This week Sliders begins it’s slide into “movie homage of the week” territory with a pretty straight forward take on Nightmare on Elm Street but it’s still pretty fun, especially with creepily nerdy guest star Zack Ward.

The gang arrives on their latest Earth in a great mood after spending some time on a world that seems to have Mardi Gras everywhere, all the time.  Their good mood is quickly lost however when Quinn almost gets hit by a guy on a bike.  The biker crashes into a roller blader and an argument ensues that ends when the biker shows off a pentagram on his hand, causing the blader to immediately start apologizing and begging forgiveness.  The biker presses the pentagram up to the blader’s face and it appears to briefly burn into his skin.  The blader attempts to run away but collapses in front of the Sliders and starts having a seizure and choking.  The gang tries to help but the man dies.  Quinn calls over a bike cop but when she sees who is involved, she rules it a suicide and tells the Sliders to forget it.  The biker, who we learn is named Gerald, seems to take an interest in Wade and attempts to sleazily hit on her but he punches him in the crotch and Quinn steps in to make him move on.  Gerald claims he’ll see Wade in her dreams and slinks off.

At the gang’s hotel, they learn from the bartender that Gerald and those like him are called the Dream Masters and they invade people’s dreams and kill them.  Everyone on this Earth is terrified of them and no one is willing to stand up to them.  Rembrandt and Quinn decide to visit the Dream Masters at their hangout to get them to back off while Arturo and Wade head up to the room.  Wade is afraid to go to sleep but Arturo manages to convince her that he’ll be right in the next room if anything happens.  She decides to get some coffee just in case and finds out there’s a long wait for it to be delivered to their room so she goes down to the bar for some.  Gerald approaches and creepily mentions that he finds Wade’s resistance stimulating.  Wade tells him to back off but Gerald manages to touch her leg with his pentagram hand before Wade runs off. Rembrandt and Quinn tell a couple of Dream Masters to tell Gerald to back off and that they’ll only be in town for a few days but they aren’t impressed and threaten to invade Rembrandt and Quinn’s dreams as well.

Meanwhile back at the hotel, Wade has a dream where she runs out into the street outside the hotel and sees Gerald and two other Dream Masters approaching her.  She sees Arturo and Rembrant beckoning her to slide in a nearby alley but when she runs over, a barb wire fence slams down, trapping her.  Quinn and the others float off into the portal, leaving Wade to try and scale the fence.  She cuts her hand badly and falls off.  In the real world, the guys find Wade out on the street, bleeding badly from a cut on her wrist.  Arturo cleans the wound and is shocked to find that there is no cut.  The guys manage to wake Wade up and decide to take shifts to keep her awake.  Rembrandt gets the first shift while Quinn and Arturo try to find some help in dealing with Gerald.  They find Officer Webber, the bike cop from the day before, who at first refuses to help but has a change of heart and gives them the address of a shelter for victims of the Dream Masters.

Quinn and Arturo head to the shelter and find Dr. Olivia Lujan.  She and her husband are at the forefront of trying to fight the Dream Masters but Dr. Lujan’s husband, Edward, was attacked by the Dream Masters and put into a coma.  Dr. Lujan tells Quinn and Arturo that a man named Vincent Cardoza was a university scientist who began experimenting with psychotropic drugs that allowed him to enter people’s dreams.  Edward found out and managed to get Cardoza kicked out but he and a group of students continued the experiments and became the Dream Masters.  After taking out Dr. Lujan, any resistance to the Dream Masters halted as everyone became too afraid.  Olivia thinks they might still have a chance to save Wade as she’s in Stage Two of the three Stage attack.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Gerald manges to intercept the coffee and liver (which according to Rembrandt is a Navy remedy to stay awake) that is being delivered to Wade.  He drugs the coffee by corrupting some sugar cubes and Rembrandt and Wade both pass out.  Wade has a dream where she is in the hotel room but Gerald materializes through the door and chases her into the bathroom.  Every faucet in the bathroom starts pouring out blood and the mirror explodes, cutting Wade in a dozen places.  Olivia, Quinn and Arturo arrive and manage to wake her up with adrenaline but she is still in critical condition.  Arturo is severely disappointed in Rembrandt since it appears he fell asleep at the wheel.

At the Dream Masters hangout,  Cardoza arrives to see how his favorite student, Gerald, is doing.  Gerald tells him about Wade and invites him to observe the final dream.  Gerald puts Wade into an elevator and makes it fall a dozen stories.  Back at the shelter, Wade’s heart stops but Olivia manages to jump it back with a defibrillator, unknown to Gerald but Cardoza sensed that Wade was at the shelter and is displeased that Gerald would give her the chance to be rescued.  Gerald promises to do better and gathers all the Dream Masters for a final assault on Wade.

Back at the shelter, Arturo and Quinn learn from Edward’s notes that he had a plan to fight the Dream Masters by using the psychotropic drugs they use to fight them in the dream world.  Quinn sneaks into the Dream Masters club and manages to get scrapings from a Master he knocks out.  Olivia synthesizes a syringe of the drug and Quinn, Arturo and Rembrandt all prepare to enter Wade’s dream and stop the Dream Masters.  The guys find Wade in the dream but get broken up by Gerald and the others, who try to kill them with their fears.  Arturo and Rembrandt manage to fight off the manifestations by remembering it’s a dream but surprisingly Quinn succumbs to a pit of quicksand and has to be revived by Olivia.  Quinn tells her to put him back in because he saw Edward and realized that they have to fight the Dream Master together as a group.  Quinn reunites with the others in the Dream World for a final showdown.  Rembrandt manages to manifest a .45 pistol and shoots one of Gerald goons.  Gerald and his other goon produce a bunch of throwing knives but the Sliders are unaffected.  Gerald decides to end it with a fireball but Quinn manages to catch it and throw it back, burning Gerald and forcing him out of the dream.  In the real world, Gerald angrily stalks out of the Dream Masters conference room with his sleeve on fire.

Back at the shelter, the Sliders all wake back up and they are surprised to find that Edward and the other coma patients have woken up as well, since the hold the Dream Masters had on them was finally broken.  Quinn and the others decide to take a well deserved nap before sliding out.

So overall, it’s an OK an episode of Sliders that is definitely on the upper end of the many “movie world of the week” episodes that we’ll be getting to later in the season.  Some of the dream stuff has a good Nightmare on Elm Street vibe, especially the bathroom dream that Wade has and Zack Ward is good as a creepily skeevy nerd villain.  The whole “Wade in danger” plot had been used a bunch of times before this episode so it’s kind of redudant and done much better in episodes like “Fever”.  Next week we get the Slider take on a combination of Waterworld/Mad Max with “Desert Storm”.

This week Zach and Joe experience ambivalence toward The Event, speculate wildly about the third Christopher Nolan Batman movie, get excited for the future of Marvel TV shows and school you about Slasher Films.

• Show and Tell: Joe watched Curb Your Enthusiasm and It’s Complicated(?) and also Nick Swardson’s Pretend Time while Zach watched The ‘Burbs and the most ridiculous episode of Masters of Horror, The Washingtonians.  Both of the guys also are still inexplicably watching The Event and Joe gives a quick preview for UFC 121.
• News: Drive Angry 3D trailer, Incredible Hulk (and other Marvel properties) coming to TV, Villains cast for Spider Man and Batman 3 and Top Gun is possibly getting a sequel.  Also the New Release Round Up.
• Slasher Films: We continue Horror Month with an in depth examination by Horror Expert Joe of the big slasher franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street and give some love to some of the more obscure gems like The Collector, for instance.

We want to hear your comments, feedback and, most importantly, suggestions for discussion topics. Send them all to contact@everythingaction.com. Also, be sure to subscribe to us in the iTunes music store (just do a search for Everything Actioncast in the store) and follow us on twitter @evaction and on Facebook.

The Karate Kid

Nightmare on Elm Street

Splice

Bones Season Five

Ken Burns’ Baseball

Caprica Season One

Stargate Universe Season One

The Human Centipede

The Slumber Party Massacre

30 Days of Night: Dark Days

The Exorcist Director’s Cut

Space Chimps 2

Blue Mountain State Season One

Ugly Americans Season One

Mad Max (Blu Ray)

Beauty and the Beast Diamond Edition

Grindhouse Special Edition

The Last of the Mohicans Director’s Cut

The Maltese Falcon

Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Peanuts Holiday Collection

Robocop Trilogy

Bad Lieutenant

Troll 2

The Blair Witch Project

Delgo

Ronin

Rocky I-V Separately

Master of Horror Wes Craven is working on Scream 4 but we’ll get some of his brand of terror later this year with “My Soul to Take”.  On the night a serial killer is brought to justice, he vows to kill the seven children born that night.  16 years later, the kids start to disappear and the rest try to figure out who the killer is.  It seems like a cross between two of Craven’s most popular franchises, Elm Street and Scream but ironically it seems like it’s taking a page from Elm Street 2, which Craven had nothing to do with.  In that one, the teen hero was possessed by Freddy and didn’t know he was the killer and they seem to be implying that about the main character here.  Anyway, check out the trailer below.

The Ninja Turtles have been shuffled around a lot over the past couple years, most recently the whole IP enchilada got bought by Nickelodeon for $60 million last year.  Now Nick’s parent company Paramount has handed over the development of a new feature film to Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes company.  Platinum Dunes has cornered the market in horror remakes over the past couple of years, most recently the new Nightmare on Elm Street but they have been acquiring and expanding their interests like with The Monster Squad remake and the Ouija Board movie.  I wonder what direction they would go with the Turtles?  Personally, I would want a comic based take on the Turtles, the comic Turtles were awesome in Turtles Forever and I would love to see their gritty and violent world in a live action movie.

Iron Man 2 suffered a pretty big drop off this weekend but still managed to hold onto the top spot against Robin Hood.  Dropping almost 60%, Iron Man 2 pulled in $52 million vs. Robin Hood’s debut of $36 million.  Counter programming seemed to work pretty well for Letters to Juliet, which came in third with $13.5 million, and Just Wright, fourth with $8.3 million.  How to Train Your Dragon continues to be strong, dropping down to fifth in it’s eight week out but bringing in another $5 million, putting it’s total gross to just over $207 million.  Nightmare on Elm Street fell from second to sixth and everything else continued to slot down.  A potential heavy hitter in Shrek 4 could give Iron Man a run for it’s money and how will MacGruber do with it’s surprisingly positive buzz?

Not surprisingly Iron Man 2 destroyed at the box office this weekend, pulling $128.6 million.  Iron Man 1 opened to $98.6 million.  Iron Man 2′s opening puts it in fifth for overall best opening weekends, behind Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest.  That was pretty much the only thing that happened this week, Nightmare dropped over 70% of it’s audience but still came in second with a little over $9 million.  Everything else slid down a couple slots.  Will Robin Hood be able to go head to head with Tony Stark this upcoming weekend?

Freddy Krueger dominated the weekend box office due to zero competition.  The reboot of the classic franchise made $32.9 million, tripling it’s nearest competition of How to Train Your Dragon’s $10.6 million.  Date Night and The Back Up Plan took the third and fourth spots while other new release Furry Vengeance had a not surprising horrible fifth place opening, only making $6.6 million.  Disappointingly, Kick Ass fell another three spots to eight place and seems destined to be cult classic.  All this is kind of irrelevant however as Iron Man 2 is going to destroy everything in it’s path this weekend.

It’s an old school Kick Ass Movie Podcast style episode this week as Zach and Brian tag team the week’s movie news and what they saw and to talk about the Nightmare on Elm Street series, what with the reboot out tomorrow.  Charlie also shows up in a pre-recorded segment to talk about what he saw over the last week.

• Show and Tell: Brian tells us about Breaking Bad Season 3 and, remembering in the News section, Party Down.  Zach saw Kick Ass and Ninja Assassin and also the Season 2 premiere of Deadliest Warrior.  Charlie recorded a segment to tell us about The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, Wolverine and the X-Men, the Season finale of Spartacus: Blood and Sand and Korean martial arts movie The Restless.
• News: Bond 23 is delayed indefinitely, Men in Black 3 is in development with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones on board, Eastbound and Down is going to Mexico and filming has started on the feature length version of the Grindhouse trailer Hobo with a Shotgun.
• Nightmare on Elm Street: With the reboot coming out we talk about our favorite films in the franchise, including Dream Warriors, Freddy vs. Jason and, of course, the original.

We want to hear your comments, feedback and, most importantly, suggestions for discussion topics.  Send them all to contact@everythingaction.com.  Also, be sure to subscribe to us in the iTunes music store (just do a search for Everything Actioncast in the store) and follow us on twitter @evaction.

Weak openings from the weekend’s new movies let How to Train Your Dragon come back to the top spot.  $15.3 million this weekend brings Dragon to over $178 million domestically.  In a blow to geeks everywhere, Kick Ass plummeted from first to fifth this weekend, making only $9.3 million.  Fellow comic adaptation The Losers didn’t  fair much better, debuting in fourth place with $9.4 million.  Surprisingly, The Back Up Plan took second place with $12.2 million despite middling reviews.  Date Night held onto the third spot while Clash of the Titans dropped to sixth and Death at a Funeral dropped to seventh.  The other new release, Oceans, opened in eighth place with a little over $6 million on about 1,000 screens.  Will Nightmare on Elm Street be able to take the top spot next weekend before everything is utterly destroyed by Iron Man 2?

If you’re a movie nerd then the answer is probably yes. In the newest issue of Toyfare (and I believe also mentioned on Slashfilm and The Totally Rad Show) a ridiculous amount of classic and cult movies came out in the year 1984.  Take a look and see if you agree.

• Ghostbusters
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Gremlins
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
• The Karate Kid
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
• The Last Starfighter
• The Muppets Take Manhattan
• The Neverending Story
• Nightmare on Elm Street
• Police Academy
• Red Dawn
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Sixteen Candles
• Starman
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
• The Terminator
• This is Spinal Tap
• Toxic Avenger

All those plus the birth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Macintosh and the Marvel Secret War, that’s tough to beat.  If you have any memories of 1984 (and please share since I was -2 at the time) or if you think there’s a year that beats it let us know.