Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Studio: New Line Cinema

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Wes Craven

Review Rating: 8

Using the new Freddy Krueger movie as a conduit, demonic spirits plan to invade, and it’s up to Heather Langenkamp, the actress of Nancy in the original Nightmare movies, to stop it!

Arguably the best Freddy movie to date, it has to be understood that unless you know and love Freddy’s backstory and all his iconic moves and legend, this movie won’t mean as much to you. A movie, about the first Freddy movie on it’s ten year anniversary, a new movie being made inside the movie we’re watching – is a very Wes Craven gimmick, and one I always enjoyed. This particular episode of the Freddy Krueger chronicles styles our beloved Master of Nightmares as something much more sinister than usual – a monster from the Outside, like a Grimm fairy tale come to terrible life. These days, we have a healthy respect if not fear for those olden tales, so it actually works to make Freddy in theory that much more frightening. It even shows inside New Nightmare, where we see what we know damn well is Robert England in a lot of makeup, and then much later, when we see a much more demonic version of Freddy rise like an evil Djinn!

Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and even Wes Craven himself all reprise their own roles in this movie, just you know, to make it all the more believable. With the same question raised in John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness, “If enough people believe in something, does that make it real?”, brought to full frontal purported real life inside the film, that’s rather scary too. And yes I know, there’s a bunch of traditional Freddy scares – the tongue in Heather’s phone; the kid strapping steak knives to his fingers for Freddy’s glove; the oh OW death of the husband – it’s all but a requirement anyway. Half of everyone’s favorite burnt psycho nightmare, half of an in theory actually possible plot, and we have a Nightmare on Elm St. opus.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV8za5nWxwo]