71.750

Clever meta-horror film stars Heather Langenkamp as Heather Langenkamp, the star of A Nightmare on Elm Street, who is haunted by dreams of Freddy Krueger. By establishing a reality removed from the films, Craven ups the ante. The first half of the film is successful and deserving of the accolades that went to Scream. However, it becomes formulaic in the second half, resorting to big & loud scares over the quiet & menacing. Keep an eye out for all the slasher/claw imagery that populates the film.

man this screenplay is so meta

wes craven's masterpiece

That actually wasn't half bad. :)

Cool idea but the story telling is just too slow and boring. The make up of Freddy looses to old ones hands down.

Wes Craven tried to get Freddy back to his old self and it worked like a charm, great setting and great performances by Robert Englund, this is the best one after the first.

A great idea this was, after Freddy was killed of and the franchise is over, a real Freddy wants to come through into reality, one of the best of the series too

It's a cool concept for a Nightmare movie. Still suffers from the always present problem in this series of how to deal with the final freddie confrontation. Watching teenagers punch freddie and knock him over in ridiculously over-the-top fight choreography is far from scary. That being said this is the best I have seen of the series, though it lacks some of the cool gross out moment of 2 and 3.

It would be hard to label this film a sequel, because it really isn't. Instead its Wes Craven taking back a film series that went out of control, and attempting to give Freddy a much worthier Swan Song then the part Six.

Cool rebirth of the Elm Street series and definitely the strongest since the third one. Lots of cool self-referential bits that makes it seem like a big fanservice from Craven, which is pretty cool, but there's enough movie to back that up as well.

When I first heard that Freddy Krueger's resurrection would be a self-referential outing that would find the razor-fingered fiend frightening such actual New Line Cinema personnel as Langenkamp, Englund, and Craven, I feared the worst -- a campy attempt to wring a few final bucks from the Nightmare on Elm Street concept's corpse. Instead, Craven and crew play their unlikely story line totally straight -- indeed, with an earnestness absent from most of the earlier Freddy sequels.

A great horror film that gets back to the basics: Blurring reality an dreams.

"I thought Wes stopped doing horror movies," observes Langenkamp (as herself); she at least, now a mom, has serious qualms about the genre. The movie gives you more to chew on than all previous Freddy adventures combined. There is a creepy spatial illusion at the bottom of an open grave ("only" a dream) and a hair-raising scene of an eight-year-old boy crossing a busy freeway with his mother in hot pursuit. The finale, though, is unsatisfying, overblown, tedious, and ugly-as-sin.

ROFL

How do you revive a dead horror franchise? META-SEQUEL! The film takes itself a little too seriously, but there are a couple of jaw-dropping moments for Nightmare fans.

Kind of a novel idea, but meta-Freddy doesn't really cut it. Still a big improvement on the previous 3 films.

Very boring. Howcome the new Freddy Kreuger looked less scary than he did before? Making a movie within the movie? IT'S BEEN DONE. Howcome this is such a popular theme in so many horror movies/series?..