The beginning of it all.

Rating: 9/10 (3 September 2001)

This is it, the one that started it all. Hard to do a movie like this justice with a review, but I'll try. This was like the third or fourth time I watched it and I still say it's damn good. Not perfect, but few, if any, movies are. It's hard to look at a movie like this without seeing the whole series, but even in relation to the rest of the series, it's one of the best. Wes Craven really stumbled onto something good with this flick.
I'll start with the story, which is really quite simple when you get down to it. It's the old-fashioned boogeyman story. Something's under the bed and it's going to come out and get you as soon as you go to sleep. The trick with this story is that the boogeyman isn't under the bed, but in your head. Simple, yes, but effective, because when you're dealing with dreams, or nightmares as the case may be, you have a lot of freedom. The laws of reality don't bind you and Craven used that to make a pretty scary movie.

It's really your basic slasher, teenagers, sex, and bloody death, but I think this was a far more imaginative slasher then, say, Friday the 13th, which was a killer in the woods basically. Almost anyone could come up with that idea and throw in some nameless teenagers to get slaughtered. `Nightmare' took more thought and it shows.
Another thing is that there aren't any cannon fodder victims in this flick. You know, those people who are brought in just to be killed off. In this movie all the characters are just that, characters. The total number of bodies in `Nightmare' is a very low three, but each one of the deaths are gruesome and they all occur to developed characters, which means the effect is that much greater.
The acting wasn't top notch, but it was still very good. Newcomers Heather Langenkamp and Johnny Depp (this was Depp's first movie) are great in their roles, as is good old Robert Englund playing (as if you didn't know) Freddy Krueger, the knife-gloved maniac. John Saxon also plays a good role.
The special effects in this movie were really good considering what they had to do. Krueger's burns are very gruesome and realistic, I just didn't get how he could be burned alive and still his hands were untouched (look under his glove, his skin is perfect). There was a very good segment involving a girl being dragged up across a ceiling as well as a blood fountain that was pretty cool.
`A Nightmare on Elm Street' is a classic slasher and horror movie. I think everyone should watch it at least once.