Series: Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street is a landmark film in the history of screen horror.  Blurring the lines between dreams and reality, and introducing one of the genre’s most unique and frightening screen monsters (Freddy Krueger), the Nightmare films are fearsome and has laid the groundwork for a very successful franchise.  The sequels, unfortunately, demonstrate a pointed drop in quality when compared to the original, and with the 1991 release of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, it seemed the monster was really gone for good.  However, in 1994, New Line Cinema decided it was time to bring him back, and recruited series creator, Wes Craven, to make it happen.(read more...)

Director Rachel Talalay (Tank Girl) helms the sixth and supposedly final entry in the traditional Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Amazingly, the film is fairly successful despite itself. The elements that are good — and there are quite a few — are classic components of the most entertaining entries in the Nightmare saga: outstanding dream sequences, the best movie makeup money can buy, and intriguing plot devices. Unfortunately, most of the creative decisions made on behalf of this particular film fall flat: the 3-D ending is a snoozer, the comedy is trite, and the acting (save Robert Englund) is wooden.(read more...)

The worst thing you can do before viewing Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is to watch one of its sequels. It isn’t that watching the sequel first spoils the chronological flow of the story. No. It is merely because the sequels are predominately ridiculous trash. This can colour your preconceptions of the original movie which is, in fact, rather good. For A Nightmare on Elm Street is, believe it or not, a horror film. It is (brace yourselves) scary. Unlike the pseudo-scary, pseudo-comic franchise that grew out of it, the original film contains some memorable images, interesting plot twists and (gasp, faint) even a decent-to-good script.(read more...)

The Nightmare on Elm Street films, whether frightfully good or laughably bad, are seminal entries in any young horror fan’s viewing repertoire. Although nary an 80s American horror film can compete with Wes Craven’s brilliant original, many of that film’s box office-reigning sequels fall into the category of weak imitation or ill-advised parody. In my opinion, the best Nightmare sequels bring some fresh meat to the cinematic table.(read more...)

Like it or not folks, this movie was The Phantom Menace for horror fans. Put in the works in 1994, most horror fans gave up hope that this would ever be made. Here we are, 9 years later, with one question:

Did Freddy fry marshmallows on his face or something?

Well, that was MY question. But, you might be asking, “Did it live up to his hype?” And I would answer, “The best it could.”(read more...)

...and at this point, the Nightmare series has officially gotten too old. Not to say that this is a bad movie, but it is definitely evident that the filmmakers have done as much as they can for the character of Freddy, and are fine with letting him become a joke.(read more...)

Nightmare on Elm Street 3 starts off on the right foot and virtually ignores everything that happened in number 2. Then, you throw in that Wes Craven, the creator of the series, co-wrote the first draft... Well, that just makes me giddy.

It's funny to think that back when I started Classic Horror, I was dead set against ever allowing Freddy or Jason in. Well, they're both here, and I've found that I've grown attached to Freddy Krueger, in a sick sort of horror fanboy way. Here he stalks the last of the Elm Street kids, who are all in a mental institution for their "mass hysteria" problem. Each one of them is having nightmares involving a hideously burned man in a dirty brown hat, wearing a green and red sweater.(read more...)

Battles often erupt when two schools of thought get together. One side says that sequels can and are often better than their predecessors. The opposition dismisses sequels out of hand, claiming that they all "suck." Despite the fact that I'm a card-carrying member of the former, I'm afraid that A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge only fuels the arguments of the latter.(read more...)