A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

On Sunday, August 30th, Wes Craven passed away, having lost his battle with brain cancer. As the acclaimed director of so many horror films, and the creator of one of horror’s foremost icons in Freddy Krueger, Craven’s work was certainly loved by many. He was the kind of guy who brought horror to the forefront and made it palatable for the masses - while still putting out quality stuff. In remembrance of Craven's legacy, I’m doing a special review of his original 1984 classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon

IMDb

I remember seeing this when I was about 14 for the first time, and I thought it was like nothing else I’d seen. The flashy colors, the fast pace and the surreal horror of the nightmares – it was a spectacle and it grabbed me by the throat in a vicegrip. Looking back now, it really was so influential to what came later. It opened up the doors for horror to take on realms outside our own, to explore nightmares and multiple realities, and it gave us all that in such a vibrant and colorful package – taking ideas explored in other psychological films to new levels by visualizing them. We felt the terror.

We start off with our fake main character, Tina, who has been having bad dreams of a man with long fingers for knives and wakes up with her nightgown slashed to ribbons in the front. Her initial suspicion was that Wolverine from the X-Men had snuck into bed with her, but she will soon find out it’s something much worse. Her mom tells her she either has to “stop having those dreams or cut her fingernails,” and ah yes, the days when parents could be that callous about their children waking up with cut-up clothes…

The third option is stop sleeping with scissors in your bed.

She tells her friends, Nancy and Glen, about the dream the next morning, but they of course shrug it off as insanity, as something so insane as a man with knives for hands could never pose a threat to them.

Johnny Depp is looking that way because Wes Craven held up a picture of a two-headed baby off screen to see if the actors could keep their concentration. Depp failed, so he was selected to be killed off later in the movie in the most brutal way.

That’s Johnny Depp as Glen, there, in his first movie role ever, who you might have trouble recognizing in this because he isn’t wearing a shitload of makeup and his hair looks like a normal person’s.

They all have a sleepover that night because Tina is afraid of her nightmares. When they hear a noise outside, they go to check and find it’s Rod, their delinquent wannabe friend who fulfills the ‘80s leather jacket’ quota for the movie. Because every 80s movie needed one of those, ya know – just a product of the time. They get into some verbal banter outside, and Rod immediately responds by pulling out a switchblade. Uh...guys, I’m really not sure that’s the dude you want to bring to your sleepover party.

"I'M NOT OVERREACTING!!!"

Rod then has sex with Tina, which is fine until afterwards when she is brutally murdered by knives cutting her up and throwing her around in the air. Gee - that’s how you know you’ve really got to work on your fucking game. When your partner dies.

Fuck. Just, holy fuck. What a brutal scene.

But this is actually the introduction of one of horror’s most iconic characters, Freddy Krueger, who I’m pretty sure was modeling your grandma’s Christmas sweaters for a living before he got big in this film. The scene where he’s introduced is excellently done, especially because he stretches his arms out like Slinkies and scrapes the walls with those long, metal claws he has. Yes, that's the reason it's excellent. Shut up.

Goddamn, this was all so fucking whacked out and insane. In the best way possible.

But this is a great scene. The nightmareish atmosphere is furiously fast and fun, and the acting is spot on from Englund and Amanda Wyss, who played Tina. Afterward, the surviving characters even start to figure out that Freddy stalks them in their dreams. Good for them. It's good that they're smart.

As Tina has left the building, the movie convenes in an emergency session after that and elects Nancy the new main character. She’s understandably upset the next day as she is in school and falls asleep only to wake up and see this:

Ugh, SO violating the dress code.

Then she runs into the worst hall monitor in the world:

Sorry to go on a bit of tangent here, but really, what is the point of hall monitors anyway? Are you just promoting some fascistic system where kids can’t be trusted to do things by themselves? I mean, if Freddy Krueger can transform into an annoying hall monitor with a striped sweater and a bleeding nose, and nobody notices that that isn't a good hall monitor, maybe it’s worth it to get rid of the profession as a whole.

We also get scenes of her visiting Rod in jail after he is arrested. Rod tells her he didn’t kill Tina, it was an invisible man cutting her up while he was in the room. You might recognize THAT as the lame-ass defense everyone gives now when they're accused of murder, but it actually started with this movie.

Rod is then killed in his cell, which prompts Nancy's father, the sheriff, to start intervening. He's played by John Saxon, the only man in Hollywood at the time who could use such a stern voice all the time.

Suicide, or killed by nightmareish dream-demon for revenge for his parents' sins. Either way, this isn't cool.

His sternness is eternal. It will never die. It will live on even longer than he himself.

While taking a bath at home, Nancy drifts off to sleep, which allows Freddy's hand to try and attack her in the tub. An interesting note: In this scene, actor Heather Langenkamp was not acting. She was just taking a regular bath in the privacy of her own home. Craven just wanted the fear to be real, which, really, is the only way to do a horror film.

Nancy is admitted to this psychiatric clinic where they test her brain waves while she's asleep to get to the root of the problem. The reason you know they're professionals is because they have computers and are wearing white coats. Nancy begins screaming insanely and bloody scratches start appearing on her, so, job well done, scientists! She's good to go home now, and you guys can continue doing your scientist-y jobs.

The greatest scientists in the world.

At home, Nancy has a shouting match with her mother, who refuses to tell her anything meaningful about Krueger. Why? Nancy already knows about him and is saying he's the one killing everyone. Who else could be killing everyone? How would Nancy know about Krueger if he's dead and in the past like her mother tells her? Does her mother really think she's that crazy or susceptible after just hearing his name once or something? I have so many questions.

None of which her mother will answer.

We also find out the sordid backstory of how the parents in the neighborhood burned Krueger alive in his boiler room because he was a child murderer. Which is bad, don't get me wrong. But what neighborhood doesn't have a good story to tell over hamburgers and beers at a cookout? Come on.

Glen is hanging out in his room later on when his bed eats him and spews out a bloodshower enough to cover the entire room for several seconds straight. I think that's awesome.

Clearly he was healthy, considering how strong his blood is.

We then also get the greatest phone sex scene in the history of movies.

So it's really just up to Nancy, who engages in a battle with Freddy. She manages to get Freddy into the real world, which results in one of the better jump scares I've seen – she wakes up, thinking it might actually all be over, and then he pops up from behind the bed. That's kick ass. Nancy isn't impressed, though, so she just sets him on fire and calls it a day.

Her father, the master of all good timing, shows up just in time to see his wife get eaten by a bed with a Halloween smoke machine in the room. Boy, the beds in this movie sure are hungry tonight.

The awesome kind of horror special effects I wish we would see more these days.

So everything seems to be good finally. It's a sunny day and perfect weather for a sunroof and parent murder:

So that's the end – the nightmare is reality and you can't really ever tell when it's over. Craven originally wanted the film to end in a happy manner, with everything that happened in the film just being a nightmare. I have to admit that would have been interesting. But I guess I'm a dark soul, because I like the ending we got. It works because it further blurs the line between the real world and Freddy's nightmare realm, like the whole rest of the movie was doing.

However – I can still see where Craven was coming from. His ending could've been good too. That's because this is a great horror movie, and it doesn't live or die by circumstance like that. This is a story about being young, right on the edge of adulthood. It's about the feeling of your parents dismissing what you say because you're a kid – but in your mind, you're almost an adult; they should listen to you. The kids in this movie find out that a devil in their nightmares is killing them, and it's their parents' fault. The kids themselves are blameless, yet they are the ones who face the penalty for their parents' sins.

Then, not only that, but their parents foil them at every turn in this film – Glen certainly would still be alive if his dad hadn't hung up on Nancy during that scene when she tried to reach him. Nancy's mom could have told the truth halfway through this movie and saved a bunch of lives. In ANOES, the parents are the “villains” - though they have no ill intent, they don't listen to their kids, dismissing them just for being kids, which is an all-too-common thing amongst adults. There's a sense of helplessness about everything in this film, which you, the viewer, feel by proxy of the characters.

Oh, and I guess Freddy Krueger is pretty evil too. I mean c'mon. The guy is a child killer, for fuck's sake.

Through the insane visuals, the groundbreaking story blending reality with dreams, the horrific visual nightmares and the iconic Freddy Krueger, who makes the most of his seven minutes of screentime here, Wes Craven and company created a classic. This is one of horror’s greats. If you haven't seen it, I really recommend it. And if you have, well, then you know what I'm talking about.

RIP Wes Craven. You are gone, but your work on this great film will live forever.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

A Nightmare on Elm Street was a classic 1980s horror film about a burnt child killer who came back to haunt people in their dreams. Filmmakers decided that premise wasn’t insane enough, so they gave us a sequel filled with horrible gay innuendos and leather bondage sex, complete with a scene of Freddy whipping a man’s naked flabby ass. Yes, you read that correctly, and yes, those things are the most disturbing parts of this film.

Director: Jack Sholder

Starring: Robert Englund, Mark Patton

IMDb

Freddy’s Revenge isn’t an accurate title – try Freddy’s Twisted Sex Fantasies.

We start off with a bus ride to high school in the 80s – which frankly is already terrifying; I mean there are only so many hairsprayed mullets and loose pastel-colored tops I can take. Apparently the extras from Society here are not used to their bus driver driving them into the middle of Mordor:

It turns out that was just a dream. Then we get a Stepford Wives-esque 80s family having breakfast when they hear their teenaged son Jesse screaming like a pussy from his room upstairs. Apparently this is a normal affair for the family – he has horrible nightmares and wakes up screaming all the time, and the family just kind of shrugs it off. What a bunch of assholes.

At football practice later, we see Jesse wrestling with a teammate on the ground after the guy pantses him. You know, kid; if you really wanted to see the guy’s ass so badly, you could have just waited until the gym teacher sent you all to the showers and taken a peek then. I love the focus on the wrestling between these two; what the hell is the point? Just to show us how, uh, “close” Jesse is to his buddies on the team?

It's the only way they can get out their "urges"...how tragic that we live in a society that teaches men to repress such things.

Oh well. Later on we get a dream sequence where Freddy appears and tells Jesse they have important work to do. Hmmmm…

Nah.

Jesse screams like a girl again – seriously, what the hell is up with that? – and then he wakes up. This time his parents do check on him, though – give em some points for that.

Later, he’s about to go visit his girlfriend when his dad insists he unpack his room beforehand. Instead of doing that, he does … well, just look:

I don’t even know. Have I just been doing this for too long? Have I lost my touch? Or is this scene simply too fucked up to address properly? Either way, I’m sure lots of perfectly normal, non-sexual-deviant, mentally sound young men in the 80s put on girly pop music and danced around their bedroom in stupid looking clothes. It was just the “thing” back then! That’s what I’m going to tell myself anyway, for fear of my increasingly fragile sanity.

His girlfriend comes over while he’s doing that and doesn’t immediately break up with him and run screaming out the door. Well, I thought the movie was unrealistic for focusing on a burn victim killing teens in their dreams, but NOW the film has lost all credibility! They talk about stupid things like his dreams, and then the girlfriend finds Nancy’s diary from the first movie. They figure out Freddy is behind the whole thing and then we cut to Jesse sleeping later.

Wait, what? How the fuck did that go? What happened in between those cuts?

“Oh, wow, I can’t believe we figured out Freddy is behind this weird stuff happening!”

“…”

“Okay, well, I’m going home to paint my toenails. See ya!”

YOU ARE A FAILURE AT LIFE.

We then get a bizarre sequence in which Jesse goes to an S&M bar and orders a beer – I guess Freddy subconsciously just really wanted to go to this place and had to possess some loser kid to get there. Questionable, but eh, there are weirder things to come. Jesse meets his gym teacher there, clad in tight black leather and everything. They go back to the school’s gym, where the gym teacher makes him run laps. Why? I can kind of understand why Jesse is doing it – he’s possessed by Freddy. But why is the gym teacher doing this? Does he really cruise S&M bars just hoping to run into students of his so he can make them run laps?

"Ohh yeah! Doing my day job in the middle of the night with black leather just TURNS ME ON!"

What a freak! Fortunately, Freddy ties him up with a jump rope, strips him naked and then whips his ass with a towel before finally killing him with his claws.

Uhh – I think there are some unanswered questions here, mostly about Freddy Krueger and how confused he is about, well, certain things. But that would take too long, and he has a private therapist for that. What weirds me out is that the gym teacher for some reason hates what Freddy is doing to him! Dude, you’re cruising S&M bars! And you can’t stand being tied up naked and whipped? What, did you think people at those bars were going to ask you to cuddle and watch a fucking re-run of Dear John on TV? Ice cream and blankets? Get your head in the game, man!

Either that or the script was just written by someone who was half asleep. I can’t really tell. Either way, it’s pretty tough to watch. It’s up there with the most ridiculous scenes from Society or The Stuff for 80s cheese so stale it’s actually difficult to sit through. You sit there and you think, oh, how silly, but then you also feel the tingle of shame in your gut, like food poisoning starting to take effect after a three-course buffet at Chipotle. Then you know you’ve crawled too far into the anus of the 80s.

After this scene is over, Jesse ends up naked sleepwalking on the highway. The cops return him home and make stupid cracks about keeping him on a short leash – yes, why bother recommending psychological help for a kid with obvious problems when you can just be insensitive douchenozzles? Truly you guys are the best cops ever. His parents think he’s on drugs. Why? Didn’t they ever have a “supernatural serial killer tried to take over their body” phase as teens? Pfft. Old fogies.

I guess that IS what’s happening, by the way. Somehow, it’s never really explained, Freddy is trying to come back into the real world by killing people through Jesse. Since this never happened in the first film and never happens in subsequent films, I’m gonna guess this is happening because Jesse’s brain is a weak flabby pile of Silly Putty that can be manipulated into doing anything, incredibly easily. Tune in next week when he joins an alternative religion!

We get a party scene later on celebrating something or other – the fact that these idiots haven’t managed to kill themselves blow-drying their overly egregious 80s poofter hairstyles every morning, I’m gonna guess. Jesse goes into a private room with his girlfriend and they start to have sex. In the middle of that, Jesse's tongue turns into a grey slug, so he fears he’ll kill his girlfriend in the middle of sex – which would be an original method of foreplay, I’ll give him that.

He runs away from her and goes to his guy friend’s house – you know, the guy who pantsed him in front of everyone and wrestled with him on the ground earlier. He says he needs to stay in that guy’s room for the night to make sure he doesn’t kill anybody.

… Now wait a second. We have a story here about a young man who has disturbing dreams he doesn’t understand. Everything is confusing to him and he feels as if there’s another being inside him, waiting to come out. He has a girlfriend but in the middle of sex with her, has an uncontrollable urge to leave and go to the house of another man, whose room he wants to stay in all night.

Well gee. If I were to be a bit insightful here in this review, I’d suggest this was actually just a big ole metaphor for Jesse coming out of the closet! Though I don’t think most coming out of the closet stories end up with the main character covered in blood after Freddy Krueger rips out of his body like a demented butterfly botching up hatching from a cocoon:

I guess people in the 80s were made out of papier mache! That affirms my incredibly specific, weird-ass suspicions better than I ever thought!

Newsflash, girls – if your boyfriend ever comes home covered in blood muttering insanely about how he killed someone … run. Run far away. Run to your nearest cab and go somewhere else, preferably a romantic comedy movie with no serial killers.

You'd think she would have more questions about him being covered in blood, especially after just randomly leaving in the middle of sex earlier, but I guess those are dumb questions.

So Jesse pretty much completely turns into Freddy, letting him loose at the party and sending everyone running for the hills. The girlfriend confronts Freddy in the old boiler room and tries to stab him a few times, though really her “stabs” are more like trying to get a pen to squeeze out ink on a high school math question – really not very violent. Try harder than that; come on!

Fortunately she doesn’t really need knife-wielding skills to beat Freddy at all. Instead she beats him and turns him back into Jesse by saying she loves him. Kinda like a really gory episode of Captain Planet.

Even mass-murdering psychopaths with questionable sexual fantasies deserve a little lovin ... when they're actually your 80s-mullet boyfriend underneath, anyway. Relationships are complicated.

So what’s the message? The struggle to come out of the closet is null and void when a hot chick says she loves you? Being gay is cool until you have a serial killer inside you, in which case you need to be turned back straight again? WHAT?!

This whole thing is just so goofy. Yes, the homoerotic subtext was completely intentional – the writer slipped it past the director, who didn’t even have a clue and just filmed the movie anyway. Oh the blissful ignorance. I make jokes about the whole thing because, frankly, the movie treats it as a joke. It would actually be really cool if this were seriously attempting to portray coming out as gay through an over the top horror film, but no, we get silly BDSM nonsense and girly screaming and of course, he ends up with his girlfriend at the end. So it’s mostly just stupid.

Not that I didn’t have fun watching this. It’s complete 80s silliness, and there are so many things to make fun of, I really didn’t cover even half of it. If you love Freddy or just 80s horror in general, this is a safe bet. It’s not very good, but then again, how much 80s horror really was, anyway?

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

REVIEW: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

I really hate this movie. I hate it so much, you could fill a book with all the reasons why. If you had watched every single movie on the face of the Earth except for this movie, and watching this was the only way you could save your mother from a pack of rabid wolverines, I’d say you’d better start trying to find some other alternative! This is seriously like the Batman and Robin of Freddy Krueger movies, or rather of 80s slashers in general. You think the remake was bad? Try The Dream Child on for size!

Director: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097981/

I mean I just don’t know what the hell they were thinking with this. I’m not saying the other Nightmare movies were great or anything, but they were at least inventive and had some good kills here and there. This is like the series was given an enema by a blind, psychotic homeless man and then left to die on a roadside somewhere, surviving only on terrible jokes and even worse ideas for ‘serious’ moments.

If you like being entertained or even retaining your brain cells, this isn’t the movie for you. But if you like having your senses and intelligence insulted every second of a movie, well, then you’re in for a treat, as this thing is the equivalent to being kicked in the ballsack by a steel-toed boot while a toddler screams in your ears at the top of his lungs!

The movie begins with Alice, one of the characters from the previous film, taking a shower, because that’s all blonde girls do in slasher movies, take showers. The water turns steaming hot and instead of just opening the door and getting out of the shower, she instead stays there for several minutes trying to turn the water off. Prime example of natural selection here, people! Unfortunately this dumbass bimbo is our main character for the rest of this cinematic nuclear bomb.

Our heroine's first idea to escape was NOT the doors but instead putting herself further into the boiling hot water...truly one of the brightest young heroines ever.

Then she runs out to find she’s in the old mental hospital where Freddy Krueger’s mother was raped by the inmates all those years ago. She wakes up to some guy we don’t know yet asking if she’s OK, who then turns into one of the inmates and starts strangling her. Dream within a dream! Great twist, guys! She wakes up for real and it’s time to graduate from high school, even though I’m pretty sure the writers of this movie, mentally at least, never graduated from pre-school.

Also, I love the implications of this movie’s main cast. Alice, the lead, was previously in the last film, where she was a member of a different group of friends, all of whom got killed off. How do you think the process went for her to make new friends to surround herself with? How many people do you think were like “hmm, the last group of people to hang out with this chick all randomly died within a few days of each other? Maybe I should reconsider”? Might’ve been in your best interest, body count. Might’ve been in your best interest…

Seriously, kid, do you look at yourself in the mirror before you leave the house in the morning, and if so, how do you NOT cringe with shame and dismay?

So Alice, while on her way to work, gets sucked into another dream, this time watching Freddy born as a little demented claymation baby, who goes into a church and finds his Freddy costume and then turns into the real thing! His first line is “It’s a boy”…I really think this is a movie that would highly benefit from having a silent killer, who doesn’t talk at all. It’d be better than any dialogue these writers came up with.

The fact that they got Robert Englund to say half his lines in this amazes me. I am thinking he was blackmailed, or maybe he just had outstanding debts. Poor guy.

And aside from that, what, are these people just narcoleptic or something? Falling asleep on your way to work? Get some sleep, you moron! It only gets worse, too; like the movie thinks high school graduates are senile old drunks who can’t stay awake for longer than a second. But I guess that is true for some of them…

Stupidly, she calls her boyfriend to come pick her up and when he leaves, he gets killed by the Fredster, in one of the strangest displays I’ve seen outside of Megadeth’s debut album cover:

Attack of the horrible claymation zombie robots!

It’s a poorly done scene that drags on too long and isn’t funny or scary. But if I singled out this scene alone for that flaw, I’d be a pretty big hypocrite. Then we see another friend get fed to death and turn into a Garbage Pail Kid on steroids; truly this film knows what Freddy fans want – CGI better fitting of a Rankin Bass Christmas special.

Who looked at this and thought it needed to be put on film for the world to see? I honestly wanna know. There is no conceivable way this was the work of a sound, rational, non-perverted mind. It had to be the brain-mash of some pedophile, or maybe a sick fetishist who the world would just be better off without.

After that, resident comic geek Mark gets sucked into Freddy’s nightmare world somehow, it’s not really explained or fitting with how the other movies worked, and Alice “draws” herself in after him…as a red stick figure like something a three year old would draw. That’s supposed to make her go inside the dream? Does she have special powers now like in Dream Warriors? Movie, if you can’t have a coherent plot, just…no, don’t exist at all in that case, actually.

Inside the house she finds a little kid who she figures out is her unborn son…somehow. The next day, after saving Mark the comic geek from imminent doom, she goes and figures out that Freddy is haunting everyone through her unborn child, an idea so stupid that I feel less intelligent even writing it down here. If he’s in the dream world…why hasn’t Freddy just killed him yet and gotten it over with? We’ve seen in the other movies that he thrives when people are afraid of him – and clearly, by this point, Alice is afraid of him, and the others are getting there too. So why does he still need the bullshit with the kid? It’s just needlessly confusing and doesn’t make any sense with the typical storyline.

Were they even trying? I think I already know the answer to that one.

Then we see another problem with this movie, the fact that Alice constantly freaks out and tells everyone around her that Freddy is out to get her, with no proof, so she just looks insane. But then later she puts on a completely normal front and tells her dead boyfriend’s parents that she’s capable of raising the baby herself, COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHY THEY’D THINK OTHERWISE. Gee, it’s not like you rave and rant like you belong in a padded cell and constantly burst into hysterics and over-dramatic whispering about Freddy all the time, is it? Oh, wait. You do do that! That’s like me being surprised I can’t get a date while constantly not shaving, not bathing and speaking only in sexist jokes. It’s stupid writing and even dumbass slasher movies should try harder than this.

And seriously, seriously, they expect us to be invested in this plot in the first place? Take a step back, guys. This is a movie that tries to have serious talks about a character’s pregnancy...

Durrrrrrrrrrrr....

...in between scenes like this:

That is shit! I mean what am I supposed to take away from this? Freddy haunts an unborn child in the womb…IT DOESN’T EVEN SOUND LIKE A REAL MOVIE PLOT! It sounds like a shit-ass-awful Saturday Night Live spoof! Whoever came up with this might as well have just written ‘WE DON’T CARE’ on a big white sign and hung it up behind the actors instead of the set pieces. It’s all but written out in bold at this point. Hell, they're practically revelling in how bad they're sucking right now!

Ugh, so where were we? What, so that kid who can’t stop drawing comics gets sucked into a comic book for his death scene? Color me surprised! Are you going to tell us that fish live in the water next? He gets shredded to ribbons and while I’ll give the movie a little bit of props for a mildly creative scene, it’s nowhere near what the series could do at its peak, and mostly comes off as jokey and inefficient. And I thought it sucked!

Then we get the big final confrontation where Alice and her unborn son and Freddy square off. Freddy gets attacked somehow by the maniacs who raped his mother in Alice’s dream – don't read too much into it; the lack of sense being made will just render you a drooling invalid in the corner, blood shooting out your eyes – and then his arm falls off and turns into a bunch of spiders for no reason. And witness the astoundingly good character of Alice, who has faced horrible, literally nightmareish ordeals, yet is STILL afraid of spiders:

Add that to the great stupid horror faces file...and SERIOUSLY, tell me you don't smack your forehead so hard, that your hand goes through your head at that! "Oh, I'm Alice, I can fight Freddy the nightmare super-powered demon of the underworld no problem, but SPIDERS?!? They're just so icky!" GAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!

Freddy gets his arm back anyway and now it hangs off him like a broken action figure, and he runs like a cartoon character with athlete's foot. So then you get stupid scenes like this, which would be shockingly bad if they weren’t just meeting the low, low standards the film has already set…

And you also get scenes like this, which aren’t so much stupid as totally idiotic AND incomprehensible, and these ARE shockingly bad because you didn’t even think THIS MOVIE could get so horrendous:

What am I looking at? There’s some half-assed plot about how Freddy was “living inside” Alice, but that’s never given any time to be explained, nor does it make any kind of sense in the first place. How? Why? Would explaining just go against your philosophy of not having anything that retains the audience’s faith in the art of cinema? I don’t get it.

So apparently, and I’m not kidding here, all they needed to do was reverse both Freddy and Alice’s son to infant babies, and then have them absorbed into their mothers’ bodies as little glowing energy balls! Wasn’t that the first thing you thought of as a solution to this movie’s plot? I can’t even count the number of times I’ve watched a film and thought “man, this could be fixed really easily if they just psychically turned one another into infants and then had their mothers absorb them into little energy balls in their wombs again”! It’s just a classical storytelling device.

Yet another of the great, classic images put forth by this film. I am just in utter awe...of how little dignity and scariness there is in this shit.

We then end on an image of our surviving cast sitting outside on a nice sunny day with Alice’s baby finally born, completely ignoring the deaths of all the poor saps whose only crime was to be friends with Alice. We also see the little Nightmare on Elm Street girls in the distance, watching and beginning their little song – what does it mean?! It means there is no God, because there are still more sequels after this one.

If cinema had an ass, this would be it. I can’t even tell you how awful this is, and how little sense it makes. It manages to take the simple formula for a Nightmare on Elm Street film and somehow make it absolutely unbearable. The bar is low and they still miss it; I really don't think this could get any more pathetic. There's no atmosphere to this, there are no scary scenes and the idea behind the premise is about as laughable as it gets. If you want to see the worst that this series can produce, go check it out, but if you want to keep your sanity and not spend the rest of the day wanting to punch a hole through something, stay FAAAAAAR away from The Dream Child!