Wes Craven's New Nightmare (USA. 1994)

Before Wes Craven completely destroyed straight faced horror with Scream, the forefather of the culturally loathed “nudge-nudge-wink-wink…This is a HORROR film and we know it!” sub-genre, he did the meta-commentary song and dance with “New Nightmare”, a last breath (or fresh gasp?) in the Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise. After two and half decent films in a seven film cycle people were finally ready to accept that the dream killer himself, Freddy Krueger, was good and buried. Freddy had started as a frightening figure in the classic first film but had quickly turned into nothing more than a goofy one-liner spouting buffoon by the time they closed the coffin lid. The decision to mine the depth of a long rotten corpse was a ballsy one, but Wes Craven wasn’t stupid and he approached the seventh entry (and only his second directorial tour of duty within the franchise) by looking beyond the frame of the first film and giving us something we’d never expect: What if Freddy started haunting the actual cast members of the first Elm Street film?

Heather Langenkamp plays herself, a slightly washed out actor trying to raise her eight year old son. Lately she’s being plagued by nightmares involving Krueger and her nerves aren’t calmed by the fact that her son is acting very odd. He keeps quoting Nightmare on Elm Street even though he’s never seen the film. It wouldn’t be so worrisome if it weren’t for the fact that Wes Craven has suddenly got the idea to write a new nightmare scrip. Could this be the cause of all her problems? Could it be that Freddy somehow jumped off the page and is haunting the real world?

Conceptually, I love the idea of a New Nightmare: A fictional creation attacks the creators. It’s an age old chestnut but one that was never done on this kind of scale (A popular horror franchise) Almost all the actors from the first film return and do great in their parts as themselves. Even a few non actors (New Line head Bob Shaye and Wes Craven himself) put the acting hat on and add an interesting reality to the on-screen theatrics. The film only started to fail me when it never delivered on its creative premise. "New Nightmare" from the get-go promised to be “Darker and Scarier” and that’s fine, but even when you deliver something scaled back, it still has to be captivating. Other than the “Actors playing themselves” gimmick the film really has nothing much going for it. The nightmares are idea free and mostly feature slight rehashes from the first film. The goobledeegook that explains the “real Freddy” comes out of absolutely nowhere. Freddy himself looks more rubbier then ever and every time his latex face popped onto screen I was pulled me completely out of it. The ending is probably the worst offender. It takes place in a lame-o location, leaves a dozen threads dangling and ends everything with a whimper. It almost feels they ran out of money and threw something together at the last minute. New Nightmare is the hardest kind of films to watch: They had a fantastic idea and did nothing but a competent job with it.