7tavern: A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Sound (3)
2.9
Plot (3)
3.3
Cast (3)
2.9
Special Effects (3)
2.7
Length & Pace (3)
2.8
Cinematography (3)
2.9

Directors: Wes Craven,

Writers: Wes Craven (written by),

Release: 6 November 1984 (USA)

Tagline: She is the only one who can stop it... if she fails, no one survives.

Plot: In the dreams of his victims, a specteral child murderer stalks the children of the members of the lynch mob that killed him.

Cast:John Saxon - Lt. Thompson,   Ronee Blakley - Marge Thompson,   Heather Langenkamp - Nancy Thompson,   Amanda Wyss - Tina Gray,   Jsu Garcia - Rod Lane (as Nick Corri),   Johnny Depp - Glen Lantz,   Charles Fleischer - Dr. King,   Joseph Whipp - Sgt. Parker,   Robert Englund - Fred Krueger,   Lin Shaye - Teacher,   Joe Unger - Sgt. Garcia,   Mimi Craven - Nurse (as Mimi Meyer-Craven),   Jack Shea - Minister,   Ed Call - Mr. Lantz,   Sandy Lipton - Mrs. Lantz

Runtime: 91 min

Country: USA

Language: English

Company: New Line Cinema

Links: IMDb Profile

Categories: Horror, Thriller

Main

Trailer

JennyB
Reviews: 36
Points: 0 (Level 1)
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3.7

4.8

3.8

3.2

3.3

3.8

A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare On Elm Street is my favorite horror movie and Freddy Krueger is my favorite horror villain. I'm surprised I haven't made a review for this movie cause I live for all the Freddy movies. I'm pretty sure everyone knows how the movie is and what the concept is about but oh well you get to sit through it again. :D A Nightmare On Elm Street is about a group of friends all living on Elm Street in Spring wood Ohio. Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) and Glen (Johnny Depp) are walking to school and Tina starts talking about the dream she had and how it felt so real and it scared her. She describes the dream and Nancy realizes that their both having the same dream but she shrugs it off cause their just dreams and they don't mean anything.

Tina's mom goes out of town for the weekend so she has Nancy, Glen, and her boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia) spend the night at her house since she doesn't want to be by herself cause her nightmare made her scared to be alone. Later on in the night while everyone is sleeping Tina and Rod decide to do the nasty. Come on haven't you people learned you're lesson already? If your going to be in a slasher movie then don't have sex cause that's like having a neon sign on you're door saying "Come kill me! I'm ready!" You have sex in a slasher movie you die so maybe everyone should stop doing the deed then you'll survive. Wow! a loop hole, I found the way to stay alive! Too bad everyone nowadays are bunch of horn dogs and they can't help themselves since they have "needs" and they know their still going to die whether they have sex or not so they might as well get some before they die.

Tina finally falls asleep and she starts having her dream again but this time she gets a better look at who's trying to kill her. She freaks (duh) and runs towards the door cause she's suddenly outside. Well that didn't work cause she tripped and fell. Why do they always do that? I swear they start running but they end up tripping or running into the wall and the killer gets them. Typical! Freddy grabs her and tries to "claw" her while Tina is trying to fight him off but she's not strong enough and he slashes her chest open. While this is happening she's freaking out in her sleep which wakes up Rod and she floats up to the ceiling she falls onto the bed once Freddy kills her. Nancy and Glen hear screams coming from Tina's room and run to see what's going on to see Tina all cut up and bloody on her bed and Rod covered in Tina's blood. The police get called and they arrest Rod since he was the only one in the room at the time of Tina's death and he was covered in her blood. Stupid cops! Don't you know that there's a killer that stalks you're dreams and when you die in you're dream you die in real life?! Guess not.

Nancy starts having more dreams about Freddy which makes her not want to fall asleep. She tries talking to her mom about it but she just ignores it and says their just dreams nothing more. Well she's clearly hiding something and Nancy gets to the bottom of it and her mom finally spill the beans and tells her that there was this man named Fred Krueger who was a child murderer and he was arrested but let out cause the judge couldn't find the arrest warrant something like that so they had to release him. Well that pissed off the parents of Spring wood so they decided to take matters into their own hands and tracked him down and they found him in his boiler room where he hangs out at. Hey Children Of The Corn had the cornfield, Freddy has his boiler room. Don't judge. The parents burned him alive and after he died he becomes Freddy Krueger and he gets revenge on the kids of parents of Spring wood who wronged him.

The movie continues with Nancy trying to defeat Freddy and you get to see a awesome death scene of Johnny Depp. That has to be the best death scene ever, blood galore! She pulls Freddy out of her dream and they battle it out then Nancy finally "kills" Freddy and she wakes up to a beautiful day and she and her friends head off to school. You think it's over right? Well it's not cause there's 5 sequels including Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Freddy grabs Nancy's mom and pulls her through the door while Glen's car drives off by itself with everyone inside screaming. I wish I had a car that drove itself, that would be so awesome. Reach for the stars.

I give this movie 5 out of 5 Skulls

Recommendations: The Amityville Horror, Children of the Corn , My Bloody Valentine

JennyB<br />
http://memoirsofascreamqueen.blogspot.com/

2010-05-24 23:54:31

Ryneb
Reviews: 149
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2.5

Movie Review - A Nightmare on Elm Street

Before A Nightmare on Elm Street, dreams were the safe place where you could go to get away from the dangers of the world. When the streets were filled with violence and chaos, your dreams could become anything you wanted them to be. If something wasn't going well, you could always wake up or think of something different.

It is said that you never see yourself die in your dreams. You might get to the closest point possible without actually dying, but most of the time it is impossible to see yourself as lifeless. Herein lies the point of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which I will now refer to as NOES.

If you can never see yourself die in a dream, what happens if you one night you experience your own death in a dream? Dreams, even after the 20 or so years that NOES first hit the screen, are still primarily uncertain to us. Would you die in real life if you slipped away in the dream?

While perusing my Nightmare on Elm Street Collector's Edition Full Series Box Set DVD Collection thingy-ma-bob, and reading the liner notes for each movie, I came across the little tidbit that NOES was (loosely) based on a couple of true stories of people having nightmares and then dying. WHAT!? That is sweet, not for the people who died but for the rest of us. Could NOES be a reality?

Probably not, but the thing that gets me is that this movie has sustained its old age. The movie's a damn vampire. I've seen the movie a ton of times, on television (AMC Frightnights on Friday nights, where they edit a lot) and on DVD, and it still creeps me out at times. I mean, come on! You're not even safe while you're asleep! Where is there for you to go? The whole not being able to sleep dilemma lets you know that you are not safe, ever. Period.

Especially in the first NOES, we have the feeling that this freako, Christmas-color bedecked, third-degree burn victim who insists on being able to chop steak with his fingers, can get us at any time. Sure, he loves to strike at night because it makes it all the more terrifying in the dark. But maybe someday you'll be sitting down to a nice warm cup of herbal tea in your lounge chair at noon, and all of a sudden you slip into dream world and Freddy's warm embrace. The movie characteristically shows us that sleep can always come out of no where, and you might not even know you're dreaming.

But anyway, let's get to the plot of the movie. Do I really need to explain NOES? Nancy and her teenage friends, living on Elm Street, are terrorized by dreams involving a knife-handed maniac, where if they die in their dreams, they die in real life. The mommies and daddies of Elm Street had killed this psychopathic a few years before, who we come to know as Freddy, because he loved to torture little children.

So what's so good about NOES? I'll tell you what's good. It's immensely creative, and the script is at times witty and serious. It depends on what we're talking about. Freddy is genuinely a creepy bastard in this film, because he doesn't spout of cliched one liners all over the place. This time humor takes a backseat to frights, and there are a lot of pop-out scares. What's good about it is the use of sound timing. There may be no sounds at one point, and all of a sudden the music rears out of nowhere and out pops Freddy or one of his minions.

And the plot is great fare, especially for a slasher. The characters mostly react like we would expect them to. They're not stupid, especially Nancy, because she figures out a lot of the physical natures of the Dream World by herself. If she goes in, she can come out with things in the dream. As Nancy pieces all of this together, so too do we.

Chase scenes are immensely suspenseful. Freddy has a ton of tricks up his sleeve, so it's really hard to tell what might pop out next. One of my favorite deaths is Johnny Depp's, where he is sucked into the bed and is minced up to show what a human being really is - a bunch of liquid solidified and molded together.

Again, the "Splash" scene is great. An ocean in your bathtub?! How cool would that be? The possibilities were endless for what could be done in the Dream World, and Wes Craven used some cool devices to add to the suspense.

The ending reminds me of Home Alone, where Nancy strings all of the traps together to thwart Freddy, but then I realized Home Alone was well after this movie had been out. I do have some qualms with the ending, mostly because it's predictable. After the hell that Freddy put Nancy through, it's hard to believe the audience would expect the ending to be a nice and sunny happily-ever-after story. We can see the Freddy attack coming a mile away.

All in all, though, this movie has fared considerably well, what with the time it's been out and all of the newer, more graphics-oriented movies that have come out. The script and acting really shoots down a lot of the tried-and-true slasher movies of the 80s, and it shows how much other slashers have taken from NOES and used for the worse in their movies. In a field of pretenders, most of which came after this movie, NOES still outdoes them by a longshot.

Sleep lightly until Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge!

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Last updated: 2010-01-18 09:00:49 by user01

2010-01-18 08:55:30

JennyB
Reviews: 36
Points: 0 (Level 1)
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A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

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2010-05-24 23:54:31

Ryneb
Reviews: 149
Points: 0 (Level 1)
Reviewer

Movie Review - A Nightmare on Elm Street

Before A Nightmare on Elm Street, dreams were the safe place where you could go to get away from the dangers of the world. When the streets were filled with violence and chaos, your dreams could become anything you wanted them to be. If something wasn't going well, you could always wake up or think of something different. It is said that you never see yourself die in your dreams. You might get to the closest point possible without actually dying, but most of the time it is impossible to see yourself as lifeless. Herein lies the point of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which I will now refer to as NOES. If you can never see yourself die in a dream, what happens if you one night you experience your own death in a dream? Dreams, even after the 20 or so years that NOES first hit the screen, are still primarily uncertain to us. Would you die in real life if you slipped away in the dream? While perusing my Nightmare on Elm Street Collector's Edition Full Series Box Set...

(Read More...)

2010-01-18 08:55:30

MysteryMan
Reviews: 167
Points: 0 (Level 1)
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2.5

A Nightmare on Elm Street

In case you haven’t figured out by now, this is about the REAL A Nightmare on Elm Street, and not the forthcoming bastardized  remake that is going to do nothing but spit in the face of the legacy that this  film and its subsequent sequels forged.
This film stands in the pantheon of great slasher flicks, and can be credited  with ushering in a new wave of horror. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this scary  at all. I say this, remembering that when I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 when I was about 8 or so, it scared the living bejesus out of me, so  mayhaps its just the age thing.
For a flick that introduces us to a new character, Freddy Krueger, this isn’t  half bad. The audience is treated to lots of suspense, gore, and a hint at his  origin. I’m sure some out there will say there coul have been more on his  origin. Sure that could have been great, but you have to save something.
Anybody with a half a brain knows that you don’t look to horror films to find  the next Meryl Streep or Gregory Peck. Surprisingly, though, you can find the  next, or should I say, original Johnny Depp. Yes, Depp made his big screen debut  with this film. You can tell he is bound for bigger and better things,  though.
The special effects really make this flick. Everything from the girl  getting killed on the ceiling to Freddy’s gloved hand coming out of the bed to  snatch Nancy’s mother, to the gushing of blood from Johnny Depp’s bed, to other  moments that I haven’t mentioned. Without these, this would have been a much  less interesting flick.
A couple of thing bothered me about this picture. First, why did Johnny  Depp’s character’s parents, or should I say his father, decided that he wasn’t  allowed to talk to Nancy. Indirectly, they caused his death. I hope they’re  happy about that. Second, why didn’t anyone seem to believe the kids, especially  when more and more of them started being picked off. You’d think someone would  have noticed.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is one of the all-time great slasher  flicks, and is a bit underrated. THat may be a result of the lesser quality  sequels that came along and killed the franchise. In the same way that Jaws made you afraid to go in the water, A Nightmare on Elm Street made  you afraid to sleep.
4 out of 5 stars

http://thankyounetflix.wordpress.com/

2010-05-13 09:47:01

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