Wes Craven's New Nightmare Details

Bloody Great!!!!

More blood, more kills, more thrills and more horrific. At times you loose track but when you watch it the 1st time some parts are confusing and you might get lost, but on the second time round, it's fine, you get the idea and it slots into place perfectly.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Wes Craven's New Nightmare

1994. It is 10 years since Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) starred in Wes Craven's (also himself) A Nightmare on Elm Street, which introduced the world to horror boogeyman Freddy Kruger (Englund, who plays Freddy and himself here). Now, in her real life, she and her young son Dylan (Hughes) are being plagued by dreams of Kruger.

At the same time Freddy is trying to break through into the real world, to achieve this he must go through Heather, who incarnated the first person to defeat him and Wes Craven is writing a new Freddy film in an effort to trap this ancient evil again within the Nightmare films.

Two full years before Scream reinvigorated his career Wes Craven wrote and directed this ferociously original piece of post-modern horror. In doing so he reclaimed Freddy, a character who, through six sequels, had strayed from the horrifying child murderer who chased kids in their nightmares that he created and become a comic lead who occasionally cut people up. Those six sequels are reduced, here, to mere fodder for Craven's imagination. Craven himself posits the film's main idea; that 'Freddy' is actually an ancient evil which can be trapped by storytellers and that, having not made a Nightmare in some years the story is dying and allowing Freddy to try and cross over into the real world.

Through this premise Craven fashions a brilliant film which fuses a mock documentary and an accomplished horror film to great effect.

Heather Langenkamp wasn't especially good in Nightmare on Elm Street; a film whose premise and execution, directorially, are what lift it out of the ordinary rather than its performances. However Langenkamp is excellent here, you might suspect that that's a given, she's playing herself after all. This is true to a degree but the story is complete fantasy (obviously) as are Langenkamp's husband and child, it's as much a performance as any she's given and it's a very strong one, ringing true throughout.

Children in movies, at the best of times, are annoying but Miko Hughes puts in a truly creepy performance that really is one of the great strengths of the film, he can't be more than about seven here and his performance suggests a more mature actor than that.

Freddy has gone through many incarnations (though always in the person of Robert Englund) and from the horrific burn make up of the first film he'd degraded into a not very scary kind of melty face make up. He's been re-designed again here and, predictably, Craven has taken a slightly different but more expensive and nastier looking tack with Freddy. All over his face and head it now looks like his skin is splitting, it's a great make up and probably the best the character has ever looked. The re-design of the famous razor fingered glove as an artificial hand works less well.

The non-professional actors in the cast (as well as Craven, who's very good, New Line Cinema head Bob Shaye and exec Sara Risher play themselves) all acquit themselves well, where they could have really hurt the film.

New Nightmare is a slightly mocking take on horror and has some nice laughs but this is no Scream no horror comedy when the scares come they are as effective as any Craven has fashioned (with several particularly disturbing scares focused on Hughes) and the kills have a satisfying brutality to them.

The design plays a large and effective role in the excellent climax, a far more bloody and satisfying face off than in the first Nightmare (though it nods in the original film's direction a couple of times) which takes place in what is best described as 'Freddy World'.

Okay. Controversy time. Great though A Nightmare on Elm Street is (and it is, 21 years on it's still clever and scary) Wes Craven's New Nightmare is, all told, a better film. Even post Scream the story remains hugely original and Craven's screenplay carries off what could have been a disastarous failure in atmospheric and entertaining fashion.