Product: New Nightmare [VHS] (1994)
Rating: 5.0
An actual scary Elm Street sequel
How does Wes Craven manage to be pretentious and self-referential and still scary? Scream had the Kevin Williamson script, but this movie is simply a sequel and a sequel in a series of movies that had past their prime. In the Seven Characters Looking for a Play tradition, Craven is being arty, clever and irritating on one hand and scary on the other.The plot has the actress from the first movie having bad dreams about Freddy Krueger. She asks around and finds out that Robert Englund is having similar problems. She asks Craven and he talks about a movie where some evil spirit got trapped as Freddy Krueger and liked the role but now he's free. Camera pans to the computer screen and you see that the the script being written is the same one that they just talked.As people die and Heather tries to make sense of the nightmare, it is increasingly obvious that the evil spirit who was once Freddy Krueger is coming back to the real world. What distinguishes this movie from a slew of other movies is how much you buy it and how much it manages to scare you. This isn't the wisecracking Freddy Krueger of the previous 5 movies. This is a terribly malignant and creepy character that may or may not be real and it's that tension that drives the movie.If you are not on an 80s nostalgia kick and you just want to watch a horror movie and you've already seen the first one - skip ahead to this one without watching any of the ones in the middle.By the way, I know taht there has been a lot of talk about a Jason vs. Freddy movie and I would just like to say that if it does happen, not only will it be a disappointment but it will ruin the great endings that both Freddy Krueger and Jason have come to in their respective movies. Nightmare reached a point of being scary again while in Friday the 13th they finally did a slightly logical chapter in which tehre is entertainment. These facts should not be ignored.