A sheep in wolf's clothing

Rating: Null/10 (8 June 2002)

I grew up with "A Nightmare on Elm Street." It was one of the defining themes of my childhood; Freddy Kreuger's iconic face and finger knives were part of the cultural fabric of the eighties. Freddy was like a demon in the media, haunting our collective consciousness just like he is supposed to have done in the film. I was terrified of him; I probably would not have been if I had ever actually seen the movie.
You see, my mother had seen it; and, while she considered it a good film she declared it simply too scary for me to watch and so, for many years, I sat on the sidelines as all of my friends came back with their survival stories (This was Britain, where an 18 rating MEANS 18, so unless you had permissive parents who didn't care what you watched on video, you didn't see horror films under age)and I concocted Francis-Baconesque visions of the film in my mind; gothic dreams that came from the darkest depths of my soul.

Well, illusion can trump reality at the best of times, but never was it more so than with this film. It was not scary in the slightest; it had a completely ludicrous plot (If Freddy is supposed to be killing children in their dreams, than how is he moving ropes or turning beds into blenders in the real world?), and a suprisingly incompetent villain (a supposedly omnipotent nightmare-master who does little more with his power than jump out behind trees and yell "Boo!"). I know that later sequels did more with better special effects, and created more realistic death scenarios, but this film remains a severe dissapointment. Perhaps the only Freddy-inspired creation I saw that dealt with the concept sucessfully was, oddly, the "Simpsons" parody