Kind of cool I guess, but very poorly done

Rating: 3/10 (21 June 2002)

I was aware that this movie, along with the Freddy Krueger character, became a massive horror movie franchise. I grew up in the 80s during the era of ubiquitous Freddy dolls and posters, conscious of the fact that he was in this movie and a lot of people seemed to like it, but I had never seen any of the Nightmare movies until recently.
I simply don't understand why this is supposed to be a good movie; I found it barely watchable, and largely laughable. The special effects, even given that the production team did not have the ability to use CG effects at the time, are terrible. It is completely obvious how every single effect was done when they pop up in the movie. Furthermore, many of the scenes contain nonsense character actions that seem to exist only to show off more crappy effects (e.g., when Freddy says, "Watch this," and chops off his prosthetic fingers).
The movie starts off very suddenly, with absolutely no character development. I found it difficult to care about or sympathize with people I don't know anything about, who can't act, with ketchup squirting out of them. I just didn't get it.
The Freddy Krueger character is far too clownish and rubbery to be scary (I've read that it gets even worse in the sequels). The annoying cheesy synthesizer music is far too present in the film, drowning out most of what could have been genuine scares.
The performances in the movie are some of the worst I've ever seen. Johnny Depp, unsurprisingly, turns in one of the less ridiculous ones, but given that this movie has almost no redeeming qualities, he has almost no lines. Heather Langenkamp is a boring, vapid heroine who clearly just can't act. She displays an extremely narrow range of emotions, from tired, to asleep, to sort of tired and angry, to somewhat scared. Speaking of which, she seems alarmingly unconcerned when Freddy Krueger materializes out of nowhere and tries to stab her. Maybe she's just tired.
I will acknowledge that this movie seems to be more creative with the story line and visuals than those that were coming out around that time, and it's more gritty and original than a lot of the slick, boring crap that Hollywood churns out today. Other than that, this movie really isn't anything all that special. It's not scary, it's extremely fake, and the script and performances are terrible.