A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Review

 

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street follows Nancy Thompson, who starts having terrible nightmares of a man named Freddy Krueger. Nightmares that affect the real world, with Freddy killing her friends, and coming for her next. 

Believe it or not, I’ve never actually seen this before, (avoided it more like) or any of them for that matter, so it was kinda neat putting a face to the name, even if I was a little disappointed. From the jump, Nightmare is not your typical slasher, breaking far from the established mold of Halloween and Friday and jumping right into the supernatural side of horror in what feels like an inside joke that no one’s in on. I do love the premise, having a killer lurking in your dreams, waiting for you to fall asleep, only to murder your brutally in the real world. The problem however, is there is nothing to establish Freddy. Sure we get an explanation much later down the line but that leads to this running like a sequel to a movie that never happened. 

If there’s one really great thing to take away from this though, it’s the special effects. The way it merges dreams with reality is exceptionally well done, and while most of the film is a bit lackluster, every chance this had to turn up the violence, it was a shocking bloodbath of epic proportions. Watching Glen get sucked into the bed and his blood getting launched out like a canon into the ceiling, or Tina’s exorcist like murder, or even Nancy’s mom, whatever the hell that was, the movie certainly never lacked in amazing kills. 

The cast was also quite unspectacular, starring Jsu Garcia, Ronee Blakely, John Saxon, Amanda Wyss, Johnny Depp, Robert Englund, and Heather Langencamp. A young Depp was easily the lone good performance in this, and while Englund was good at times, the movie never set him up to be particularly scary. Langencamp was probably worst of all and she made the back half of this almost intolerable with how bad was, mixed with a far too corny script. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven, wasn’t all bad but a mixture of rough acting, a silly script, and not following its established rules makes for one of the weaker slashers, which is surprising honestly, consider how widely known and loved the series has become. 

6.5/10