A Nightmare on Elm Street Series Review by shoutingatco.ws

For 8 hours a day (or less, if you’re an insomniac or obsessively check social networking sites until three am), you are unconscious in bed. As countless drunk students, and Welsh idiots from Jackass knock-offs will testify, when asleep, people can get away with doing quite a lot to you. Hilarious things like writing on your head, or trying that prank with the hand in the bucket of warm water.

But what if these people weren’t real, and only existed in your dreams? And instead of trying to make you piss yourself, they were trying to extract your insides? And there was only one of them, called Freddy Krueger, and he came after you every time you were asleep?

Scary, right?

Well, kind of.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street was a twisted vision of the 70s slasher series Halloween and Friday the 13th, in that as long as you were awake, you were safe. The moment you fall asleep, Freddy can get you, and like a bad LSD trip, anything that happens to you in your dream carries through into real life. As dream Freddy throws a girl around in the air, baffled witnesses can see her slamming into walls as if thrown by the devil. An invisible devil. Or something.

See, Freddy is a serial child killer that got away with it through some unexplained technicality, and so the local parents killed him to death. Only he’s not dead, he’s been banished to the dream world, probably, where he haunts the dreams of teenagers and kills them to death. The rest is as formulaic as you like, with the friends of the main character (Nancy) getting sliced into sandwich-sized chunks. She, improbably, gets away repeatedly until blah blah blah, final showdown, and she gets away.

There’s a small coda scene at the end, in which Nancy’s mother dies, and her car becomes possessed by Freddy, and speeds off, out of control.

Over the course of the next five sequels, Freddy gains and loses powers as it suits the plot, and is able to jump in and out of the real world. Inexplicably, people start having group dreams, where they can band together to fight Freddy. Just like in real life.

By the third film, the remaining teenagers in town have been lobbed in an asylum to keep an eye on them, joined by Nancy from the first movie, who works there for some reason. Inexplicable is the keyword of the series. We find out a little of Freddy’s background: His mother was accidentally locked in an asylum, as these things happen, and was raped by all the inmates.

Freddy stabs Nancy in the stomach, and fucks up, stabbing himself as well. It happens. This is all in the wacky dream world, actually in a junk-yard. Nancy is actually totally dead because of the knifery pokery, with a funeral and everything. Aww, boo hoo and stuff.

In the fourth film, fatigue has really set in, and it’s tough going even giving a fuck about any of the characters or the “plot”. Luckily, everyone who was in the asylum before has been released, for no real reason. Freddy, who has been killed in every other film has come back to life, of course, because he’s a zombie dream-paedo.

One of the girls, Alice, becomes some super-charged sleep-monster, taking on the powers (I dunno) of the rest of the Elm Street kids, and battles Freddy until a tediously inevitable conclusion in which it is assumed that Freddy is dead, but SHOCKINGLY, he’s not, he’s only come back to fucking life. Again.

On to movie 5, “The Dream Master”, in which Freddy uses an unborn baby’s dreams to attack people. By this point, there’s been so many characters popping up, dying, escaping, looking-like-they’ve-died-but-they-haven’t, that it’s impossible to keep track of any of them. Maybe the whole thing gains a wonderful new depth if you remember who someone was, three films earlier.

The highlight of the film, no – the series, no – of any film ever, is when a character who might be called Kevin is turned into the Take On Me video, sucked into the comic book he’s writing of the film. Possibly.

And so the series concludes, thankfully, with Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. In which Freddy Krueger will finally be killed off! With no way he could possibly ever come back! And in fact he is killed by the daughter that they hadn’t bothered mentioning up until this point. You know, that daughter. It’s all a bit Coronation Street. Freddy is exploded into pieces in the real world, which means the demons that can revive him in the dreams (I don’t know) can’t help him out, and he actually dies. That’s it! The series is over, and we can all go home now.

Oh, except, er, he’s not dead. As you may well have guessed. Roll on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

If you thought it was convoluted and mental so far, you’ve seen nothing yet. In the film, Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy in the first film, and probably in bits of others, plays herself. She’s been convinced to make a new Nightmare movie by Wes Craven.

Movie director Wes Craven, writer of A Nightmare on Elm Street, plays a character called Wes Craven who is the writer of A Nightmare on Elm Street and a movie director. Somehow he manages to make the role unconvincing.

So Heather (the actress) is being stalked by Freddy Krueger, who she thought was fictional, but turns out that he’s a real thing, and his spirit was trapped in the movies. Now the movies have stopped being made, Fred’s in the real world and coming for her, because he thinks she’s actually Nancy, and she’s the only one that can stop him.

Towards the final third, Heather finds the script to the movie “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”, which she reads along with, somehow, or something. Eventually, and inevitably, probably in a dream, but maybe in real life or something completely different, Freddy is thrown into a furnace and killed to death again. Woo, yay, we’re all safe from meta-Freddy.

For fuck’s sake, they released another one? Really?

Freddy vs. Jason is the final, final chapter in this dreadful saga, which combines Our Freddy with Jason Vorhees from that there Friday 13th film. Like a comedy version of Viz’s “Harold and Fred – they make ladies dead”, they fight each other to be able to kill the local teenagers.

Why is it teenagers anyway? Because they make for the most satisfying tit-shots? Because we’re inherently predisposed to hate the little sods? We don’t know, but we’d be pretty chuffed to make it to 20. Apart from in a couple of the films, where he attacks adults too.

Freddy rescues Jason from Hell, in a move that’s not particularly logical, since they then set out to kill the shit out of each other. The plot is even more incomprehensible than the others, so here’s an out-of-context extract from Wikipedia that’ll prove my point:

At first Freddy thinks that Jason is afraid of nothing, which combined with his real-world invincibility makes him impossible to kill even in the dream-world. But then Freddy accidentally discovers Jason’s fear of water, then exploits it to turn Jason back into a child, then brings him to a nightmare of his childhood, and starts to drown him.

But before Freddy can kill Jason, Lori enters the Dream World and interrupts the fight, causing Jason to wake up and attack the group, who are now at Crystal Lake. Freddy, enraged, attempts to kill Lori, after revealing that he was the one, who killed her mother, but she awakens and drags him into a burning cabin in reality.

Obvious, right?

In the final finale, Fred and Jase are kicking off in the real world. Jason gets stabbed in the heart, Freddy decapitated, and both of them blown up in a gas explosion that sends them flying into the lake. Right at the end, they both emerge from the water, alive, with Jason carrying Fred’s still moving head. Fred winks at the camera for absolutely no reason and finally the series is over. Ironically, with the one film that Freddy isn’t left missing, assumed dead.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a decent 80s slasher with a twist, and a simple idea that if you die in your dream, you die in real life. Easy. Then the films go mental and downhill rapidly, introducing convoluted rules and disregarding them as it suits. Freddie looks like a deformed paedophile tramp, and there’s an eerie air about him, like he really, really smells of piss.

Sweet dreams.

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