Product: New Nightmare [VHS] (1994)
Rating: 4.0
Quite Innovative for a Franchise Film
Okay. I don't "do" horror. Only DVDs I own in the genre are IT and ALIEN. I've never been a fan of gore or monsters or teen girls running about screaming before they're decapitated in a fountain of blood as the killer cracks a one-liner. Just never got into it, I guess. Couldn't suspend my disbelief or sit through it.But this movie. This movie...This one's different. Not perfect, but a truly post-modern piece of metafiction. It makes the case for horror films as the modern fairy tales, as well as for Freddy as part of our American mythology and modern cultural consciousness. I'd never heard the argument before, that horror stories "trap" the evil that lurks just under the surface of ordinary life. Fascinating.Execution was nearly flawless, and even 12 years later stands up very well. The only thing that dates this film are the HUGE cell phones, but that couldn't be helped. I wish I'd seen Freddy more and the kid less (not a fan of child actors, although he was *quite* good), but I realize that this "ultimate evil" was kept in the background on purpose, a shadow over anyone who'd helped trap him in those movies.The infrequent and largely low-key gore was a big plus for me. I've never really enjoyed or even seen the point of all the blood and guts (and brains). The musical score was dead-on. The suspense near the end was gruesomely spectacular and enjoyable in that horror-movie way. The funeral scene was genuinely creepy, as was Freddy's new look for this film.My absolute favorite moment in the film is when the protagonist is on-stage with a talk-show host at a filming ...and Robert Englund, dressed as Freddy, runs on stage and then high-fives adoring members of the audience. It was really a deja vu, through-the-looking-glass moment, since I'm looking at a Freddy in a film that is being portrayed as mere Robert Englund in a costume, hamming it up for a talk show audience. The cheese factor of how it's done, overlayed with that ominous tone coming from the protagonist's perspective ...it was a stroke of BRILLIANCE.The close second best moment is Wes Craven's meeting with the protagonist. Here he explains his philosophy of horror as the means of "trapping" evil... and Freddy's pending escape into "our world."I was totally creeped out at the thought that whatever Craven wrote, it just ...materialized in the "real" world. Like Craven was unwitting accomplice to this "ultimate evil"-Freddy, slowly taking this poor actress and mother apart, rendering her weak enough for this ...demon to "cross over." The thought of a writer shaping actual reality, toying with real lives while thinking it's just a harmless story... creepy stuff. Delightfully clever and well-done.It just clinched it for me to see the scene fade to black on a screen containing the entire dialogue scene I just witnessed, fading to black on the words "screen fades to black." Awesome!As for weak points, like I mentioned, I wish I'd seen less of the kid. I felt there was a bit TOO MUCH foreshadowing with the kid getting more and more unhinged over the film. I kept feeling "Yes, I GET IT. You can move on now." They could have accomplished that with less scenes of the kid getting more nutso. In general, the film felt too long, but maybe I just don't handle suspense well. It was very much "What's going to HAPPEN?" throughout. The ending felt a bit too sudden and a little anticlimactic, but perhaps that is typical horror and/or Freddy fare.I intend to buy the DVD. It will be the 3rd horror film I own, out of hundreds of NON-horror films. That's saying a LOT.This is the horror film for the rest of us. See it. Get it.'Nuff said.