Okay, so the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" series reviews are finally complete. Or at least, as complete as my reviews for "Friday the 13th" were. "Freddy Vs Jason" still remains and I'll get around to that one as soon as I can (trust me!). However, asides from that here are reviews for the last two "A Nightmare On Elm Street" movies prior to the aforementioned team-up and the 2010 remake.
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
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Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
I suppose this was the logical next step for the series. From the very first film there were a few somewhat jokey elements to Freddy Kreuger. While it was toned down a lot in the second one, we still had the "I've got the brains" line. From the third film onwards the amount of cheesy Freddy lines has only gone up and so with the sixth film we finally have an out-and-out comedy. The question is: Is it a GOOD comedy movie?
A lot of the comedy comes from slapstick and visual gags. When I heard that Roseanne Barr was going to be making an appearance, I was a little concerned. Turns out I was absolutely right to feel that way since it's pretty much the point where everything goes seriously downhill. Roseanne's pointless cameo is very short, over-played and simply isn't funny. And it's a pity that things went downhill after that, because I really enjoyed the earlier scenes.
We start the film with the last surviving teenager in Springwood. Freddy kept succeeding in all the previous films and the upshot is that there is only one left. He keeps on having recurring dreams of being in a house that is falling. As the house is falling we even having Freddy turning up on a broomstick, clearly referencing The Wizard of Oz. It's pretty crazy, but actually rather entertaining.
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Unfortunately, eventually we need a story and following a Freddy story inevitably reminds us that we are dealing with a child murderer. Through a turn of events the last teenager in Springwood finds himself bringing fresh meat to Freddy from out of town.
The adults of Springwood have gone mad, sometimes desperate to take on a child as if it were one of their own (see Roseanne's cameo), sometimes claiming to be surrounded by imaginary children, and even going through the trouble of setting up a fair when there are no children left to take to it. (Just generally a seriously dodgy depiction of mental illness) All of this could actually have been done pretty well, but here it just isn't.
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Oddly, while in Part 5 my big problem was that the teenagers didn't feel like real people, here they actually feel like rather more solid characters. I don't know if it's the writing or the acting, but they work somehow. Possibly the most ridiculous scene in the movie (and in the entire franchise) starts out with a cameo from Johnny Depp, before pulling the victim into a videogame. The scene involves the victim being controlled with a game controller within the nightmare and actively bouncing up and down like a videogame character in the real world. Yet this scene stars Breckin Meyer, an actor who has been pretty decent in a number of films starting with some smaller roles in Clueless and The Craft, before moving on to a bigger part in Road Trip and even playing Jon in the Garfield movies. Okay so he's not going to win any awards, but he does have a long-term career.
To be honest, though Breckin Meyer is not giving a stand-out performance here, though the good news is that this means the other actors are doing a pretty good job. Lezlie Dean was actually the most fun character, though that's probably more because she gets to use some fighting powers than because of acting talent.
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Out-acting absolutely everybody in the movie is Yaphet Kotto (who played one of the two engineers in "Alien"). He's randomly a dream expert and randomly happens to have a picture on his wall tied to some mythology directly related to Freddy's powers. On top of that he's a therapist for the newly-introduced teenagers. Essentially this is the "magical black man" trope, only marginally avoiding the magic. While he's not a small part in the film, it never seems to be suggested that his experience might allow him to finish off Freddy by himself.
Big inconsistency with the last film comes with the ability to all enter the same dream. There's no good reason why they should be able to do this, but it seems to be just presumed that they can because it happened in other movies. (The maguffin allowing them to do so has been completely ignored here.)
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There's some attempts in the film to explore Freddy's backstory. We see that he had a wife who finds out about the child murdering. We discover that he had tendencies to self-harm, recognising that you can overcome pain (a discovery he tells to his step-father, played by Alice Cooper). We also have him being taunted at school, which was especially dodgy since (in reference to the point raised in parts 3 and 5) they mock him by saying "son of thousand maniacs". (How would his classmates even know that???) If this is supposed to be funny then it's a more twisted sense of humour than I'm able to buy into.
Overall, the biggest problem with this movie is that, while there are humourous elements, the film isn't actually funny. Unlike in the other films where it seemed like the main focus was the drama (if not actually "horror") and the humour was a bonus extra, in this film it just feels like an unconsistent and poor comedy. What's more, the comedy completely undermines the drama.
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In the Friday the 13th series, "Jason X" did something similar. It became very much a comedy rather than a horror movie with comedic elements (such as "Jason Lives"). It also suffered from inconsistent jokes, but the difference is that the points in between gags in "Jason X" were used to introduce some genuine tension and drama. What's more "Jason X" did not suffer from so many dud gags as this does.
Another "Friday the 13th" movie which has some similarities is "Jason Goes To Hell". In fact, this may not be coincidence. Sean Cunningham was really keen on setting up a "Freddy Vs Jason" movie, but when Wes Craven decided to make "New Nightmare" he had no choice but to make another Friday the 13th movie to make sure no one forgot about Jason. No surprise then that he would take some of his cues from the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie, to tie the two franchises closer together.
The main similarities between "The Final Nightmare" and "The Final Friday" (asides from these secondary titles for each of them) is the decision firstly to tie the evil of the main character to some kind of demon and secondly to make their main weakness ultimately tied to some member of their family. I like the idea of tying the end of a franchise to its beginnings and the demonic origins of Freddy are actually done quite well, but overall there are a lot of other big flaws in the film to worry about.
One last important point: When Freddy is finally defeated it's not obvious why it should work any better than towards the end of the first film. I still think the most final of all the deaths was the one in Part 4. The death in this film would be a lot easier to ignore than in previous cases (yet Freddy mocks the attempt to kill him with holy water in a prior film). In the end, the best reason to presume this is the end of the franchise is the title.
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There are some fun elements in this film and I can't say it was an awful experience to watch, but it really doesn't work very well overall and the videogame sequence is absolutely daft. Still, perhaps the intention to end on this film wasn't really so bad. The series in general has been more about visual delights with tongue firmly in cheek rather than about horror and while not all the gags work, this is still pretty fun to watch. As groan-worthy as this was and as bad as it was, there's still some limited appeal for fans of the series.
D-
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Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
After part 6 had made Freddy into a goofy comedian and the horror was seemingly entirely lost from the series, Wes Craven comes along and promises a totally fresh approach. While Craven had been involved in writing Part 3 a lot of his ideas had been ignored and much of the writing can be credited to Frank Darabont (who also had writing credits for the eighties remake of "The Blob" and "The Fly II", as well as later writing and directing "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Mist" and the tv series "The Walking Dead"). So really this was the first time Wes Craven had proper creative control on the series since part one. Fans were very excited.
The opening scene is pretty great. We have a brand new version of the opening scene where Freddy is working on his glove, though oddly this time around Freddy isn't working on a glove, but a mechanical hand. Soon enough in the movie we have a pretty violent attack and it looked like this was set to be a pretty exciting film with effects being used to produce some real threat and tension rather than just to look pretty.
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As we are introduced to our characters it turns out that this time we are following Heather Lagenkamp, the actress who played Nancy in the first movie. Based on real life she has a husband who works on special effects and a young son. Not so based on real life it is suggested in the movie that Wes Craven gave up making horror movies after the first "A Nightmare On Elm Street", apparently because nightmares fuel his movie ideas and he hadn't had one in a while. (In actual fact, Wes Craven had released five horror movies in between his two Nightmare on Elm Steet movies, just counting the ones that went to cinemas.)
Heather gets nightmares about Freddy (well, his glove at least) and her son keeps getting nightmares about him too. It seems that in real life Heather only ever hangs around with cast from the Nightmare On Elm Street movies. She's apparently quite close with Robert Englund, who kisses her on the cheek when he says goodbye. Also, when she needs parenting help who else would she contact other than John Saxon who played her father in the movies? (What?) It seems almost like Heather has no normal friends. We do have one important character who is neither an actor or family in the form of Julie, the babysitter. She doesn't get much more characterisation than anyone else.
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In fact, a lack of characterisation is a BIG problem for this film. If you are introducing us to Robert Englund as an actor, we in the audience don't know him. We need some understanding of the persona he has in this film and all we really get is that he's a nice supportive guy. We can say the exact same thing about John Saxon and, when he turns up, Wes Craven.
The most time for character building is given to Heather and her son Dylan. The child actor playing Dylan is Miko Hughes and in this film he is AWFUL. Child actors are often a problem for movies, I know, but they aren't normally as bad as this. What's more, apparently (and I haven't seen this one yet), Miko Hughes was previously pretty good in "Pet Semetery". As always when an actor doesn't seem to be giving the performance we'd expect, my first instinct is to blame the direction. In the case of Wes Craven, I don't feel that reaction is lacking justification.
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The first point in the movie where I realised things weren't going well was when Dylan is randomly found watching the first "Nightmare On Elm Street" film on television. Heather is shocked to see this happening and switches off the television only to see Dylan react by screaming. It's never really explained why he does this, though later it is suggested that he may have symptoms of schizophrenia. Another regular odd thing Dylan does it to put on a silly voice and say "one, two Freddy's coming for you". Dylan using the silly child-doing-a-gravelly-voice voice and wandering around downstairs (presumably sleep walking) where the TV is becomes extremely repetitive and it doesn't really add anything to the story.
There's also an inconsistency in the story too. One moment Heather is worried because Dylan "sounds like Freddy" (um... really?), the next she's worried about the effects of the media on Dylan, but it's not long before she's worried by her nightmares again.
A really confusing scene has her discussing her nightmares (which we don't appear to have seen because Freddy is pretty much NOWHERE TO BE SEEN for most of the movie) with Robert Englund. Robert says "so you've seen me in your dreams" and Heather replies "no, not like you" in a voice that shows she's clearly shaken up by it. The most clear and obvious reaction is that she must be dreaming about something scarier than in the movies, but yet when Robert Englund says, "No, not like me. Darker. More evil," Heather genuinely responds by asking "How did you know?" (Because you just clearly implied it Heather. It's not ominous or like mind-reading when you've pretty much already said it out loud to everyone. You might as well say "I'm thinking of the number '552'" and proclaim Robert to be psychic when he tells the number back to you. Derren Brown would have a field day with you.)
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Now admittedly Freddy does turn up through the movie, but not AS Freddy. Instead we only ever see the glove, generally seemingly disembodied from Freddy himself. If you could a disembodied hand as Freddy then yeah, I suppose he turns up quite often. But unfortunately when your bad guy simply IS a disembodied hand and you keep showing the whole disembodied hand then for that particular threat you've already done the big reveal. With Dylan's horrendous acting and the repetitiveness of the scenes, there's very little tension being built up for most of the film.
When Freddy is FINALLY revealed it's not even the darker Freddy we've been promised. The new make-up job is the least facially concealing ever. Never before has it been so obvious that it's Robert Englund under the mask. It isn't even because Robert Englund has been a character during a few points in the film already. Robert Englund's face has been seen before in parts 5 and 6, but the "burned face" mask has always made him unrecognisable. This time, Freddy isn't burnt. Instead he's somewhat like Freddy but he's a demon instead. Not only that, but the first thing he does is a cheesy line of "Every played 'skin the cat'?" that isn't delivered with anything like the venom that Jackie Earle Haley would deliver his lines with in the later remake. We then have pretty much an exact repeat of Tina's death in the first Nightmare movie, yet it's against someone who isn't asleep.
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In the final scenes of the movie Freddy is more goofy than ever with cartoon style stretchy arms and a lasso for a tongue. What's more I am never once worried that Freddy is going to kill off either Heather or Dylan and, to be quite frank, I'm having difficulty caring whether they are killed off anyway.
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There are plenty of daft moments in this film including the oh-my-goodness-something-bad-will-happen music while Dylan is on some climbing frames in a Park playground. Nancy being seemingly unaffected after running into motorway traffic and being hit by a car. One death involving the Freddy hand scratching at someone's crotch. Dylan being put into an oxygen tent (yes, because of schizophrenia, that's right, why do you ask?). But perhaps the most ridiculous element in the film (and this ties in with the dodgy hospital treatment) is any scene with the character of Dr. Christine Heffner. It doesn't seem to matter whether Dylan's character is suffering from schizophrenia or sleep deprivation, Dr. Heffner thinks it is to do with him watching scary movies. She also thinks that is a good enough reason to get the police involved and have Dylan put into foster care. Dr. Heffner is such a ridiculous caricature with absolutely no clear logic to anything she says that all pretense that anything the movie shows us is real life entirely evaporates.
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I watched the remake early on because I wanted to get the worst film out of the way before I carried on with the series. In the Friday the 13th series I was so sad when I got to the end and found that I was finishing off the franchise with the worst film of the lot. Sadly, I'm in exactly that position all over again.
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This is by far the worst film in the entire franchise. I can't recommend anyone watch more than the first 5 or 10 minutes before switching off because things simply don't get any better than that. The nearest thing we seem to have to plot development is on the one hand the attempts to connect Freddy's furnace with the oven in Hansel and Gretel. This actually involves lying to the audience about the ending of the fairytale, pretending that the children use the breadcrumbs to get home. In the fairytale the breadcrumbs are eaten by crows and it is up to another adult to find Hansel and Gretel in the woods. The rest of the plot development is pretty much one scene where Wes Craven tells us exactly what the plot is all in one go. Sure it's an intriguing idea but the rest of the film does little to expand on it. Revealing it all at once in a lecture from the director isn't exactly good filmmaking either.
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"Freddy's Dead" would have been a better ending to the franchise than this. Perhaps the worst thing about this movie is the bits where it mocks the franchise. Wes Craven's premise for the movie that Freddy is a demon who is kept at bay when people remember the story is nice enough, but when Craven explains it he makes it all about his own career with the previous sequels being part of the problem. When Craven says to Heather that sometimes a story is "too watered down by people trying to make it easier to sell" that's a pretty clear attack on the franchise as a whole. Let's not forget that the idea of Freddy escaping the movie and entering the real world was one of Wes Craven's ideas that were rejected during the making of "Dream Warriors" and thank goodness for that.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare is not only a travesty, but a middle finger to the fans. Through this movie it is pretty clear that the success of this franchise is not down to Craven.
E-
Ranking the franchise
I'm putting part 4 and the remake both in the top spot because while I felt the Remake worked best as a horror film, Part 4 was the one of the fun Freddy movies that appealed to me most.
1= - A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) (B+)
1= - A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010) (B+)
3 - A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) (B+)
4 - A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) (B-)
5 - A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) (D+)
6 - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) (D-)
7 - A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) (E+)
8 - Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) (E-)
Briefly comparing the two franchises...
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I'm still looking forward to "Freddy Vs Jason" where the two figures get to face each other head-to-head, however it's not the characters competing here but the franchises as a whole. There's an odd sort of balance between the two here since out of the seven Freddy movies I've seen I have enjoyed four of them, while out of the eleven Jason movies I've seen I have enjoyed just four and a half. (I count the first Friday the 13th film as just a half-like because it was only the final act that I really enjoyed.)
However, while I thought several Freddy movies were very good and felt the quality of the franchise was more consistent, I didn't really enjoy any of them as much as "Jason Lives" or "Jason Goes To Hell". These choices from the Friday the 13th franchise perhaps betray my fondness for horror comedy, but considering that Freddy is accused of being "funny Freddy" in most sequels you'd expect some of them to have a similar impact on me.
I'd also note, however, that while I might not think the Nightmare on Elm Street movies hit the same heights as a few of the Friday the 13th films, I don't think it hits such lows either. While I gave "New Nightmare" and the "Friday the 13th" remake similarly low scores and consider both to be very personal insults to their respective franchises, I still think that "Friday the 13th" is the more offensively awful of the two.
Friday the 13th has a wider spectrum of quality, including some absolute personal favourites, but A Nightmare On Elm Street has a more consistent level of quality. Overall that seems to put the two franchises on a similar level for me and I can see how the two figures ended up being matched up as a result. I just hope this final elusive entry in both series ends up living up to the hype!
Part 1 here
Part 2 here
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
I suppose this was the logical next step for the series. From the very first film there were a few somewhat jokey elements to Freddy Kreuger. While it was toned down a lot in the second one, we still had the "I've got the brains" line. From the third film onwards the amount of cheesy Freddy lines has only gone up and so with the sixth film we finally have an out-and-out comedy. The question is: Is it a GOOD comedy movie?
A lot of the comedy comes from slapstick and visual gags. When I heard that Roseanne Barr was going to be making an appearance, I was a little concerned. Turns out I was absolutely right to feel that way since it's pretty much the point where everything goes seriously downhill. Roseanne's pointless cameo is very short, over-played and simply isn't funny. And it's a pity that things went downhill after that, because I really enjoyed the earlier scenes.
We start the film with the last surviving teenager in Springwood. Freddy kept succeeding in all the previous films and the upshot is that there is only one left. He keeps on having recurring dreams of being in a house that is falling. As the house is falling we even having Freddy turning up on a broomstick, clearly referencing The Wizard of Oz. It's pretty crazy, but actually rather entertaining.
Unfortunately, eventually we need a story and following a Freddy story inevitably reminds us that we are dealing with a child murderer. Through a turn of events the last teenager in Springwood finds himself bringing fresh meat to Freddy from out of town.
The adults of Springwood have gone mad, sometimes desperate to take on a child as if it were one of their own (see Roseanne's cameo), sometimes claiming to be surrounded by imaginary children, and even going through the trouble of setting up a fair when there are no children left to take to it. (Just generally a seriously dodgy depiction of mental illness) All of this could actually have been done pretty well, but here it just isn't.
Oddly, while in Part 5 my big problem was that the teenagers didn't feel like real people, here they actually feel like rather more solid characters. I don't know if it's the writing or the acting, but they work somehow. Possibly the most ridiculous scene in the movie (and in the entire franchise) starts out with a cameo from Johnny Depp, before pulling the victim into a videogame. The scene involves the victim being controlled with a game controller within the nightmare and actively bouncing up and down like a videogame character in the real world. Yet this scene stars Breckin Meyer, an actor who has been pretty decent in a number of films starting with some smaller roles in Clueless and The Craft, before moving on to a bigger part in Road Trip and even playing Jon in the Garfield movies. Okay so he's not going to win any awards, but he does have a long-term career.
To be honest, though Breckin Meyer is not giving a stand-out performance here, though the good news is that this means the other actors are doing a pretty good job. Lezlie Dean was actually the most fun character, though that's probably more because she gets to use some fighting powers than because of acting talent.
Out-acting absolutely everybody in the movie is Yaphet Kotto (who played one of the two engineers in "Alien"). He's randomly a dream expert and randomly happens to have a picture on his wall tied to some mythology directly related to Freddy's powers. On top of that he's a therapist for the newly-introduced teenagers. Essentially this is the "magical black man" trope, only marginally avoiding the magic. While he's not a small part in the film, it never seems to be suggested that his experience might allow him to finish off Freddy by himself.
Big inconsistency with the last film comes with the ability to all enter the same dream. There's no good reason why they should be able to do this, but it seems to be just presumed that they can because it happened in other movies. (The maguffin allowing them to do so has been completely ignored here.)
There's some attempts in the film to explore Freddy's backstory. We see that he had a wife who finds out about the child murdering. We discover that he had tendencies to self-harm, recognising that you can overcome pain (a discovery he tells to his step-father, played by Alice Cooper). We also have him being taunted at school, which was especially dodgy since (in reference to the point raised in parts 3 and 5) they mock him by saying "son of thousand maniacs". (How would his classmates even know that???) If this is supposed to be funny then it's a more twisted sense of humour than I'm able to buy into.
Overall, the biggest problem with this movie is that, while there are humourous elements, the film isn't actually funny. Unlike in the other films where it seemed like the main focus was the drama (if not actually "horror") and the humour was a bonus extra, in this film it just feels like an unconsistent and poor comedy. What's more, the comedy completely undermines the drama.
In the Friday the 13th series, "Jason X" did something similar. It became very much a comedy rather than a horror movie with comedic elements (such as "Jason Lives"). It also suffered from inconsistent jokes, but the difference is that the points in between gags in "Jason X" were used to introduce some genuine tension and drama. What's more "Jason X" did not suffer from so many dud gags as this does.
Another "Friday the 13th" movie which has some similarities is "Jason Goes To Hell". In fact, this may not be coincidence. Sean Cunningham was really keen on setting up a "Freddy Vs Jason" movie, but when Wes Craven decided to make "New Nightmare" he had no choice but to make another Friday the 13th movie to make sure no one forgot about Jason. No surprise then that he would take some of his cues from the last Nightmare On Elm Street movie, to tie the two franchises closer together.
The main similarities between "The Final Nightmare" and "The Final Friday" (asides from these secondary titles for each of them) is the decision firstly to tie the evil of the main character to some kind of demon and secondly to make their main weakness ultimately tied to some member of their family. I like the idea of tying the end of a franchise to its beginnings and the demonic origins of Freddy are actually done quite well, but overall there are a lot of other big flaws in the film to worry about.
One last important point: When Freddy is finally defeated it's not obvious why it should work any better than towards the end of the first film. I still think the most final of all the deaths was the one in Part 4. The death in this film would be a lot easier to ignore than in previous cases (yet Freddy mocks the attempt to kill him with holy water in a prior film). In the end, the best reason to presume this is the end of the franchise is the title.
There are some fun elements in this film and I can't say it was an awful experience to watch, but it really doesn't work very well overall and the videogame sequence is absolutely daft. Still, perhaps the intention to end on this film wasn't really so bad. The series in general has been more about visual delights with tongue firmly in cheek rather than about horror and while not all the gags work, this is still pretty fun to watch. As groan-worthy as this was and as bad as it was, there's still some limited appeal for fans of the series.
D-
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
After part 6 had made Freddy into a goofy comedian and the horror was seemingly entirely lost from the series, Wes Craven comes along and promises a totally fresh approach. While Craven had been involved in writing Part 3 a lot of his ideas had been ignored and much of the writing can be credited to Frank Darabont (who also had writing credits for the eighties remake of "The Blob" and "The Fly II", as well as later writing and directing "The Shawshank Redemption", "The Mist" and the tv series "The Walking Dead"). So really this was the first time Wes Craven had proper creative control on the series since part one. Fans were very excited.
The opening scene is pretty great. We have a brand new version of the opening scene where Freddy is working on his glove, though oddly this time around Freddy isn't working on a glove, but a mechanical hand. Soon enough in the movie we have a pretty violent attack and it looked like this was set to be a pretty exciting film with effects being used to produce some real threat and tension rather than just to look pretty.
As we are introduced to our characters it turns out that this time we are following Heather Lagenkamp, the actress who played Nancy in the first movie. Based on real life she has a husband who works on special effects and a young son. Not so based on real life it is suggested in the movie that Wes Craven gave up making horror movies after the first "A Nightmare On Elm Street", apparently because nightmares fuel his movie ideas and he hadn't had one in a while. (In actual fact, Wes Craven had released five horror movies in between his two Nightmare on Elm Steet movies, just counting the ones that went to cinemas.)
Heather gets nightmares about Freddy (well, his glove at least) and her son keeps getting nightmares about him too. It seems that in real life Heather only ever hangs around with cast from the Nightmare On Elm Street movies. She's apparently quite close with Robert Englund, who kisses her on the cheek when he says goodbye. Also, when she needs parenting help who else would she contact other than John Saxon who played her father in the movies? (What?) It seems almost like Heather has no normal friends. We do have one important character who is neither an actor or family in the form of Julie, the babysitter. She doesn't get much more characterisation than anyone else.
In fact, a lack of characterisation is a BIG problem for this film. If you are introducing us to Robert Englund as an actor, we in the audience don't know him. We need some understanding of the persona he has in this film and all we really get is that he's a nice supportive guy. We can say the exact same thing about John Saxon and, when he turns up, Wes Craven.
The most time for character building is given to Heather and her son Dylan. The child actor playing Dylan is Miko Hughes and in this film he is AWFUL. Child actors are often a problem for movies, I know, but they aren't normally as bad as this. What's more, apparently (and I haven't seen this one yet), Miko Hughes was previously pretty good in "Pet Semetery". As always when an actor doesn't seem to be giving the performance we'd expect, my first instinct is to blame the direction. In the case of Wes Craven, I don't feel that reaction is lacking justification.
The first point in the movie where I realised things weren't going well was when Dylan is randomly found watching the first "Nightmare On Elm Street" film on television. Heather is shocked to see this happening and switches off the television only to see Dylan react by screaming. It's never really explained why he does this, though later it is suggested that he may have symptoms of schizophrenia. Another regular odd thing Dylan does it to put on a silly voice and say "one, two Freddy's coming for you". Dylan using the silly child-doing-a-gravelly-voice voice and wandering around downstairs (presumably sleep walking) where the TV is becomes extremely repetitive and it doesn't really add anything to the story.
There's also an inconsistency in the story too. One moment Heather is worried because Dylan "sounds like Freddy" (um... really?), the next she's worried about the effects of the media on Dylan, but it's not long before she's worried by her nightmares again.
A really confusing scene has her discussing her nightmares (which we don't appear to have seen because Freddy is pretty much NOWHERE TO BE SEEN for most of the movie) with Robert Englund. Robert says "so you've seen me in your dreams" and Heather replies "no, not like you" in a voice that shows she's clearly shaken up by it. The most clear and obvious reaction is that she must be dreaming about something scarier than in the movies, but yet when Robert Englund says, "No, not like me. Darker. More evil," Heather genuinely responds by asking "How did you know?" (Because you just clearly implied it Heather. It's not ominous or like mind-reading when you've pretty much already said it out loud to everyone. You might as well say "I'm thinking of the number '552'" and proclaim Robert to be psychic when he tells the number back to you. Derren Brown would have a field day with you.)
Now admittedly Freddy does turn up through the movie, but not AS Freddy. Instead we only ever see the glove, generally seemingly disembodied from Freddy himself. If you could a disembodied hand as Freddy then yeah, I suppose he turns up quite often. But unfortunately when your bad guy simply IS a disembodied hand and you keep showing the whole disembodied hand then for that particular threat you've already done the big reveal. With Dylan's horrendous acting and the repetitiveness of the scenes, there's very little tension being built up for most of the film.
When Freddy is FINALLY revealed it's not even the darker Freddy we've been promised. The new make-up job is the least facially concealing ever. Never before has it been so obvious that it's Robert Englund under the mask. It isn't even because Robert Englund has been a character during a few points in the film already. Robert Englund's face has been seen before in parts 5 and 6, but the "burned face" mask has always made him unrecognisable. This time, Freddy isn't burnt. Instead he's somewhat like Freddy but he's a demon instead. Not only that, but the first thing he does is a cheesy line of "Every played 'skin the cat'?" that isn't delivered with anything like the venom that Jackie Earle Haley would deliver his lines with in the later remake. We then have pretty much an exact repeat of Tina's death in the first Nightmare movie, yet it's against someone who isn't asleep.
In the final scenes of the movie Freddy is more goofy than ever with cartoon style stretchy arms and a lasso for a tongue. What's more I am never once worried that Freddy is going to kill off either Heather or Dylan and, to be quite frank, I'm having difficulty caring whether they are killed off anyway.
There are plenty of daft moments in this film including the oh-my-goodness-something-bad-will-happen music while Dylan is on some climbing frames in a Park playground. Nancy being seemingly unaffected after running into motorway traffic and being hit by a car. One death involving the Freddy hand scratching at someone's crotch. Dylan being put into an oxygen tent (yes, because of schizophrenia, that's right, why do you ask?). But perhaps the most ridiculous element in the film (and this ties in with the dodgy hospital treatment) is any scene with the character of Dr. Christine Heffner. It doesn't seem to matter whether Dylan's character is suffering from schizophrenia or sleep deprivation, Dr. Heffner thinks it is to do with him watching scary movies. She also thinks that is a good enough reason to get the police involved and have Dylan put into foster care. Dr. Heffner is such a ridiculous caricature with absolutely no clear logic to anything she says that all pretense that anything the movie shows us is real life entirely evaporates.
I watched the remake early on because I wanted to get the worst film out of the way before I carried on with the series. In the Friday the 13th series I was so sad when I got to the end and found that I was finishing off the franchise with the worst film of the lot. Sadly, I'm in exactly that position all over again.
This is by far the worst film in the entire franchise. I can't recommend anyone watch more than the first 5 or 10 minutes before switching off because things simply don't get any better than that. The nearest thing we seem to have to plot development is on the one hand the attempts to connect Freddy's furnace with the oven in Hansel and Gretel. This actually involves lying to the audience about the ending of the fairytale, pretending that the children use the breadcrumbs to get home. In the fairytale the breadcrumbs are eaten by crows and it is up to another adult to find Hansel and Gretel in the woods. The rest of the plot development is pretty much one scene where Wes Craven tells us exactly what the plot is all in one go. Sure it's an intriguing idea but the rest of the film does little to expand on it. Revealing it all at once in a lecture from the director isn't exactly good filmmaking either.
"Freddy's Dead" would have been a better ending to the franchise than this. Perhaps the worst thing about this movie is the bits where it mocks the franchise. Wes Craven's premise for the movie that Freddy is a demon who is kept at bay when people remember the story is nice enough, but when Craven explains it he makes it all about his own career with the previous sequels being part of the problem. When Craven says to Heather that sometimes a story is "too watered down by people trying to make it easier to sell" that's a pretty clear attack on the franchise as a whole. Let's not forget that the idea of Freddy escaping the movie and entering the real world was one of Wes Craven's ideas that were rejected during the making of "Dream Warriors" and thank goodness for that.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare is not only a travesty, but a middle finger to the fans. Through this movie it is pretty clear that the success of this franchise is not down to Craven.
E-
Ranking the franchise
I'm putting part 4 and the remake both in the top spot because while I felt the Remake worked best as a horror film, Part 4 was the one of the fun Freddy movies that appealed to me most.
1= - A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) (B+)
1= - A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010) (B+)
3 - A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) (B+)
4 - A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) (B-)
5 - A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) (D+)
6 - Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991) (D-)
7 - A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989) (E+)
8 - Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) (E-)
Briefly comparing the two franchises...
I'm still looking forward to "Freddy Vs Jason" where the two figures get to face each other head-to-head, however it's not the characters competing here but the franchises as a whole. There's an odd sort of balance between the two here since out of the seven Freddy movies I've seen I have enjoyed four of them, while out of the eleven Jason movies I've seen I have enjoyed just four and a half. (I count the first Friday the 13th film as just a half-like because it was only the final act that I really enjoyed.)
However, while I thought several Freddy movies were very good and felt the quality of the franchise was more consistent, I didn't really enjoy any of them as much as "Jason Lives" or "Jason Goes To Hell". These choices from the Friday the 13th franchise perhaps betray my fondness for horror comedy, but considering that Freddy is accused of being "funny Freddy" in most sequels you'd expect some of them to have a similar impact on me.
I'd also note, however, that while I might not think the Nightmare on Elm Street movies hit the same heights as a few of the Friday the 13th films, I don't think it hits such lows either. While I gave "New Nightmare" and the "Friday the 13th" remake similarly low scores and consider both to be very personal insults to their respective franchises, I still think that "Friday the 13th" is the more offensively awful of the two.
Friday the 13th has a wider spectrum of quality, including some absolute personal favourites, but A Nightmare On Elm Street has a more consistent level of quality. Overall that seems to put the two franchises on a similar level for me and I can see how the two figures ended up being matched up as a result. I just hope this final elusive entry in both series ends up living up to the hype!