After watching (and liking) 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, the movie that introduced Freddy Krueger to the world, I sat through several of the sequels that drove the franchise into the ground, although I skipped the latest installments (including this year’s attempted reboot). Now a friend spoke quite highly about New Nightmare, a 1994 sequel by Wes Craven, the director of the original, so I decided to give it a try.
The concept is quite ingenious: a movie within a movie. Wes Craven is writing a script for a new Nightmare movie, and while he does, weird things start to happen that seem to follow the script he’s writing to the letter.
The movie stars Wes Craven, Robert Englund, and Heather Langenkamp as themselves as Craven tries to convince Langenkamp to play her character once again. The problem is that this time around Freddy is much more than a simple movie villain.
While the concept sounds good on paper, once fleshed out into a real script and then a full length movie, it looses some steam. The visual effects are good, but the acting is below par, especially Langenkamp’s, who, not surprisingly, doesn’t seem to have had much of a career outside of the Nightmare franchise.
I would recommend this movie only to hard core Nightmare fans, since it doesn’t inspire too many original thrills, but they’d appreciate seeing the old team reunited once more.
Grade: 5
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