Imagine a stoner horror-comedy take on Mulholland Drive. That's a little bit what this second directorial effort from Robert Englund starts out like. It gives you a sense that it's going to be something more than the sum of its parts, which are Englund's background in straight horror and one producer's time on Dude, Where's My Car? The three male leads, who come to Los Angeles and find a housing deal that's way too good not to be satanic, play the material in that wide-eyed style, and they're actually really good. The jokes are hit and miss, but overall this is a genre-ripping surprise. It's much better than Englund's previous attempt to parlay his Freddy Kreuger fame into a directorial career, the formulaic 976-Evil. Probably, we should have known that Englund had some comic timing, considering how he shifted his Nightmare on Elm Street character from a brutal child killer to a master of the one-liner. Off-screen, he's always been the smartest and most entertaining of the horror-actor icons, and his commentary is fun. He certainly doesn't take this any more seriously than he should, nor should anyone else. And hey, what the hell else are you going to do at 4:20? Oh, right.

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