Nightmare On Elm Street 1-5 my thoughts

[carl]

OK so I've never actually seen a true Nightmare On Elm street film in its entirety (Freddy Vs Jason doesn't count) but we just got the UK box set come into work and we transferred them straight to rental, so I watched the 5 films on this set and I have to say that I was, kind of disappointed actually.

A Nightmare On Elm Street is the one film in the series that is called a classic, and it is generally considered one of the scariest films ever. I disagree, it works on a killer concept, that we are being stalked and murdered in our dreams, a place we all have to visit at some place and a place where ANYTHING can happen. It was in itself a decent slasher movie with some fantastic direction from Craven. The subtle blur between reality and dreams was terrifying, because you were never sure if the character was awake or asleep until all hell started to break loose. The visuals that Craven utilized in these sequences only served to intensify this, Freddy popping out from behind a tree that's less than one third his size was a particularly creepy highlight for me. Then this was all really tied together by a select few kills that were both unique and fairly disturbing. Amanda Wyss blonde girl being dragged across the ceiling and having her guts slashed open by an invisible force, and Johnny Depp getting swallowed by his bed and having his entrails sprayed across the roof. You know the score.

Unfortunately despite being fairly solid in these areas I never once felt the film itself was ever disturbing because of the fact that in all other areas the film was just another teen slasher movie. Robert Englund did very good as Freddy, even in this first film and before the character became a comedian you could tell that Englund had made the character his own, but other than him the acting was absolutely horrible. I hear so much about how great Heather Langenkamp was as Nancy, but to me she was horrible. Nothing at all in her performance made her feel like a regular high school girl, she never really came across as scared, and the difference between her portrayal of Nancy being worried about her boyfriend and her running in terror from Freddy were exactly the same as her portrayal of every other emotion in the film. Amanda Wyss and Jsu Garcia were completely boring in their none existent characters, and even Johnny Depp (the king of cool) gave the one bad performance I've seen him give. Which possibly had a lot to do with the writing, because let's face it. As much as Craven knows about visuals he knows squat about writing, which is proven by the completely laughable dialogue and characters who never once acted believably. Let's see now, we have the cops at a house where a boy has been brutally murdered, the killer is still on the loose, probably in the locality, and over the road a girl starts screaming bloody murder, smashing windows and shouting that he's here and don't let him kill me. So AFTER ABOUT 10 MINUTES of this the cop states "Maybe I better go get her father", gee ya think????? I'm sorry I know that horror is not supposed to be about realism, but I can't really define a movie so laughable as the most disturbing film ever made, especially since the dream world all but disappeared for the second half of the film which left it with nothing even remotely scary to hold on to. I'd say about 3.5/5 creepy, but in no way is this film a horror masterpiece.