Never Sleep Again...
Even before I started doing this Review thing I have wanted to review this movie for a while. Now I have yet to decide if this movie is good, or a gigantic pile of shit. All I do know is Jackie Earle Haley did a wonderful job as Freddy Kruger in this film the rest of I have yet to decide if its any good at all. But I plan on solving that mystery today, when I watch the film with a critical eye and see just how bad (or maybe good) the rest of the story truly is. Instead of retelling the original story, or re-imaging the whole thing all together, they went a different way and used it as a platform to retell the entire series in one film. (Friday the 13th Remake did the same thing) Now while it's not all in all a bad thing, it is a tad lazy on the part of the film makers. Lets see if my thoughts on this movie were right all along, or if I have a change of heart. Either way, this movie is part of my library in the "Nightmare" collection so good or bad it's not going anywhere. "One, Two, it's Freddy's review!" So... Here... We... GO!
In the first five to ten minutes of the film we are introduced to six main characters, all we know almost nothing about. And two (Spoiler Alert) you are made to think are the most important in the film end up being two of the most meaningless. Little bit of a booboo there, "Dean" who started the film in a nightmare apparently hasnt slept in three days, he already is the first victim but we know nothing about him, and care even less. It appears like they are riding the coat tails of the original films feeling like they dont need to introduce characters in the movie because the story has already been told eight times. But when you are doing a remake it's best to start from your own beginning rather than just assume the audience knows where the plot is headed. "Dean" ends up meaning absolutely nothing at all and is killed before the opening credits by Freddy who they are doing a great job of showing yet hiding his face through quick cuts and camera changes. While another (Spoiler) meaningless character (But are lead to believe is important) "Criss" (female) screams into the opening titles. As the movie goes I find that many of the main cast are completely meaningless starting with Dean, which when the movie begins this way it's not a good thing. So lets recap here before the opening title the only positive is Haley's ten seconds on screen, and other than that they made a series of booboos. Nothing major but they are not off to a good start. We already don't care about the meaningless cast really have no idea who the important characters are, and all we know is Freddy is awesome. Boom... And away we go!
The movie officially opens after the opening title at the funeral of "Dean" you remember him, the guy who didnt matter and died in the first ten minutes into the film. The focus is on "Criss" right off the bat as she falls asleep during her best friend Dean's funeral. She just saw him brutally commit suicide and she falls asleep during his funeral? What a heartless bitch! Anyway, she see's a young girl, toss flowers into the grave, then Freddy's hand jumps out and grab's the girls leg jerking Criss awake! Good thing she woke up in time to hear the end of her friend's funeral, I'm sure he is looking down in heaven appreciating that. Now anyone who has seen the originals knows that "Nancy" is the main character, however right now she is being treated in a supporting role, which could be new and fresh but spoiler alert... it's not. It's just bad production. We have seen "Quentin" twice now, and my first thought is... who is he? And what makes him so important that he seems to be the only male character with any importance. You can tell he is important, but they never tell you why, at least not now... or ever really. We follow Criss to the grave site (remember now Nancy is the main character) where she see's herself in preschool with Dean, (who she didnt meet until High School or so she thought) So this is a lot of time being spent developing Criss (who mind you is not the main heroine in the film). So why is this going on? Why are we not finding out more about Nancy? Well because the film makers wanted a great big SWERVE ...or at least I'm guessing. By now, if I had not seen this movie I would assume that Criss and Dean are the main male and female leads to this film, again... this is NOT the case.
Criss ends up spilling her heart out to one of the unnamed characters from earlier who we still don't know. He blames Dean's death on the fact that he was on a "Truck Load" of medication. I myself am on a "Truck Load" of medication and I have never been killed by Freddy Kruger in my dreams, but I'll watch for him now that I know that's one of the signs. Nancy shows up to tell Criss that she believes her, but before she has a chance to say anything Mr. Unnamed tells her to leave Criss alone. Good call, she's emotionally distraught from seeing her close friend commit suicide, she falls asleep at his funeral, needs someone to believe her, and the one person who does is shunned away. PLOT TWIST! It's not long before we see Nancy again, who seemed very unimportant before, but suddenly we are back to Criss, trying to figure out her past. So... Criss is clearly the main heroine... Right? The movie then goes on to spend the next twenty or so minutes following Criss around and Mr. Nameless, and of course our good Pal Freddy is going to show up sooner or later to kill what appears to be the main character. (I cant stress this enough, Chriss and Dean are NOT the main characters.) So the reason they are spending so much time developing their characters makes no sense at all. Dean is dead yet they continue to develop him after his death. I'm just gonna go ahead and throw it out and address the elephant in the room, Quentin and Nancy are the main characters, but almost no time at all is spent developing them what so ever in the first half hour to forty five minutes of the film. Sooooo. Yeah, there's that. They do appear on screen a handful of times but the bulk of the first half of the film is spent on Chriss and Dean and their apparent relationship prior to highschool. Keeping up so far? They are spending a half hour on developing characters that are supporting characters and almost no time developing the two main characters of the film. Now that that's out of the way, lets move on.
So we are at Springwood school, we see out two main characters for about forty five seconds before we are back to Criss yet again, where she comes face to face with Freddy once again. You still believe I'm lying and that Criss is the heroine of the film dont you, well I know something you dont know... Again Haley does a GREAT job as Freddy in every scene he is in, and they do a phenomenal job of lighting to shadow him and make him look menacing. We get the first real look at Freddy's new face, and while it's nothing like the Robert Englund's version of Freddy, it does have a more realistic burn victim look to it. His Freddy look is wonderful, and more menacing and more realistic. So bravo to to the costume and special effects people. Of course she wakes up screaming in the middle of class, and we follow Criss back to her house on Elm Street. You still believe she is the main character dont you, dont worry I did too. After all they spend the first half of the movie following her and developing her, her relationship to the deceased Dean, and Freddy taunts her and plays games with her the way you would expect him to. Mr. No Name finally has a name and it's Jessy and he shows up to "save the day" and by save the day I mean show up and do nothing at all. He literally does nothing but sleep next to Criss. Criss of course is being followed by Freddy cuz that's what Freddy does to supporting cast members. Jessy does happen to see Freddy, but does not seem to be afraid of him, or afraid to sleep. So where is Nancy and Quentin? I dunno, I havent seen them but for Five minutes of the film. Perhaps we will come back to them later, once the seemingly most important character dies.
It's now sleepy time again for Criss and this time Freddy really comes out to play. Again, Haley's Freddy steals every scene he is in, in the ten seconds he was on screen he instantly brought the scene up. We walk past the now infamous little girls singing the Freddy song. "Five Six Grab You're Crucifix, Seven Eight better stay up late" and then in nice breath of fresh air we walk in on Freddy counting down. "Four, Three, Two, One... Ready or Not HERE I COME!" Very nice, Freddy very nice. Again you steel the show. Criss jolts awake, or does she? Muwahahaha! She walks around making you believe she is now safe laying back down next to Jessy only to have Freddy jump up and yell "FOUND YOU!" Good stuff right there. Have I mentioned that we have spent this whole time following and developing Criss? This is important because something shocking is about to happen. Now I dont know, if they did this on purpose to fool the audience into thinking one way when what is really happening is going on over here (in a place that we no nothing about) Which would be completely stupid because they just spent close to half the movie developing Criss and her relationship with Dean, Jessy and her connection to Freddy. If they didnt do it on purpose then it's even worse because now you are just making yourselves look stupid. This is the scene where in the previous films we see one of the supporting characters thrown around the room by an invisible force and then sliced open by Freddy. This worked in the original because they didnt spend half the movie developing her character. So yeah, Criss is now dead... Glad we spent so much time following her around to find out that she was never that important in the first place. All the information she discovers is revealed later on by Quentin and Nancy, so aside from Haley's Freddy stealing the show every moment he in on screen all this story development is for nothing and might as well be scrubbed from the film because its just reintroduced later by our true main characters. Now I realize you should care who dies, you should be emotionally involved with the characters, but no one, else in the film up to this point is developed in the least. Criss then dies, who appeared to be the most important character, and no we are left with everyone else, who apparently didnt matter enough to spend any time talking about in the first half of the film. You see where I'm going with this? Now even the true main characters are pretty meaningless at this point.
Obviously Jessy, who didnt even have a name till the beginning of the last scene is blamed for Criss's death. So, obviously he's next to die. He jumps in through Nancy's window, you remember Nancy dont you? Our main character? No? That's because she's been given about three minutes of camera time so far. He jumps back out after they sing the "One Two Freddy's coming for you" and then he jumps back out only to be arrested. So that scene just meant nothing. Oh Nancy, you just can't buy any real camera time can you? Jessy who has apparently been already convicted of murder is locked in a federal prison, not a jail awaiting trial, he's already gone to prison, but I'll over look that for the sake of the progression of the film. So NOW we get to see Nancy and Quentin, now that we got those pesky supporting characters with all the character development outa the way. Obviously it takes little time for Jessy to fall asleep in prison, Freddy makes short work of him, and I have to admit I like the way the Nightmare goes, and as always Freddy steals the scene, reminding Jessy that it takes well over seven minutes for the brain to die after the heart stops beating, meaning "They have six more minutes to play" Again, Freddy=Awesome. Quentin falls alseep at the library ironically researching sleep deprivation. He comes in contact with our friend Freddy for a split second before jolting awake.
We get the first meaningful scene with our main characters almost an hour into the film as they research dreams and nightmares. This scene is actually very interesting and filled with good information about dreams, that will come into play later on in the film. Anyone who has fallen asleep at the wheel of a car knows about "micronaps" maybe you didnt know that's what they were called but basically when your brain is sleep deprived it begins to dream while you are awake. Mashing the real world and the dream world together. This will become important later, and is actually a great fresh way for this film to go. Now had we been following around Quentin and Nancy instead of Criss for half the film we might actually care a tad more. Before now the two of them have probably had about five minutes total of screen time, if that. Which makes this scene which is all too important, less interesting to the viewer because we are not emotionally invested in either character. Lets move on... Nancy turns out to be quite the creative artist, but we only find this out because we stumble upon it. Nancy is now the main character, which she should have been all along, and she finds out the same information that Criss did, so yeah, Criss was meaningless even though we spent so much time developing her. The parents start to become concerned that the kids are starting to remember their past, which is a terrible thing! The only parents that dont seem to care are Criss's which is strange since she just died and all. Even the best friends and parents dont care that the characters are dieing off like flies.
Now, just like the scene where Criss is thrown around the room, was taken from the original we get the bathtub scene where Freddy's claw comes up between Nancy's legs and then disappears again. Nice little throw back, but yet again the film makers are throwing back to every film in this one and mashing it into one movie. It's not terrible so far, their biggest sin is there poor character development and screen time for separate characters. So Nancy finishes her bath... or does she as she opens the door to a nightmare of snow falling in her bedroom, it's a great visual as it leads to back to the old school house where Freddy worked before he was killed by the parents of Springwood. Freddy reveals that Nancy was always his number one, which was obvious from the beginning wasnt it? But at this point who cares cuz Freddy is on the screen and that makes it all better. She wakes up back in the bathtub, to Quentin's phone call and he insists he is coming over because Nancy had a dream about Freddy. Now our two main characters who we know very little about are doing things that make no sense because we are never told what their relationship truly is. As you can tell by now, this is an ongoing problem throughout the film.
Now, this part puzzles me, they go through Nancy's mother's things, and find a school photo of all of them from preschool revealing that they all went to the same preschool. Now I realize this is an important plot device, but the idea that any one of the parents would keep anything like this when the whole idea was to make them forget and never find out what happened to them when they were kids, wouldnt they burn this sort of picture rather than keep it in a hidden place? I know if my child was molested in preschool by the groundskeeper I wouldnt keep the class photo around to remind me of it. Let alone hide it somewhere as a keep sake. And the MOST overlooked part of all of this is the fact that not any of the parents of these kids seem to care the least that their children are dropping like flies! Our kids are dying? Oh... well that's a relief I was really getting tired of feeding them. Nancy's mom is VERY upset that they found the picture, it must have been a very important keep sake to her to know that her daughter was molested as a child, and she wanted to keep the photo as a memory. Even though she clearly says that she didnt want Nancy to have to grow up with that memory. Then why keep the picture? *Facepalm* This film is filled with plot holes....
Rather than go to the police with these accusations of child molestation the parents decide to kill Fred Kruger setting the whole thing in motion. Not once do they even imply that they ever went to the police. They just decided to kill him...Yup. Quentin has the nightmare where he actually see's Freddy get burned alive, which is a nice plot device but since Freddy was not trying to kill him or do anything other than show him what happened it really makes no sense for him to have that dream. Not to mention he manages to fall asleep while he is swimming, which seems like it would be rather impossible. *sigh* Where is Freddy... so that we can start having fun again? While all this is happening Nancy is tracking down everyone else from the picture to find out that everyone is dead... except for her and Quentin, you know the two people we spent the least amount of time developing in the beginning of the movie.
What comes next is quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen in a horror movie. Complete disregard for timeline. Quentin and Nancy barge into the Principles office (The Principle is Quentin's father if I hadn't already addressed that.) during school hours just coming from the school library. They confront Quentin's father about killing Kruger, which he doesnt deny he says the parents were protecting them, from what they he did to them. So lets recap, Freddy is a child molester, instead of going to the police with these claims, they kill Freddy in a fiery ball of deathy death, then the kids start dropping like flies and the rest of the parents dont seem to notice or care that their kids are dying. Yup... We are all caught up now. Anyway, back to the funny part, after entering the office during school hours, they spend five minutes in the office and leave you can see out the school doors that its still daylight outside, when they leave the building it's the middle of the night. Whoops... where did the last eight hours go?
They leave to find the preschool, but stop at a pharmacy so Quentin can get more pills to keep him awake. Only heres the thing, they wont give him any, soooo why are we doing this? Well I'll tell you why... the only good reason to do it! To get some bad ass Freddy micronap dreams in where the dream meshes with reality! That is essentially the only purpose for this scene, but I will forgive them just for bringing Freddy into the scene and giving him one that's only purpose is to watch how awesome he is. Ending the micro nightmare with the line "WAKE UP! You're Bleedin!" And thank you Freddy! She has a Freddy slice on her arm so of course now we take a trip to the hospital, unfortunately this scene's only purpose is so Quentin can steel adrenaline from a nurses cart, when they could have just given him pills in the previous scene. They are in and out of the hospital before you can say "Freddy is Awesome" and we are back on the road. Quentin and Nancy escape from the hospital that Quentin was so instant that she needed to go to the hospital just moments ago. He stabs himself with adrenaline and away we go, only thing is, the adrenaline does absolutely nothing for him. So... the past two scenes were for nothing, story wise, but Freddy was in one of them, so we'll over look it. As they are driving, Quentin who just took a massive shot of adrenaline has a micro nightmare and sees Freddy in the middle of the road. They crash the car, and meander on over to the preschool... whoohoo finally a plot device what went somewhere! :) Freddy is showing up around every corner, so just forget about the adrenaline because it did nothing and was completely pointless.
They wonder the school, looking for clues armed only with a lantern! They found Freddy's bedroom, which essentially a Janitor's closet, and then find the infamous hidden room they were all molested in. Things are about to get awesome because Freddy is about to take over the movie, and that means money folks I can't stress enough how great of a job Haley does at portraying Freddy Kruger. Robert Englund would be proud, and he was, he said so after the movie was released. Quentin and Nancy have a nice heart to heart before heading into Nightmare world to go face to face with Freddy, unfortunately it's hard to connect with the two of the BECAUSE THEY SPENT NO TIME DEVELOPING THE CHARACTERS OR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO OF THEM! Now, I dont make movies, nor am I qualified to do so. But come on New Line, you had to know this nonsense was going on during production. Ultimately Quentin who had the first dose of adrenaline falls asleep before Nancy, way to go there pal, way to protect your woman. However, we are now in awesomeville folks, Freddy is here to save the day. Freddy is by far the best and well thought out character in the film, not to mention the best actor in the film.
Now during Freddy's kick ass scene we get a throw back to "How's this for a wet dream" from the second film, accept this depiction is far better as Nancy falls into the slowly morphing carpet that is turning into blood. Haley's Freddy Kruger laugh is probably better than Englund's and is so menacing it almost runs chills up your spine. Nancy falls through the floor and is dressed in a dress styled for a young girl, as Freddy taunts her. This is a toss back to before Freddy died, he quotes, that this dress was always his favorite. Freddy starts to play by throwing her across the room, when she stabs him in the eye with a pair of scissors. Freddy doesn't miss a beat when he pulls them out, telling her than she can't hurt him, she's in his world and she can't ever leave. Her screaming seems to wake Quentin up, who then tries to wake Nancy up to no avail, but just before Freddy can kill her he stabs her in the heart with the other stick of adrenalin, (which was the only reason for the hospital scene at all) and she wakes up and pulls Freddy out of her nightmare. We all expected this as it happens in the end of every Nightmare film, I was actually pretty happy with the creative way the pulled it off in this one, even if they did have to create a scene specifically for it to make it possible.
After Freddy is pulled out of the dream Quentin, who is supposed to be Nancy's protector fails miserably at trying to defeat Freddy. So for all of you who were on the team Quentin band wagon, sorry folks he sucks, and if were not for Nancy he would have been killed. But at least he provided a nice distraction for Nancy so she could kill him... Right before Freddy kills Quentin, Nancy slices off Freddy's hand from behind. Freddy, in total shock at losing his mighty knife wielding glove turns around and gets his throat slit. Freddy is defeated, and they torch the room, and anyone who has seen the Nightmare movies already knows that once you pull Freddy out and kill him again he just goes right back into Nightmare land and recharges and comes back to play another day. Quentin, beat to shit by Freddy limps out of the room lead by Nancey who barely has a scratch on her. Way to go there big man, you're going home in an ambulance and Nancey kicked Freddy's ass. They return home, where Nancy's Mom tells her that she wants her to go right to bed. As if they didnt just come back from a death trap. Guess what, Freddy's back already and finishes the film with a BOOM as he shows in the mirror behind Nancy's mom stabbing her through the back of her head all the way through her face and he pulls her into the mirror as Nancy screams into the ending credits.
Freddy's Body Count: 5
Final Thoughts
This is an extremely flawed film. I think I made that abundantly clear through the course of the review. The character's had little to no depth and the only character they spent any time developing was killed off half way through the movie. It was hard to relate to Quentin and Nancy because almost no attention was given to them until we were almost forty five minutes into the movie. However, I cant stress enough how impressive Freddy was in this movie, and I think that's what they were going for and probably blinded them from the actual story telling of the film. They had plenty of new material and new scares for Freddy, his glove had more knives than razors, he had an new eerie menacing way about him. He did a lot of new things when he would taunt and stalk his pray, like slicing the blades back and forth on the glove and dragging a claw across a wall creating sparks. They did alot of new and played with a lot of throw backs. Really the only thing worth anything in this movie is Freddy and its the only thing that saves the movie at all. If it were not for Freddy this would be a B list horror flick at best. But Freddy saves the day and for his efforts gets this movie two extra stars than it would have gotten without him.
Final Rating: 2.5 outa 5
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