MY CALL: This was a unique, ahead-of-its-time way of closing out a franchise with style! Very entertaining and a pre-Scream (1996) early metamovie. Plus, it does great honor to the NOES franchise.
MOVIES LIKE Wes Craven’s New Nightmare: First off, you should first see the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and then A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master (1988) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989). Although you might opt to skip Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)… up to you. But Freddy’s Dead doesn’t enrich the franchise at all. There’s also the controversially divisive A Nightmare on Elm Street(2010), which I enjoyed.
In the spirit of past NOES films and the new beginning implied in the title, we open with the forging of a new clawed glove, more monstrous than ever before. Only in this opening, it is the opening scene of Wes Craven’s (A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Hills Have Eyes I-II, Scream, Cursed, Deadly Friend, Deadly Blessing) movie within the movie. Actually, it’s Heather’s (Heather Langenkamp; A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 & 3) nightmare about the movie within the movie. How’s that for dream layers, Christopher Nolan?
Starring in Wes Craven’s 1984 classic in her youth has taken a toll on Heather. She suffers nightmares of her fictitious co-star and, so it seems, her young boy (Miko Hughes; Pet Sematary) shares a linked trauma. At the height of the franchise’s fame, Heather is receiving strange phone calls, she and her son feel touched by Freddy (Robert Englund; Dead & Buried, Killer Tongue, A Nightmare on Elm Street 1-6, Galaxy of Terror, Hatchet II, The Phantom of the Opera), and Wes Craven contacts her wanting to resurrect Freddy in a new movie.
In this metasequel, Freddy manifests into reality, takes Nancy’s husband, and then comes for her and her son. Meanwhile, Nancy’s visions and her son’s behavior become increasingly troubling as Wes works on his secret script. Wes’ dreams and ongoing script ideas alarmingly match Nancy’s recent trauma. And as an ancient evil manifests in the form of Freddy Krueger, it seeks Nancy as its gateway into reality.
Freddy gets a bit of a makeover in this movie, with more stylized burn makeup, a trench coat and new leather pants, and a glove of bone and sinew now a part of his body. The goofy special effects gags are limited to the very end, when Freddy’s head and jaw distort to try to eat the child whole, and he lassos his prehensile tongue around Heather’s head. All this transpiring in a very Doom-like Hellscape videogame lair. I guess the serious veneer had to wear thin at some point. In the grand scope of the franchise, the death scenes are “okay”, and not numerous. I guess though, that’s less the point of this movie. Its strengths lie elsewhere, and they are appreciable.
At the end of the day, this is much more than just another sequel. It ignores all of Freddy’s in-movie shenanigans of the past six movies and only acknowledges that the movies were made, and that this fed into the lore of an ancient evil which assumed the form of that character. This Freddy is not silly, jocular or slapstick, but just plain mean. He’s a different kind of evil than we’ve seen before… or at least, that we haven’t seen since the 1984 original.
Fans of the NOES franchise should truly enjoy finding Bob Shaye, Robert Englund, John Saxon and Wes Craven playing versions themselves. In fact, I’d recommend seeing The Movies That Made Us episode on A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) before watching this to maximize one’s connection to the filmmakers. Not that this movie isn’t a classic on its own. This is just the send-off this franchise needed.