Whatever you do, don't fall asleep.

Rating: 9/10 (21 October 2012)

In the slasher sub genre, one that's particularly crowded with all sorts of efforts, studio and independent productions alike, of high and low budgets, Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" still reigns supreme as one of the more imaginative of the entire bunch. Nightmares have been fodder for many horror films over the years, but here they're particularly insidious and memorable. The film basically turned its producing studio, New Line Cinema, into a major player, gave a fresh breath of life into a sub genre that had grown stale, boosted the career of Craven, turned its dream haunting, scarred bogeyman Freddy Krueger into a pop culture icon (hat, red & green striped sweater, designer glove and all), and made co-star Robert Englund (as Krueger) a bona fide genre star. The impact it's made in 31 years is simply undeniable.
The story deals with Krueger, a depraved murderer of children, who was executed by a vengeful vigilante mob, and who now lives on in the nightmares of the mob members' children. Resourceful, feisty young Nancy (appealing Heather Langenkamp) realizes it's up to her to combat Freddy - on his own terms - before he can continue to claim victims, while her peers and the adults around her think she's simply going insane.
Many ingenious ideas here when it comes to the world of nightmares, and as this thing plays out it's not always clear where the nightmare ends and reality begins. The boiler room is one hell of a wonderful, atmospheric, and sinister location, and that glove, with knives attached to the fingers, really is a thing of macabre beauty. The movie is fantastically gory, yet other special effects are often just as impressive; there is an undeniable appeal in seeing effects done when the digital revolution was still years away and things were accomplished practically. Jacques Haitkins' cinematography is often wonderfully moody, and Charles Bernstein contributes what has to be one of the most catchy and haunting scores of the genre, up to and including that jump rope ditty.
The cast runs a little hot and cold as some of the performances aren't all that great, but it's still a decent assemblage of talent, from veterans John Saxon and Ronee Blakley, to Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, and Johnny Depp (in his feature debut) as the imperiled kids to character players like Charles Fleischer, Lin Shaye, and Joe Unger. Langenkamps' Nancy is a heroine for whom you do want to root, and Englund, although it hardly needs to be said, delivers a deliciously evil performance; given how silly a character Freddy eventually became, it's nice to see him in the days when he was still plenty scary.
All in all, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is one of the quintessential films of its genre that's pretty much required viewing for newcomers.
Nine out of 10.