Review #114: New Nightmare (1994)


This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #31- Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Happy Halloween, everyone! This was a fun month and I'm glad I got to watch these series in their entirety- I definitely feel like I missed a cultural phenomenon earlier in my life and now I'm as caught up as I can be. So thanks to everyone who followed along! I hope you had fun too.

On to today's movie.

Overall, I thought this movie had a lot of great ideas and there isn't really anything specific I can point to as being bad (except for a couple moments of special effects). However, ultimately I came out fairly lukewarm on it- I don't know if it's because the movie was lacking, or my horror fatigue from watching 31 movies in 31 days, or maybe I was just in a bad mood. I feel like it dragged a bit in the middle, and maybe near the end, but like I said there was a lot of good stuff in here too.

I really liked the plot- Heather Langenkamp (the actress) is starting to be haunted by Freddy Krueger, and it turns out it's connected to a new movie Wes Craven is writing so she has to save her son from this fictional demon without looking like she's a lunatic Hollywood actress. I really, really like that, and it was fun to see so many people playing themselves and going around real-world places and dealing with real-world things. I thought it was very well executed and the only time anything struck me as wrong was when Lin Shaye played a nurse (because she was also an actress in the first Nightmare, so it was odd that she was playing another character in this movie).

I also LOVED the moment where John Saxon starts treating Heather as if she's Nancy- I just wish it went on longer! As it is it makes up like thirty seconds of one scene and then it's over. And Freddy got a redesign (well, sort of- the movie Freddy still looks the same, but Demon!Freddy looks new and upgraded) and I thought it was fantastic, not because it necessarily looked good, but because it looked almost like a parody of what a sleek, modern, upgraded Freddy design would look like. It felt like that's what they were going for and if that's the case, they knocked it out of the park.

I don't really have much else to say- just that I thought this was a great follow-up to the canonical end of the Nightmare series, and I commend them for ending it out the way they did (except until Freddy vs. Jason came out). I'm glad I got to watch this one to cap off the month.

So thanks again for everyone who followed along, and I hope you all have a wonderful Halloween!

Overall Rating: 7/10 Sewn-Up T-Rexes

Favorite IMDB Trivia Tidbit: "The name 'Dylan' is clearly spoken a whopping one hundred three times."

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