A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

VERDICT:
7/10 Bed-Wetters

The scares don’t hold up like they did in ’84, but then again, Freddy’s the man.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is about a group of suburban teens who all start having the same vivid dreams about being chased around a boiler room by a guy with really mean tan, a nasty-ass sweater his grandma probably knitted for him when he was six and eventually grew into twenty years later, and a custom-made glove fitted with razors at the tips to tie the whole getup together. The kids shrug it off as strange, but then – in a totally rude gesture – this nutjob starts bumping them off mid-dream. So the kids wise up, chug some Red Bulls and take it upon themselves to stay the hell awake for as long as they can while figuring out a way to take this guy down before they’re sleeping in a ditch.

With the exception of Chucky who scared the living daylights out of me for most of my youth, I’ve never been all that impressed by a lot of the horror icons like Jason Voorhees or Michael Meyers and I’ve never really understood how two mute, lumbering bastards with some big ol’ blades managed to garner so many shitty sequels. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t get it. And while I can’t say that I’m all too frightened by our icon of the hour either, Freddy is still a pretty badass idea for a horror movie.

The whole concept of having a guy who kills dumb, horny teens in their sleep instead of in a log cabin in the woods because they’re too damn dumb and horny to simply run away is just freakin’ awesome. It doesn’t quite work like Jaws where you can hardly take a bath without waiting for a great white to pop out the faucet, but since everyone goes to sleep and everyone has nightmares, it does taps into that same realm of inescapable fear in a way that a lot of horror movies don’t. The day I have a nightmare involving Freddy is the day I start downing NyQuil.

But when push comes to shove, a big reason why this movie works is because Freddy Krueger‘s just a cool villain. Even though his backstory is pretty by-the-books, it’s nice that he actually talks and has a sick sense of humor about all the murderin’ he’s up to. The whole “silent killer” thing gets old kinda fast and I like to see a guy who takes pleasure in speeding up social Darwinism one bleary-eyed teen at a time.

Robert Englund’s also good in the role, but I feel like he hams it up a bit too much to the point where he stops being sinister and starts being a joke. Nonetheless, he makes it work and something tells me he gets it down to a science by the 46th entry in the series.

But another of Freddy’s strong suits is that he’s a creative killer, and all the credit there is due to the brains behind this whole operation, Wes Craven. Like I said, this isn’t the scariest two hours I’ve sat through in recent memory, but it’s still easy to admire how original all the kills and dream sequences are, especially considering how limited special effects were back then. Some of the stuff is totally nuts and totally ridiculous, but those are also the kind of things that stick with you after a movie that’s working off a kind of ridiculously nutso premise to begin with.

And as far as the acting goes, it sucks, but it’s got a perk or two here and there, the “here” being a super-young Johnny Depp and “there” being a guest appearance by a much younger Magda from There’s Something About Mary. The rest sucks.

By the time the movie ended, I was pretty close to giving this one a 6 because it does feel totally dated 26 years down the road, but there’s also enough original and effective horror elements going on here to warrant it a 7 and the last thing I need is to get into an argument with Freddy fanboys about how wrong I am about this movie. The point is, there are only so many horror movies out there that truly stand the test of time, and while A Nightmare on Elm Street might not be setting the bar or anything, it’s easy to see why so many consider it a horror classic.