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."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review #181: The Evil Dead (1981)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #36: The Evil Dead (1981) As much as I'm trying to make these reviews as standalone as possible, I feel the need to tie this one (at least a little bit) into the last one (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and the next one (Evil Dead II). So, bear with me I guess. I'm a huge fan of the Evil Dead series as a whole. Evil Dead II was one of the first horror films I ever saw, and for many years was my favorite movie of all time. However, I was never a very big fan of the first movie; I only saw The Evil Dead a couple times and when I did, it felt "lesser" than Evil Dead II in every way. I'll save most of my comments about EDII until the next review, but I just want to say that in this particular rewatch, I came out liking The Evil Dead WAY more than I used to, and liking Evil Dead II a little bit less (though I still love it). If you aren't familiar with the series at all, The E
Read more

Review #199: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #54: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? follows two aged Hollywood starlet sisters, Jane and Blanche, who have begrudgingly lived together for many years after a car accident left Blanche confined to a wheelchair. Both sisters hate one another, and their deep-seated hatred has begun to hit a breaking point as Jane struggles to hold a tight grip on a world that no longer remembers her. My thoughts on this movie itself are pretty simple: This is a long film (2 hours 15) that really didn't need to be that long, and it's a pretty slow burn. The tension is there, you really feel the fear and paranoia you're meant to feel, so it's not a bad time, I just really think it could have been tightened up (either in the script phase or the editing phase) to cut off like a solid half an hour. Then again, movies were just slower back then, I guess. I apprecia
Read more

Review #188: Let Me In (2010)

Image
This review was originally written in 2022. Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #43: Let Me In (2010) I can't fathom why both this movie AND Let the Right One In were on this bucket list, considering this one is basically a shot-for-shot remake of that one. But whatever, they're both on the list so I'm reviewing them both. To recap in basically a word-for-word manner, Let Me In is an American film about a young boy, Owen, bullied at school and without many peers, who befriends a girl, Abby, who recently moved into his apartment complex and who tries to teach Owen to stand up for himself. Little does Owen know, Abby is actually a vampire and her bloodlust will soon cause problems- problems that have kept her on the run for many, many years. Most of my thoughts on the other movie apply to this one. It's honestly such a close adaptation, I'm kind of impressed- I saw both of these films maybe ten years ago (I saw the American one first), and I remembered ther
Read more