Wes Craven's New Nightmare

A great movie, easily the most brilliant of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series. It’s witty, smart, funny, entertaining, and you’ll still like yourself in the morning for watching it.

Visually, the movie is a knockout. Craven-who, along with George Romero and David Cronenberg, was one of the real masters of post-'60s low-budget horror-never made a scarier picture than the original "Nightmare." But he's probably never made a better one than this-one that was more fun to watch or had a more satisfying conclusion, that slammed the door on hell with such panache.

Genre thrills with a big dose of originality.

Cleverly mixing shamelessness and panache, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is easily the most dazzlingly self-referential seventh installment in a horror series ever. [14 Oct 1994, p.60]

I haven't been exactly a fan of the "Nightmare" series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare lacks the trancelike dread of the original Nightmare, and it features almost none of the ingeniously demented special effects that made the series’ third installment, Dream Warriors, a hallucinatory exercise in MTV horror. This one is just an empty hall of mirrors.

For most of its running time, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is simply a s-l-o-w- tease to a paradoxical, reality-bending shockfest that never materializes. [14 Oct 1994, p.G9]

é simplesmente uma obra de arte de terror,tendo um encerramento mais digno do que o anterior .

I feel like this movie finally took the idea of Freddy Krueger seriously. The idea was a fantastic one, but the execution of the idea was not that great. I didn't mind Freddy's new actor, because no one will ever be able to beat Robert Englund in the Freddy role. The movie was a little slow, and it felt like the film was being dragged on for far to long. It is better than some of the other Freddy movies I have seen, which is saying something because this was a new actor fulfilling this role. The old actors came back for one last reunion, and I am happy that they did not give us a dumpster fire of a movie.

Just an ok movie. Really good storyline though. Wes Craven is making another Freddy movie, but everything that happens in the making of the new movie, is happening in their real lives.

In this film, Freddy Krueger will haunt the nightmares of the actress Heather Langenkamp who, ten years earlier, gave life to the heroine of the first film in the franchise, and who this time comes back to play herself. The script is constructed as if Krueger were real and were, in fact, haunting the film's production, which is undoubtedly an original variation of what we already know. This is the last film in the classic franchise "A Nightmare on Elm Street", one of the most successful horror slasher films. The films before this one already revealed the wear of conventional formulas and everything indicated that no more films would be made to continue the franchise. However, the creativity of Wes Craven (who also signs other films of the genre, such as "Scream") managed to make this film revive the public's interest in this material a little. However, it is a film that wears out as it passes, and the ending is somewhat disappointing. Wes Craven is creative and can imagine good stories, but he was never the ideal director to demand the most from the cast. Heather Langenkamp interprets herself, but the truth is that one can hardly consider her dramatic interpretation to be really good. The actress just didn't seem to be engaged. For the last time, Robert Englund brings the character that immortalized him to the big screen, and does a competent job, even though I feel that the actor's work has been considerably better in previous films. Technically, the film seems to be expensive and has more money involved than the previous ones in the franchise. Cinematography is standard and does not present anything truly remarkable. Englund's makeup work doesn't look as interesting and authentic as it did in other films, but it does its job competently. The sets and costumes are good, and there is a touch of originality that is felt slightly in the visual and special effects, as well as in the dynamics of the film, which was very well edited.

I’ll start with a warning, I have more to say about films I hate! On the positive side it was good to see Heather Langenkamp return. And the final twenty minutes was entertaining. That’s it, now for what I didn’t like, quickfire. It feels like a bad soap. It’s boring and hard to watch due to the flawed concept, it’s fiction but it’s pretending to be real but we know it’s fiction. They aren’t asleep during the nightmares. It doesn’t make sense most of the time. I could not at any point get over the concept, was this meant to be real life? It really bothered me to the point I didn’t want to watch it anymore. Freddy was Robert. The nightmares were phycological. The imagery was imaginary. The fun was gone. I don’t think I've hated a sequel as much as this since the first time I watched Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) or Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985). Some of the acting is not good, the child and Wes specifically. Sorry, at least he wasn’t as bad as M. Night Shyamalan in Signs (2002). It’s hard to relate to the characters. There are sSo many eye roll moments like ripping off The Exorcist (1973) and Hellraiser (1987). Things that were subtly left for the viewer to notice in the original like the grey hair felt like painful fan service here. Even the lore doesn’t make sense anymore, people that weren’t asleep were dying. Some of the effects were dire like the whole highway clouds disaster and the climax transformation. Freddy’s mask looks very dry again. The final 20 minutes where they final accept that they are making an Elm Street movie actually gets entertaining and this gets it an extra point but not enough to make up for the nearly 90 minutes of rubbish before it. It’s the worst of the Friday the Elm Street marathon I’m running through. Fundamentally it’s well made but conceptually I hated it. Does it achieve the minimum expectation of a film, is it entertaining? No. Not in my opinion.