen interviews with him knows that Robert Englund is a talker. He will go on for as long as you let him. There's nothing wrong with that, and I get the feeling if he hadn't been reigned in, Hollywood Monster would have been longer than War And Peace. He writes like how he talks.
It's a good book and a quick read, and now I want to go out and find all of Robert Englund's movies (and television appearances) and if I had to have a complaint about it I'd go with the old "It's a little disjointed." And by that I mean "Not all of the stories really go anywhere." If I cared about that sort of thing, that would be my complaint.
In some books I'm sure that would be a very big deal. In this particular book, though, it doesn't matter because, like I said, it's like reading a guy talking for an afternoon. Nobody tells only stories that have a point. People just talk.
And so does Robert Englund.

End of line.
-Sally