A Real Nightmare

It's never been high on my list to see Wes Craven's New Nightmare. But I troll for movies occasionally on HBO to weakly justify my subscription beyond watching the HBO It Series of the Moment. This movie ran recently, and I've always been faintly curious.

Made in 1994, writer-director Wes Craven returned to The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise for the first time since the original. The franchise had trucked along without him for five more films in the meantime, and had culminated in "killing" Freddy Krueger. Wes Craven came back to put a new twist on things... he went "meta."

New Nightmare takes place in the "real world," and stars Heather Langenkamp (the heroine of the original film) as "herself." She's tormented by nightmares about Freddy, receiving harassing phone calls that seem to be from him, and worried about her son's possible mental disorder. Meanwhile Wes Craven (a character in his own film) is also having nightmares about Freddy, and is incorporating them into a new Nightmare script he intends for Heather to star in. Several stars from the original film (including Robert Englund) appear as both "themselves" and as their characters in the franchise. Rabbit-holery ensues.

My real curiosity about the film stems from my love of the movie Scream. Wes Craven would direct that just two years after this, and while he did not write Scream himself, it certainly seems that screenwriter Kevin Williamson was very much inspired by the meta approach to New Nightmare. In short, New Nightmare seemed very much like "Scream Zero," and I wanted to see what it was like.

But New Nightmare is a mess from start to finish. The script wasn't quite whipped into shape before it went before the camera. Consequently, there's lots of confusion as to just what the story is about. Is Freddy trying to abduct Heather's child, or become him in some sort of demonic possession? Does Heather believe her son actually has a mental illness, or does she suspect Freddy's intervention? (It certainly takes too long for her to make up her mind.)

In a lame attempt to perhaps smooth over some of the confusion in the tale, voice-overs are used liberally throughout the film, audio montages of dialogue from earlier in the film that explain the dramatic importance of what we're seeing. At least, that's the nice way to put it. It feels more accurate to say that the movie assumes you're stupid and need to be reminded of things you watched only a few minutes earlier.

The acting is pretty uniformly awful, and Heather Langenkamp is the worst of the lot. Her delivery is the sing-songy awkwardness of a parent who isn't very good at reading books to a child (which is especially funny, since she does that very thing in two scenes of the movie). Robert Englund is alright (though the script lets him down; more on that in a moment), and a young Miko Hughes is fairly effective, but the rest of the cast is difficult to watch.

All of this, and I haven't even covered the movie's biggest problem -- it isn't really scary. In fact, it's more funny than scary. Perhaps some of the humor was intentional, but it really doesn't come off that way to me. The film's big climax has ridiculous slo-mo, and makes big moments out of Freddy's inflatable stretching arms and prehensile Harryhausen tongue. It's flat out ridiculous.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected so much from a Freddy Kreuger film. But really, did it have to be this bad? I see no way not to rate it an F. Its place in cinematic history as a forefather to Scream gives it a reason to exist, but there's no reason to actually watch it.