Tag Archives: Nightmare on Elm Street

Never Sleep Again 4/5

Never Sleep Again

Ridiculously long, but rather glorious documentary about all the movies of the Nightmare on Elm Street series (except the very recent remake). You get actors’ insights, special effects guys, producers, where the seed ideas for each movie came from, you get everything you could possibly want. And it doesn’t flag until maybe the last 10 minutes, where it turns into a love-in about New Line – but even this is redeemed by the closing titles, where various actors from the series deliver the best lines.

This documentary made me realise two things: The Freddy series is clearly the best horror franchise of the 80s; Robert Englund is fantastic.

Got 4 hours free? Watch this.

Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 1/5

Nightmare on Elm Street 2010

This was really quite poor. It had the flashy graphics, the beats, but it felt lifeless, characterless and pointless. I felt sorry for the actors, who did a sterling job with what they were given, but this really felt like a Michael-Bay-Directing-Transformers version of a horror movie. I wondered if they felt they were trapped in a nightmare during the making of this movie. The whole child molester angle was also quite tasteless as it recalled the behaviours of real-life child molesters, and made you feel uncomfortable.

It had two moments I liked, which helped break up the monotony. The part where one of the characters dies, and Freddy explains there is brain function 7 minutes after death, so he still has time to play… and the part where the parents are hunting Freddy down and he’s fleeing, which was quite good. It too often left me bored or slightly offended.

Still, not as completely terrible as ‘New Nightmare’ though.

Freddy Versus Jason 3/5

Freddy Vs Jason

Yeah, reasonably fun, but with long sections with too little Jason or Freddy, especially in the first half. When they actually were either fighting or terrorising the kids, it was decent enough, but a little more Freddy humour would have been nice. Decent turn in a minor role by genre great Katherine Isabelle (her from the Ginger Snaps trilogy, and American Mary).